World impact, maybe? The holocaust is a historical tragedy that affected the entire globe. There are still people alive today who suffered and survived the holocaust – they lost everything – their families,homes and cultural histories have been demolished.
If that does not merit “remembering” a devastating part of history I don’t know what does. How can anyone forget?
“He who does not learn from history, is doomed to repeat it.”
-George Santayana
Because it was a major event in history when millions of Jews and others were murdered. We need to remember the Holocaust so that we remember the horrors that innocent people were put through.
However, the main reason it should still be taught and thought about is to remind us of why it should never happen again. Even more so because the world we live in today is far more complex, which would make it even easier to build such mass killing machines. Our history can help us learn from our past and live for a better future.
Everyone should have the opportunity to learn and discover about the holocaust because it is the biggest known genocide ever. We should not forget about the innocent people who were murdered because Hitler didn’t agree with them. People should always learn from mistakes, and it makes things a lot less painful if they are not your own.
We need to remember the Holocaust so that we remember the horrors that innocent people were put through, and so this can’t happen again.
We should remember the holocaust so we can make sure that nothing like this will ever happen again. if this would happen again we would know what to do because the Holocaust educated us on this major events in history. Always keep in memory all those Jews and non Jews that were murdered.
We should do it out of the respect of the millions of innocent men womeN and children who were killed together in the most evil way you can ever imagine. They died a long death, often watching the ones they loved most suffer. Each and every single one of these people had friends, family, etc. They were ordinary people. Why were they killed? Simply because they were Jews. Another reason why is that it can be passed on to the future generations about the true horrors of rasism so something as terrible may never, ever happen again.
As a child growing up in the Bronx, the last four digits of Terry Noble’s phone number were 7401. Coincidence: When Terry was assigned a social security number, the last four digits were 7401. And years later, when he found himself as a volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel – where he now called himself Tuvia Ariel – he worked with a carpenter whom he respected. The carpenter was a wiry, solid man, dedicated, the silent type. Ariel learned that he was one of the few who had escaped Auschwitz and survived, that he then joined the Polish partisans, then the British Army. It sent him to Palestine, where he deserted to join the Palmach, the Jewish fighting force, and helped Israel win her independence in 1948.
Quite a history. Ariel had read the number tattooed on his arm. The last four digits were 7401. But more than awe piqued Ariel’s curiosity about this survivor’s experiences in the Holocaust. Ariel had read the number tattooed on his arm. The last four digits were 7401. “Don’t talk about it!” Ariel recalls the carpenter telling him forcefully, painfully. “I lost my whole family, my mother, my father; there was a brother in back of me, a brother in front of me – I’m the only one left. Don’t bring it up again!” Ariel didn’t. Except once. Tuvia Ariel is a man with many stories. In fact, he is a story: the man who was once a famous musician’s adviser and arranged for kaddish to be recited for an estranged Jewish radical; the man who put in a stint at Yale Law School and was a soldier in the U.S. Army in Israel during the 1956 Sinai war. He tore the “USA” from his uniform and, looking like an Israeli, hitched his way down to the Sinai Peninsula, ready to fight, only to find that the war had ended two hours before. I was told in advance how colorful Ariel was, but nothing prepared me for the likes of a comment he made one hour after I met him on Friday afternoon. I knew he had a new leg. I knew it was breakthrough for him. But who gives thought to such things? Who wonders what it is like to be without a leg, or with a new one? Praying in the synagogue on Friday, I sensed nothing unusual as Mincha came to an end. Suddenly, Ariel approached me, almost in tears. “This is the first time in my life I prayed the Shemoneh Esrei standing up. I have never been able to address God like any other Jew, beginning the prayer by taking three steps forward, ending it with three steps backward…” As follows: He saved his life by cutting off his own leg as it got caught in a machine he operated on a kibbutz. Ariel was raised in a non-observant home, in which the Shemoneh Esrei was not recited. Then he went to Israel to volunteer. In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he saved his life by cutting off his own leg as it got caught in a machine he operated on a kibbutz – a machine that sucked his leg into its grinder and from which the rest of his body escaped only by his quick and gruesome self-amputation. A little over ten years later he became a religiously observant Jew. By then he was rotating between a wheelchair, crutches, and artificial legs, which, however, could never keep him standing still long enough to pray the Shemoneh Esrei. Then, that Friday, he did it. After walking home (only three blocks), he choked up again, “That’s the longest I’ve walked in 22 years.” He was fitted with a new leg only shortly before – the day the Berlin Wall crumbled. He found his new leg innocently enough. Ariel was in the United States at the beginning of 1989 on a business trip. He saw an advertisement, featuring a new kind of plastic developed for spacecraft, also used for artificial limbs. The ad featured amputees engaged in vigorous basketball, not from wheelchairs, but standing up, running, passing, even jump-shooting. A regular game. Not with people amputated below the knee, but above the knee. Ariel thought to himself that seeing this was like seeing a grandmother, who had died long ago, suddenly walking down the street. When he lost his leg 22 years earlier, he never thought he would see himself live normally again – and here were people just like he was, playing basketball He inquired and was directed to an advanced prosthetic clinic in Oklahoma City. For above-the-knee amputees the old system had the stump rest on the prosthesis, which caused pain and circulatory problems and often did not work well, sometimes not at all. Using the new, flexible, rubber-like plastic, the new prosthesis grips the stump, which not only relieves pain and circulatory problems, but also better channels the energy and movement of the stump into natural, leg-like movements. Even in advance of receiving his own leg, Ariel was not satisfied to give himself new life. He wanted it for all the above-the-knee amputees in Israel. So he had a long talk with the prosthetists in Oklahoma City about bringing this technology to the Holy Land. They agreed to train Israeli prosthetists in Oklahoma City and to travel to Israel to train Israeli prosthetists there, provided only that Ariel supply the plane tickets. Ariel’s goal reached even beyond making the technology available in Israel. He aspired to establish a “Hebrew Free Limb Society” to provide a limb to the amputee as a loan, until – only a person like Ariel has the right to make this pun – “the amputee gets back on his feet.” Strictly speaking, it is not idealism that motivates Ariel. It is something more – his sense that he has been designated as an angel of God before. He has reason to think this, and the way he sees it, his years of suffering now make him a messenger again – to help those whom the world forgets. Why is he certain he has been an angel once before, thus able to be so once again? Ariel volunteered on two kibbutzim. The one where he lost his leg preferred that he leave the country. He was an embarrassment to the kibbutz. But Ariel would not leave Israel, no matter what. It took him about five years of various struggles to get into tourism schools; and somehow, between cars, crutches and artificial limbs, which kept him in pain and then went bad altogether, he remained a tour guide for 15 years. Toward the beginning of his career, when he was low man on the totem pole, he was assigned to pick up tourists at the international airport in Lod and to bring them to the main office, whereupon an experienced guide would take over. He yanked up his sleeve to show Ariel a number tattooed on his arm. Ariel looked, almost went into shock. One day he picked up an American, ostentatiously wealthy, ostentatiously dressed and mannered. Even crude. Ariel could not bring himself to be friendly, so he was formal. Halfway from Lod to Jerusalem, the tourist, a perceptive man, yelled, “Pull over!” Ariel pulled over. The man barked, “You think I’m just a materialistic American tourist, don’t you? Well, I’ve paid my dues!” He yanked up his sleeve to show Ariel a number tattooed on his arm. Ariel looked, almost went into shock, and before he knew what was happening the tourist was saying, “I lost my whole family … a brother in front of me, a brother in back of me…” Ariel’s mind burned.
Participants of the Teen Fellowship will take a trip to Washington DC to get an up close look at the atrocities of the Holocaust. The teens will also be treated to a tour of the memorials and museums and the capital building. Shabbat will be spent in a beautiful DuPont Circle Hotel.
Open only to teens from participating in the Eternal Flame Fellowship.
Dr. Abraham Bichler of Fair Lawn, a retired Hebrew professor at Fairly Dickenson University, will share with the Eternal Flame fellowship teens his family’s story of survival in the Holocaust.
As a boy, Bichler and his family were taken from their home in Poland and shipped to the frozen Russian wastelands of Siberia and the Taiga, where they were enslaved in Stalin’s labor camps. Surviving the harsh winter climate was nearly as challenging as surviving in the camp—a torturous hell where arriving five minutes late to work guaranteed a six-month jail sentence. As the years passed, Bichler and his family struggled and encountered many hardships, but constantly searched for the “little miracles” that ultimately led to their survival and immigration to the United States. His book, “Little Miracles” highlights those bright parts of the hell he endured.
Bichler has focused on the Holocaust that has been overshadowed by the more familiar stories of Hitler’s concentration camps and Jewish ghettos, but one that is equally important and shared by many.
To learn more on the Fellowship or to register your teen visit eternalflame.org/fellowship
Bella Miller still remembers the day the tattoo was engraved on her arm.
She was inside a barracks at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp in Poland, weeks after she arrived with her family in August 1944. Another inmate dipped a long needle in ink and punched the number into her arm. There were about three minutes of excruciating pain.
“You were not anymore a human being, you were a number and believe me that number will never leave my mind,” Miller says. “A24977: That’s what I was.”
Bella will be sharing her story of horror strength and inspiration to the teen of the Eternal Flame Fellowship Program at Valley Chabad.
Our first teen fellowhip session will be gin with a presentation by Sandy Rubenstein. Sandy is a teacher at the Horace Mann School in New York. Teaching is her passion, what she loves to do and has been doing for over thirty years. She is also the child of Holocaust survivors. In 1996, her father, Joseph Horn, published his memoirs, Mark It With a Stone, the fulfillment of a life-long dream. In 2008, the book was reprinted in paperback, with an introduction written by Sandy Rubenstein from the point of view of a child of survivors.
Joseph Horn passed away in 1999. Now, his daughter, Sandy Rubenstein, speaks to middle and high school students and others. Teaching about the lessons of the Holocaust is a calling, a compelling force for her. As she relates her father’s story, sharing excerpts from his book, she intersperses video clips of her father speaking directly about his experiences: a powerful medium. Students are riveted and full of questions. She addresses the need for young people, our future leaders, to reflect on their own moral responsibilities to stand up against today’s hate, bigotry, and genocide. As survivors are no longer with us, Sandy Rubenstein’s presentation allows new generations to witness history first hand.
The principal of an international school in Chicago was reassigned after an anti-Semitic bullying incident in which Jewish children were shown pictures of ovens and told to get in.
Principal Joshua VanderJagt asked to be moved after outrage grew, leading to the students involved in the bullying to be banned from graduation.
Holocaust survivor and stepsister of Anne Frank, Eva Schloss joins us at the on Monday evening, October 27, 2014 to share the story of the horrific experiences of her past. With two books published and having spoken to numerous crowds, Eva keeps the legacy of Anne Frank alive and seeks to spread awareness of one of the most tragic events in history.
Join us to watch this incredible film about a Polish man who returns home after the death of his father and unearths a secret about the now-deceased Jewish residents of his village.
“That this film could be made in Poland with a Polish cast and crew has turned “Aftermath” into a significant milestone in that country’s ongoing process of wrestling with its demons.
Whenever I write on the Holocaust – the Shoah – I do so with a certain degree of humility, and not without a deep sense of pain.
For I am reminded of what my parents taught me while still a young boy — the profundity and pain of which I realized only years later — that there are things in Jewish history that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened; that Oswiencim, Majdanek, Dachau, Treblinka — these are beyond vocabulary. Words may ease the pain, but they may also dwarf the tragedy. For the Holocaust was uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel put it, “not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
But while the Holocaust was “uniquely unique” as Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer put it, there are important universal lessons to be acted upon.
