Today is Yom HaShoah. It is the day when we pause to remember the 6 million precious Jewish lives that were systematically extinguished by the raw, boundless hatred of anti-Semitism, although at EMET, we remember them every single day. It is the memory of the 6 million, one and a half million of whom were children, that propels us in every waking moment of our lives to do everything in our power to protect the state of Israel, and to cherish the fact that we live in an era where this is a vibrant, dynamic modern state of Israel.
It is tragic to see how a mere 76 years after the Holocaust, when there are still people walking around with numbers on their arms and nightmares in their memories, anti-Semitism is on a dramatic increase throughout the world. Even in the United States, 60% of religion-based assaults are against Jews, even though we constitute approximately 2% of the overall population.
The virus of anti-Semitism, particularly as it is defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is growing exponentially. It is primarily manifested as what Natan Sharansky calls, “the new anti-Semitism, against the one Jewish state in the world, the state of Israel, which is constantly held to a different standard than any other state in the world."
From 2015 until today, the United Nations General Assembly condemned Israel 112 times, Iran 5, North Korea 6, Syria 8 and China 0. The Jews are the people who brought monotheism into the world. An attack on the Jewish people is an attack on the world’s soul and the world’s conscience.
We, the generations that follow, carry a tremendously heavy burden to remember, to teach our children about our precious legacy and never to forget, and to forever work toward the safety and security of the land of Israel and the Jewish people, and for compassion for all the nameless victims of hatred throughout the world.
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