As yesterday was Yom Hashoah, it seems like an appropriate time to discuss this:

The Shoah was not just a German or Nazi enterprise.

It was only possible through collaboration from people all over Europe (France, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine etc.) and beyond. It was also not an isolated bubble of horror disconnected from the past or even the present. It was only possible because of thousands of years of embedded and foundational Jew-hatred.

Similarly, what we experience today is only possible because of those same things.

The Holocaust - the Shoah - was not a universal tragedy. It was a Jewish tragedy, that has universal lessons.

For Jewish people, the persecution we have experienced for millennia - and in particular, the Shoah - are not things of the past. Not only do we still face intense persecution today, but we are scarred by the events of the past.

It is not history for us. It is our families. It is the culture we grew up in. It is our nightmares.

Today - on Yom Hashoah - we remember our dead.

During my 2012 trip to Eastern Europe, I spent three weeks in Poland exploring sites connected to both Jewish life and Jewish destruction.

In Warsaw, the capital of Poland, I visited the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery. This is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. There are 250,000 graves as well as mass graves containing the bodies of Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Like other Jewish cemeteries in Poland, it was used as a site for mass executions.

This is a photo of Mr Liviu Beris.

When I met him in Bucharest, Mr Beris was the Head of the Holocaust Survivors Association of Romania.

I interviewed Mr Beris in 2012 and he told me about his and his family’s experiences during the Romanian Holocaust. He told me, ‘my fault, my crime was that I was born to Jewish parents’ and therefore along with thousands of other Jewish Romanians, he was deported on foot to concentration camps in Transnistria, part of modern day Moldova following violent and deadly pogroms.

TW: Holocaust:

Today on Shabbat and in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, we will learn about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisers.

It’s a common misconception that during the Shoah, Jews ‘went like lambs to the slaughter’. This is erroneous and offensive. From April 19 to May 16 1943, Jews staged an uprising.


The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of all Nazi Ghettos and at its peak, it was the prison for 450,000 Jews. The conditions were unimaginable and the prisoners lived on 184 Calories a day.