ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA

We have often asked ourselves:

How was the Holocaust allowed to happen?

How could Germany turn on its own Jewish citizens? Poland? Russia? France?

Approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. This number represented 1.7% of Europe's total population and more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population. By 1945, most European Jews—2 out of every 3—had been killed.

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”

Today, we mourn the loss of 6 million Jews, murdered in Europe during the Holocaust.

But this year, we must also channel the tragedy and use it to move forward with clear vision and foresight, in order to prevent the loss of another 6 million.

Hitler’s Holocaust did not come out of nowhere. The signs were all there, but they appeared gradually. Instead of turning the temperature up 50 degrees at once, which would create panic across Europe, the Nazis simply adjusted the thermostat a couple of degrees at a time — not enough for a noticeable change — and then they’d leave it for a while to let everyone feel like that’s just how hot it always was. Then they’d come back and turn it up a few more degrees. Again. And again. And again.

A group of Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) police lock hands on the steps of the University of Vienna in an attempt to prevent Jews from entering the building. 1938. Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

Those of us who’ve vowed “Never Again” are obligated to notice the temperature and regulate it. Nazi Germany-esque events in the United States today cannot be tolerated: Jewish students and professors prevented from accessing their own campuses; large mobs chanting slogans that all mean “Kill the Jews” and being rewarded for it by the university; Jewish student groups denied membership to multicultural leadership councils; Jews feeling unsafe wearing yarmulkes, Magen David necklaces, or having a Jewish name displayed in Uber; our politicians siding with the terrorists trying to destroy the Jewish Nation; and the list unfortunately goes on.

But we are prepared for the challenges ahead. We just have to choose to face them, rather than look away until the last minute.

'You must look at facts because they look at you.'

- Winston Churchill, 1925

It is crucial for the Jewish people to be masters of our own history. If we are not in control of our story, then someone else is.

This means understanding the events that took place in Europe around WWII, and the societal concepts that allowed these events to take root. American Jews must learn the signs, in order to speak out in a timely manner.

But hope remains strong. Because while the Jewish people have suffered thousands of years of cyclical oppression, persecution, apartheid, exile, genocide – each and every time, in the most unlikely of circumstances, the Jewish people pull through and the Nation of Israel lives. Did the world expect Israel to survive the 1948 War? Absolutely not. But when the Jewish people are forced to fight, we win, because we are not fighting for ourselves; we are fighting for each other. That is what makes the Zionist spirit unstoppable.

From your friends at the ZOA,

Never Forget

Never Again

AM YISRAEL CHAI

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