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By Steve Feldman, Greater Philadelphia ZOA Executive Director
(APRIL 25, 2022 / JNS) George Santayana is credited with observing that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” He was referring to negative and tragic events of the past, and the acts and people who precipitated them, as well as the painful lessons they imparted.
But what of the people who forget the positive developments of the past and the positive lessons? Surely, they will not repeat them. What will come of such people?
April 25 is one of the most significant dates in Jewish history, yet stop 100 Jews exiting a synagogue or Federation event to ask them why the date is significant, and not one will come up with the correct answer … or perhaps any answer.
On April 25, 1920, the world—or at least some of the most dominant nations of the world at that time—proclaimed that the Jewish people are attached to a specific territory to be returned to the Jewish people for the restoration of the Jewish homeland and that it be enshrined in international law.
It happened in San Remo, Italy, as some of the nations that had just triumphed to win World War I gathered to parcel out what would soon be the former Ottoman Empire to punish the Turks for joining the war to fight with the aggressors.
A scant 28 years later—a blip in the course of human history—the nation of Israel was re-established, birthing the Third Jewish Commonwealth.
It was truly a remarkable day in modern Jewish history, perhaps even a modern miracle. There were celebrations at the time, yet the cause and the achievement have been forgotten by all but a relative few.
Are we, the Jewish people, the beneficiaries of “miracles” of such magnitude so often that we can be forgiven for forgetting a few? Hardly.
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