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The Remembrance of Ha Shoah
By the 2oth century, the Jews were no strangers to suffering: this unique and ancient people remain the one people, chosen by God, who despite persecutions, dispersions over 2000 years, and yet still remained a people and a nation. Dispersed and exiled from many nations over the centuries, they found themselves hated, abused and persecuted, often by Christians with religious forms of anti-semitism. By the beginning of the 20th century, many young people in Judaism had begun to explore more liberal understandings than their orthodox traditions, and while integrated into their communities and nations in Europe and elsewhere, old prejudices began to surface especially following a renewed interest in the re-establishment of Israel back in her homeland of Palestine. Fearing the Jews were the instigators of social upheaval and all societal ills, including the emerging communism, Hitler and the Third Reich, rising to power in the 1920s and '30s, scapegoated the Jews for every evil Germany had brought on themselves at the end of the First World War. Arranging the most bold and genocidal lunacy of modern times, Hitler's regime deported, robbed and killed over 2/3 of the Jews of Europe, believing that the end of the Jews would signal the dawn of a new Aryan age, and a Master Race of non-Jewish peoples. Before the end of WWII, approximately 6,5 million Jews, 2.5 million children, and a total of 11+ million innocents had been slaughtered and tortured in the killing centers of Europe, laying Europe and the world as one mass grave of innocents.
After returning to Israel and other countries after the war, the remnant of mostly Ashkenazi Jews saw the realization of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Israel. Most of the Citizens of Israel in the late 1940s till now had at least one or more family members who perished in the 'Shoah' or 'Destruction', the name indicating a terrible tempest or massive storm. Yom shoah, or the 'Day of the Shoah' commemorates the great suffering of the Jews, the victims of the Holocaust, and most use it as a day of worship and prayer, thanksgiving for deliverance, and to focus on World peace and other victims of genocides still occurring.
Commemorations include moments of silence, such as the stopping of all traffic in Israel around noon for a few minutes, memorial services, special presentations and speeches from survivors and a time for the Jewish community to draw together in unity and teach non-Jews the value of tolerance and the love of God. For more on the Holocaust, or Shoah, see: Shoah Education Project Web, an online curriculum for the Church on the Shoah.
Trees & Israel
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