Bo | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 1, 2025
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The Necessity of Teaching Our Children Passover and International Holocaust Day
Rabbi Michael S. Siegel
February 1, 2025
It was the moment that our people had been waiting for, for hundreds of years. The plagues had devastated Egypt, and the God of Israel had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt who the true divinity was. The Israelites were about to leave Egypt, break the chains of bondage and begin the journey to the land that God had promised to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah.
Moses stood before the people as their last night in Egypt approached, and with it, the 10th plague. One might have expected him to give an oration about the meaning of freedom, or the necessity of courage, or what to expect in the days ahead. Rather, Moses offered the Israelites an elaborate ritual centering on the sacrifice of a lamb or a goat, and the necessity of putting its blood on the doorposts. Moses went on to instruct them to conduct a sacred national meal, replete with matzah and bitter herbs, all while dressed to leave, sandals on their feet and staff in hand.
The point of all of this was, in Moses’ words, to create a day of national remembrance, placing the duty on parents to pass on the memory of what happened in Egypt, from generation to generation. Three times in the parasha does Moses turn to this theme.
When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children say to you: what does the ceremony mean to you? And tell them it is the Passover service to the Lord who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians. (Exodus 12:26-27)
On that day tell your son I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)
In days to come when your son asks you: “what does this mean”. Say to him: “with a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 13:14)
About to go forth, Moses addresses the people and focuses not on military might, nor on leadership for that matter, but on education.
The historical record was not enough. Nor were the exploits of the leaders and their warriors. Moshe Rabenu, Moses our Rabbi, was wise enough to teach the people that what matters most is the lessons that we draw from our sacred history, not its chronicling.
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere.” In other words, while Greek philosophy focused on intellectual understanding, Jewish tradition emphasized history with meaning, connecting them to something larger than the events of a particular moment.
It is remarkable how effective this approach has been for the Jewish people. Thousands of years later we continue to educate our children, to encourage them to ask questions, to experience the challenges and to experience the meaning and wonder of the Exodus, as well as Jewish history, every Passover Seder.
There is some irony in that the reading of the portion of Bo coincided with another historic event that took place week: International Holocaust Day. It coincides with the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau which happened on January 27th, 1945. This year marks its 80th anniversary. Here, too, is another day of remembrance which focuses on the same people who were feared by their host society, persecuted and enslaved, and subjected to genocide. Yet it barely registers around the world. I wonder how many of you commemorated the day in any way, or even knew about it?
On International Holocaust Day the world is asked to pause to commemorate those who were murdered, those who perpetrated those heinous crimes, and those who stood by and allowed it to happen. In the 80 years since the survivors walked out of that camp under the gate with its cynical sign: Arbeit macht frei: work makes you free, there has a been a proliferation of museums to commemorate the Holocaust around the world. All of them serve an educational function. The Association of Holocaust Organizations has registered 293 institutional members around the world.
How effective have their efforts been? When children ask, “Mah haavodah hazot: what occurred during the Shoah,” what will they say? What meaning, what relevance will they lend to the story?
The Claims Conference, which represents the Jewish people and their claims against Germany, just published an 8-Country Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Index. The results are stunning:
When asked to name concentration camps, killing centers (death camps), killing sites, transit camps or ghettos, nearly half (48%) of Americans could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 camps established during World War II.
Across countries surveyed, large swaths of the population do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and notable subsets of the populations believe 2 million or fewer Jews were killed.
This is what we have taught our children as we commemorate this 80th anniversary?
It is actually worse than that: Nearly half of adults in the U.S. (49%), Hungary (47%), France (44%) and Germany (44%) report that Holocaust distortion is common in their country.
Holocaust distortion misrepresents established facts about the Holocaust, minimizes its impact, and shifts responsibility for it. This distortion is promoted or enabled by governments, political leaders, and others, and it is a worldwide effort.
During the course of the war in Gaza, we have had a front seat in a class on the power of Holocaust distortion. Each of us are witnesses to the fact that during the course of the Gaza war, the world became increasingly comfortable with comparing Israelis to Nazis; blurring the meaning of genocide and using it to describe the Israeli conduct of the war. Despite Israel’s efforts to conduct the war with an eye toward protecting civilians, it was portrayed as the perpetrator of all evil, with barely a mention that all of this pain and destruction was planned and orchestrated by Hamas while their soldiers hid safely in their tunnels.
None of this is to say that the IDF was without fault in its conduct of the war. Armies are made up of human beings who will undoubtedly make mistakes. But a responsible country has a process to address those errors and punish those who crossed the line. Israel has a strong record in this regard, and I am confident that after the war this process will continue.
What needs to be noted is that no country has ever fought a war where the enemy hides in tunnels amidst an elaborate labyrinth, leaving women and children to suffer above ground. But that is not the picture that is presented on cable news networks. The vast majority of the coverage is focused on Israel as the brutal aggressor, without as much as a question of why the Hamas fighters are exposing their people to danger while they hide underground or in hospitals or schools. No one asks why so much of the food that is shipped into Gaza falls into the hands of Hamas instead of the people that it is intended for.
It should surprise no one that as a result, one in three Americans believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. Among younger Americans, and along political lines, divisions are more prominent. Almost half of those surveyed aged 18-29, 49%, say Israel is committing genocide.
Ironically, the same United Nations that created the International Holocaust Day is the greatest perpetrator of Holocaust distortion beginning with the Secretary General Antonio Guteres, who has consistently accused Israel of genocide while barely mentioning that it was the Jewish State that was attacked. The fact that the only people threatening genocide are the leaders of Hamas and its partners around the world, is utterly ignored. Can it be at all surprising that newly released hostages are reporting that one of the places that they were hidden was in UNWRA sites under the auspices of the UN?
I was proud when Israel’s President Herzog spoke at the United Nations on January 27th, the 80th anniversary and pointed an accusing finger at this empty institution, “Rather than fulfilling its purpose, and fighting courageously against a global epidemic of jihadist, murderous and abhorrent terror, time and again this assembly has exhibited moral bankruptcy,” the President said.
He went on. “Just as terrorists use human shields, they also weaponize the international institutions, undermining the most basic, fundamental reason for their establishment. How is it possible that the same institutions established in the wake of the greatest genocide in history – the Holocaust — are manipulating the definition of genocide for the sole purpose of attacking Israel and the Jewish people?”
The President asked, “How is it possible that international institutions, which began as an anti-Nazi alliance, are allowing antisemitic genocidal doctrines to flourish uninterrupted in the wake of the largest massacre of Jews since World War II?”
Long ago, our Torah commanded us how to remember, how to inject meaning into a historical moment, how to bear witness through education, through teaching our children.
Elie Wiesel once said, “Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.” 80 years since the liberation of Aushwitz. I am sure that Mr. Wiesel would be shocked at just how ineffective Holocaust education has been.
The same Claims Conference survey also uncovered this statistic: A majority of adults across almost all countries surveyed believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today. In the U.S., more than three-quarters responded affirmatively.
Elie Wiesel also said at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, “it is not because I cannot explain that you won’t understand, it is because you won’t understand that I cannot explain.”
I wonder if those same people who said that a Holocaust could happen today appreciated that, as World War II makes so clear, it may begin with the Jews but it never ends with the Jews. One would think that if they took that fact at all seriously, that would serve as inspiration to understand what happened then and to apply the deeper lessons to the present day.
The world’s children deserve to know what happened in the Shoah; what happened in that Hell called Aushwitz before the gates swung open 80 years ago, and what a real genocide looks like. It is through education based on facts and not propaganda, that we will prevent the fears of their parents to become a reality.