Pope John Paul II during a visit to Yad Vashem 23/3/2000,The Dalai Lama, speaking with Avner Shalev during a visit to Yad Vashem 20/3/94, U.S. President (then Senator) Barack Obama with Avner Shalev in the Hall of Names 23/7/2008,Avner Shalev with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni in the Hall of Names, Survivors of the Rwandan genocide are taken on a guided tour of Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum, Oskar Schindler next to the tree planted in his honor in the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, yet the names of close to 2 million remain anonymous. Since the 1950s, Yad Vashem has worked tirelessly to collect and commemorate the names of men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Individuals submit handwritten Pages of Testimony in memory of loved ones, researchers painstakingly examine archival materials, and experts use the most advanced technology available to identify name after name to complete this vital task. But the work is not finished. The names of close to 2 million are waiting to be redeemed and time is running out.
Share this video and help us recover the missing names and lost identities of the victims of the Shoah.
For more information about Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project:
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/rememb…
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments on the day:
At the end of the book of Genesis, Joseph makes one deeply poignant request. Though I die in exile, God will bring you back to the land, and when he does so, vehaalitem et atzmotai mizeh, “Carry my bones” with you.
When Moses ascended Mount Sinai, and there was a catastrophe, and he smashed the tablets, and together with God made new ones, ever afterward luchot veshivrei luchot munachim be-aron, the Israelites carried with them in the Ark the new tablets and the fragments of the old.
And so it has been throughout Jewish history. We carry with us all the fragments of our people’s past, the broken lives, the anguished deaths. For we refuse to let their deaths be in vain. They, our past, live on in us as we continue the Jewish journey to the future, to hope, and to life.
And so it is with the victims of the Shoah, the lost lives, the broken communities, synagogues desecrated and set on fire, the sacred scrolls burned and turned to ash, the children, a million and a half of them, an entire murdered generation. What our enemies killed we keep alive in the only way we can, in our minds, our memories and our memorial prayers.
There are cultures that forget the past and there are cultures that are held captive by the past. We do neither. We carry the past with us as we will carry the memory of the Shoah with us for as long as the Jewish people exists, as Moses carried the bones of Joseph, and as the Levites carried the fragments of the shattered tablets of stone.
Those fragments of memory help make us who we are. We live for what they died for, when we walk tall as Jews, showing we are not afraid, refusing to be intimidated by the anti-Semitism that has returned to Europe, or by the sustained assault on Israel, the one place on earth where Jews have ever been able to defend themselves instead of relying on friends who stayed silent, passive, when our ancestors needed them most.
Friends let us be in no two minds. The new anti-Semitism, different from the old merely in focusing not on Jews as individuals but on Jews as a nation in their own land, is as vicious as the old, as potentially murderous as the old, and the fact that it is being given protected space on our university campuses and in some of our media simply go to show that what we learn from history is that people who do not study history fail to learn from history and reproduce all its failings and its hates.
But this time is different. We have the state of Israel. We have Jewish children at Jewish schools. We have good and decent friends. And we have Jerusalem.
If you examine carefully the walls of Jerusalem, you will see a curious phenomenon. Jerusalem was destroyed many times. But each time, its walls were rebuilt from the stones of the ruins of the earlier wars walls. Out of the ruins of the past, Jerusalem has been rebuilt, and out of the fragments of the memories of the past, the Jewish people have been reborn.
So today we say to the souls of those our people lost in Europe’s dark night: we will never forget you, we will never cease to mourn you, we will not let you down, until Jews can walk the world without fear, witnesses against those who choose death, to the God of life who told us: “Choose life.”
The text above was a speech delivered by Rabbi Sacks at the National Holocaust Memorial Commemoration Ceremony in Hyde Park, London in May 2011.
The Mourners’ Kaddish
Transliteration
Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’may raba b’alma dee-v’ra che-ru-tay, ve’yam-lich mal-chutay b’chai-yay-chon uv’yo-may-chon uv-cha-yay d’chol beit Yisrael, ba-agala u’vitze-man ka-riv, ve’imru amen.
Y’hay sh’may raba me’varach le-alam uleh-almay alma-ya.
Yit-barach v’yish-tabach, v’yit-pa-ar v’yit-romam v’yit-nasay, v’yit-hadar v’yit-aleh v’yit-halal sh’may d’koo-d’shah, b’rich hoo. layla (ool-ayla)* meen kol beer-chata v’she-rata, toosh-b’chata v’nay-ch’mata, da-a meran b’alma, ve’imru amen.
Y’hay sh’lama raba meen sh’maya v’cha-yim aleynu v’al kol Yisrael, ve’imru amen.
O’seh shalom beem-romav, hoo ya’ah-seh shalom aleynu v’al kol Yisrael, ve’imru amen.
* Add on Shabbat
English
Magnified and sanctified be G-d’s great name in the world which He created according to His will. May he establish His kingdom during our lifetime and during the lifetime of Israel. Let us say, Amen.
May G-d’s great name be blessed forever and ever.
Blessed, glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One, though G-d is beyond all praises and songs of adoration which can be uttered. Let us say, Amen.
May there be peace and life for all of us and for all Israel. Let us say, Amen.
Let He who makes peace in the heavens, grant peace to all of us and to all Israel. Let us say, Amen.
