Turning Remembrance into Action

This Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, Rabbi Eckstein shares a message on Fox News, saying that we must ensure that all remaining Holocaust survivors live their final days in dignity, and that we must also speak out against the anti-Semitism that is rising around the world today:

Each year we at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews take this opportunity not only to pause and memorialize the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but also to turn commemoration into action.

We bring food, medical care and other support to more than 110,000 impoverished Holocaust survivors and elderly Jews across the former Soviet Union, and to tens of thousands more survivors in Israel. And we urge others to help us reach other aging, struggling survivors around the world.

With 40 survivors dying daily worldwide, we’re racing against the clock to ensure that all poor survivors can live their final days in dignity, without being forced to decide each day between eating or paying for life-saving medicine or between electricity and home care.

Yet Yom HaShoah this year seems markedly different. While we have seen radical nationalism and xenophobia make inroads across Europe for years, most decent-minded people everywhere have condemned such extremism, along with the rise of violence against Jews, Muslims and other minorities.

This year, though, we are seeing a new normalization and acceptability of anti-Semitism - or at least a new permissiveness, where outright anti-Semitism is poisoning the public sphere. It’s surely no coincidence that at the same time, fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are still alive to speak out against this re-emerging evil, thereby emboldening the haters to re-emerge...

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