The Last few weeks have offered a juxtaposition of a number of events all of which point to what could happen to considerations of the Holocaust in the Future, and which will certainly affect Shoah Education over the next decade. A week or two ago, USHMM hosted a Presidential Speech and speeches from Eli Wiesel and other holocaust survivors, as well as the director, and a procession of military units whose predecessors were among the liberators at several German camps. Then, the Pope visited and spoke in Israel, at first balking at a visit to Yad Vashem but then condescending, due to an exhibit regarding the role of Pacelli, Pius XII, in the Shoah, and during the visit was met with very mixed reaction, though generally cordial. May 14th marked the 61st Independence Day for Israel. In serendipity I watched a short clip of the 1993 'Schindler's List' the Stephen Spielberg film, when the Soviet soldier arrives at the liberation of the concentration camp, and Stern stands and asks, "Are there any Jews left in Poland?"---the pause answers the horrible question of what has occurred in Europe. I watched later two salient clips of Eva Kor, a Mengele twin survivor, speaking about reconciliation and forgiveness, and one of Eli Wiesel speaking at Yad Vashem in which he made the point that the Holocaust was not merely a humanitarian issue, but must forever remain about the Jews---he remarked that the world did not kill them because they were humans, they killed them because they were Jews. (See Universal lessons of the holocaust)
About the Jews, vs. About Genocide
Whenever one discusses the issue about whether the Shoah was about the Jews or about other humanitarian issues such as genocide, civil rights, treatment of the ill, lame, poor etc, controversy arises, and 65 years after the end of the war, regarding what the Shoah was really about. It shows a somewhat moronic forgetfulness and lack of discernment beginning to creep in during this age of genocide. Rather than put an end to genocide and war, WWII and the Holocaust did little more than set the stage or foretell it: the Shoah was grim prophecy.
Now the varied events first mentioned may seem only vaguely related to the topic, but they are really a synthesis of several issues which arise. Today, at the outset, everyone uses the words 'holocaust' and 'Shoah' too glibly: they are used with regard to abortion, to any genocide, to any catastrophic event, and even to the treatment of chickens. The well meaning but unwise use of the words have ranged from school children to Congressmen, and what they really mean when they use the word 'Shoah' or 'holocaust' is 'great catastrophe' or even mass killing. The Shoah though, bears some marks in history and in the history of God's dealing with mankind, that point to it as 'about the Jews' even though many died of every nationality, and certain groups such as the infirm, Roma Sinti( gypsies), political dissidents, church dissidents, the mentally infirm, and even epileptics, drunkards and 'chronically unemployed' were targeted for the same 'special treatment'. The Shoah though must be kept in focus as an event about the Jewish Nation, and not merely the largest genocide, although it has certainly held its own in that regard.
Since the end of the Shoah, there have been more and not less genocides, of an increasingly cruel and vile nature (as if they were not all), so while the Shoah provides the foretelling and nature of genocide, it must be kept as its own event to be properly understood, and its lessons not lost.
The Modern Mind and the Shoah
Growing up in the United States where many fought in WWII, the Holocaust was not an unknown or under mentioned event, but was often portrayed and described as a ghoulish one, akin to Horror movies, or tales of evil. Hitler, rather than a political leader became the penultimate Evil one, and fascination with the Shoah was more on the level of a horrid fascination, rather than a historical and lived atrocity.
One author noted that the Jews who suffer pogroms and other tragedies often begin to tell the story about 50 years afterward. As American children, we heard only rarely of WWII and only a little of the Shoah. Then came Yad Vashem in 1953, (with American partners in 1981), Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1977, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 coupled with Holocaust Studies in Colleges and Universities, Holocaust Education in Schools and Churches, and a number of significant museums and memorials.
Additionally, foundations like VHF, and Fortunoff and others began documenting eyewitness testimonies of Holocaust survivors, rescuers, and even the testimony of liberators and Nazis. As educational efforts increased, so did a more dignified response to the Shoah, although at the same time, so did Holocaust Denial. Then, for all intent and purpose while there had been Holocaust information and news on the 'green screen' web, by 1995 and 1996, the web we know today became feasible and widely used enough to contain real efforts at online Holocaust education. The first efforts were made by such as Shoah Education Project Web (now at shoaheducation.com), Spartacus, History Timeline, Nizkor, USHMM, Mining Company (now About), and many others.Within 4 years , FCIT, Wiesenthal Center's MOTLC , Jewish Virtual Library and many other very fine sites were all working with ways to efficiently provide basic information about the Shoah, with Shoaheducation.com , USHMM and Wiesenthal Center attempting generalist approaches for Introducing Holocaust studies online as opposed to only 'encyclopedic' approaches.
Wikipedia also added extensive and detailed overviews of people, places, things, events and resources although they have not yet collated them into a separate resource. Death_camps.org , shoaheducation.com, Holocaustchronicle.com , ushmm.org and MOTLC all provided introductions to the Killing and Atrocity centers and thousands of sites then detailed individual topics ranging from the burning of the Reichstag to the liberation of Nordhausen and every other imaginable topic. However, for the millions of persons reached, mostly with information services, we still have a general public with a superficial understanding of the Shoah. Though we now have interdisciplinary programs putting out doctoral-level persons in Shoah studies, we have mostly educated those who already believed in the Shoah, and only a little, and hardly changed minds who hold opposing views. While interest in the topic has in the past 2 or 3 years waned somewhat on both sides, a quick review (See Seditionact.com-January 10,2009) shows that Holocaust Tolerance or standard history sites are not faring quite as well as online Denial sites.
As the Tolerance Museums Turn
One notable trend though in the focus of Tolerance Museums, Holocaust Museums, Online and In Class education, is that rather than keeping a focus on what became of the Jews in the Shoah, how the world has treated the Jews over the history of mankind, who the Jews are and a variety of other dynamics, institutions dealing with the topic have been seduced into a generalization of topics , assigning the importance of the Holocaust to what we can learn about genocide and humanitarian efforts, rather than focusing on the Shoah as a uniquely Jewish event. While others were killed and suffered alongside the Jews, there can be no question that the Shoah was focused on erasing the Jewish people in Europe, with a 'clean up' of other imagined threats to Aryan bloodlines. Tolerance efforts have worked so hard to equalize our view of persons, nationalities and races that they sometimes err in not recognizing real differences without pejoration, and having a naive idea of realistic possibilities and probabilities that Tolerance objectives will ever be fully reached. Yet in their effort to 'erase differences', an almost opposite view to 'Master Race' ideologies, several major institutions are losing their focus as Holocaust Museums and learning centers in favor of becoming Centers on genocide studies and civil rights. Please do not misunderstand: those are essential cores of holocaust studies, but they are to be end results and not replacements. Said Eli Wiesel in his speech "Universal Lessons of the Holocaust"
...."I know what people say,
It’s so easy, those that were there---want to agree with that statement, 'it was man's inhumanity to man---No! It was man's inhumanity to Jews! Jews were not killed because they were human beings , in the eyes of the killers they were not human beings. They were Jews---it's because they were Jews. But it was so easy for the killers to kill. You see the pictures...Jews were ordered to dig their own graves. Have we ever had that in history, which is filled with cruelty but not with such cruelty? Have mothers ever been forced to give up their children in order to live, and few mothers chose that! Mothers went with their children, their babies, there are no words. At that time we had the feeling that history had entered into madness, and madness had its own logic, its own destiny, even its own archaeology. And within that madness it was perfectly plausible to kill Jews! And so we go through the museum and we don't understand: all we know is that it happened.
We never tried to tell the tale to make people weep..[...]If we decided to tell the tale it is because we wanted the world to be a better world. Just a better world, and learn, and remember. E. Wiesel, April 2008
The dilemma we face in Holocaust Education, is that as the Shoah fades out of first person view, as the next 10 years will take with it most eyewitnesses, are we to ascribe the Shoah to the general category of genocide, or to understand it in terms of the History and people of the Jews and the world's pathological reaction to them or to try and be naively generous and erase knowledge of the Jews in the world and what has become of them, in order to categorize the Shoah as merely the genocide of the Jews, among the dozens of other genocides since. We run the risk I suppose of seeming intolerant if we separate out the Jews, and some fear we say that the Jews suffered more than others in genocides such as the Hmong in the Killing fields, or those of Bangladesh, Croatia or others, and so they would consider the Shoah one among genocides, noting that other nationalities were killed also. There must be a point of reason though, to both recognize suffering in all genocides, and still be able to understand the very unique existence and plight of the Jews in History and suffering. There are a few differences which do not in any way diminish the sufferings of other peoples, but should be recognized to understand the dynamics of our contemporary systems.
1. The Jews are the only people who have existed in dispersion for 2000 years. Other nationalities and races which were dispersed due to war or catastrophe usually did not maintain their identity beyond a couple of generations.
2. Judaeo-Christian views hold the Jews to be held in divine mystery, a people chosen out by God for His purposes. While the modern mind does not care to entertain this, the view is still held by somewhere between 1/4 to 1/2 of the world. Even Islam notes the Jews in origins.
3. 'Root Race' theories prominent in various forms at times in history but eminently since the late 1800s , in Theosophy, the Thule Society and derivatives, and other 'New Age' philosophies hold a pejorative view of the Jews as a root race which once ended, will usher in a Utopian age and people. The foundation of these ideas greatly affected Nazi philosophies and theologies. Even when disparaging, the centrality of the Jews as an identified group holds. In essence, people who love the Jews, hate the Jews or do not care about the Jews, all hold to some sort of parenthetical status.
4. Socio-Political and Economic focus on Israel, for 2000 years, has been on whether the Jews had an inherent right to their homeland, or whether another people(s) or religion did. All have contended for that tiny piece of property for that long. In the Shoah the struggle was pronounced and heated, with atrocities in Palestine, aliyahs and blockades of immigration, Waffen-SS and Islamic cooperation in carrying out a 'final solution', and Vatican lobbying to keep the Jews from declaring Israel their rightful homeland.
5. The nonstop history of Pogroms against the Jews in every nation they resided
6. The far higher preponderance of banishment from major cities and nations than most other groups, and
7. The unheard of actual return of a people two thousand years after dispersion to their homeland, without any of their own military strength.
While there are other distinguishing factors, even unbelievers would acknowledge that their mere existence is at least a phenomenon hard to explain, as well as the inexplicable hatred and persecution of the 'children of Israel'. They have been often at the helm of discovery, economics, art and literature, politics and war. They have been scapegoated throughout history for minor and major crimes, and have cyclically had their possessions, houses, and businesses confiscated or destroyed. So even aside from the Shoah or how we view it, the Jews stand uniquely in the world, not by their testimony but by all of ours.
Understanding a Jewish Shoah
Even the name 'Shoah' is Hebrew, and outside of a few scholars and museum officials, the Shoah is recognized worldwide as having been 'about the Jews'. Liberal efforts to be so utterly fair and balanced, that we miss the essence of understanding about the Holocaust points to a moronic liberalism. I am not advocating a return to the Dark Ages of racial hatred or division, quite the contrary, that would be bizarre, but we really can in research and teaching, in writing and memorials, maintain the Jewish essence of the Shoah in order to comprehend world systems then and since, rather than blindly assert that the Jews have no distinction in the world at all. To merely breathe that lately brings cries of prejudice, but there has to be an element of common sense, even in research. The Shoah was genocide, but all genocides are not the Shoah. All genocides are unspeakable crimes, and all must be tirelessly combated, but while Holocaust Museums, studies and memorials speak to genocide, that is not their primary concern. That may sound unconscionable to suggest, but there is a great effort afoot to alter the purpose of Holocaust memorials to be not about the Jews and the Shoah, but instead as a moral marker briefly in a world which has not ceased genocide.
This is a dangerous position, for it once again, displaces the Jews in the US and other societies, removing a form of protection of a constantly persecuted people, in favor of a blind erasure of all real differences among persons. Rather than the erasure of racial reference, it is better to recognize the differences crying viva la difference!, appreciating the many expression of God's glory and creation in a diverse world instead of rewriting all of creation into one 'kind', which never works. While Roma Sinti, the Mentally Ill, Political and Religious Dissidents, and some Soviets were killed along with the Jews in the Shoah, 'Endlosung', or "The final solution of the Jewish Question" was about the Jews, and Germanization, Aryanization, Judenrein and Operation Reinhard, were about the Jews, with other agendas on the side.
What if USHMM were not about the Jews?
Not to pick on USHMM, but What if the displays, teaching and research and Memorials at the United States Holocaust Museum were not about the Jews? There have been undertows of that philosophy brewing for years. USHMM is funded partly by private funds and grants, and partly by the Federal Government. I last visited in 1998, and its purpose was still very much in tact, with 'Daniel's House', passports commemorating victims, history, memorials, shoes, walls, rescuers, railcars, etc, but recent years show more and more concern with contemporary genocides instead: a very worthwhile cause, but the balance must not be tipped. I know the temptation: after years of daily studying the Shoah and WWII history and never getting to the bottom of the hundreds of thousands of resources, it is invigorating to put one's hands to the protest of and ending of crises such as Dar Fur, Eritrea, and other current slaughters. If we lose the 'pillar' though of Shoah Studies regarding the Jews and the world's response to the Jews, we aid those who would again grind the gears of Gleichschaltung, by making the Jews first, just one of the crowd, and then an unwanted member of the masses.
When Stern rises and asks , in "Schindler's List" of the Soviet soldier, "Are there any Jews Left in Poland", no words are spoken at first. 'No' would have been an understatement though there were a few left. How could the Jews be gone from the one European nation which harbored them more than any other? All of them? Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote a poem 'Where are the Jews' cited in Wiesel's A Jew Today, in which Jesus is walking the streets of ruined Warsaw, asking "Where are the Jews", and falls to his knees weeping when each query brings the response 'gone', 'gone too'. Turning, the Polish crowd turns, and recognizing 'just another Jew' they turn to kill him, asking 'how did he stay alive?"
The poignant reminder of a world without Jews and the sorrow of God, would not sit among scholars or journals today. The politics of the White House would no doubt prefer through more than one administration a sanitized 'purification' of Tolerance efforts over Holocaust Remembrance, but USHMM and the other centers are a Bulwark against the historical anti-Semitism of the world in one of the last bastions of reasonable life for many Jews. The first step in removing support for Israel with little objection may be the removal of the central nature of the Shoah as the attempted destruction of the Jews on the advent of their return to their promised homeland. Political attempts to remove the Jewish focus in these so called 'tolerant' times are really efforts against tolerance for the Jews, and should be stood against at all cost. It is good to forgive, as Eva Kor posited, but forgiveness of Nazi persecutors yet the Jews bearing the glory of God have always been the first show the pattern and way of God, shown even in the New Testament to be the 'oracles of God'. It is the bearing of that Glory that shows a people, a nation saved apart in captivity for two thousand years and returning to a Promise that must cause us to understand, that the pillars of memorial which we have set must not be moved.
When Israel crossed the Jordan, to take Jericho, the water , just as at the Red Sea subsided and the Ark of the Covenant , the priests and army passed over. They were told to leave 12 stones to mark the work the Lord had done.
Jos 4:8 And the children of Israel did so as Joshua commanded, and took up twelve stones out of the midst of Jordan, as the LORD spake unto Joshua, according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel, and carried them over with them unto the place where they lodged, and laid them down there.
Jos 4:9 And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the Ark of the Covenant stood: and they are there unto this day.
Those stones where stood the chosen priests marking the work of God in coming into the land given them through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were pillars to be remembered forever. Our memorials should stand like those pillars, those stones also. ekbest
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