This letter, published in the readers’ section of the Davar newspaper on May 12, 1965, deals with the question of the appropriate time to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah). The writer explains that the existing date of Yom HaShoah, commemorating the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto, is an artificial date, which causes confusion due to its proximity to Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for IDF Soldiers). On the other hand, Tisha B,Av is “free in our times for additional new content,” and it is therefore an appropriate date for commemorating the Holocaust. This comment refers to the belief of some that, with the return of the Jewish people to their homeland, Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the exile and the destruction of the Jewish homeland in 70 CE, is no longer relevant.
Yom HaShoah is commemorated on April 27, the day on which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. While this date has been debated for both religious and ideological reasons, it remains the day on which the Holocaust is publically remembered in Israel with a siren and ceremonies. International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place on January 27, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
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Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
Yom HaShoah – Yom HaShoah (יום השואה), known in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, is Israel’s national day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance during that period. Yom HaShoah is commemorated by a siren and memorial ceremonies throughout the country. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. Yom HaShoah takes place on 27 Nisan, marking the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The idea of Holocaust Remembrance Day sparked a debate on how to commemorate such a tragic event – even the suitable date was deliberated. Some wanted to emphasise the rebellions and armed resistance and therefore saw fit to set this day on the day that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out; others sought to emphasise the disaster and destruction of the Jewish people and wanted to add the day to one of the days of national mourning, such as Tisha B’Av or the tenth of Tevet. Further opposition to the chosen date came from religious circles, due to the tradition not to mourn in the month of Nisan.
