We Must Remember All...

We read the International Holocaust Remembrance Day essay today (NY Daily News,1/27/25) by Rabbi Avi Weiss. He postulates that the State of Israel should become the “keepers” of the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp sites. She would treat and maintain them as a holy Jewish cemetery, honoring the million Jews who were murdered there by the Nazis, often turned into the Germans by their own neighbors of many years, we might add. Rabbi Weiss hears their blood cries calling out, “Do not forget us!”

Of course Rabbi Weiss is correct. It is a sacred mitzvah to remember. Yet, just a few pages before, we read of Israel killing 22 more in Lebanon, while she supports President Donald J. Trump’s hauntingly familiar sounding idea of moving the Palestinians out of Gaza to neighboring countries, “so we can just clean out that whole thing”. Clean the Palestinians out? Meanwhile, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key supporter of Prime Minister Netanyahu calls this proposal, “a great idea”; on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less! Does he remember nothing?

We know by now that Trump would consider the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, as well as those who died trying to liberate them, to be “losers and suckers”. That is just who he is. Still, for Rabbi Weiss to call on Israel to champion those victims, while turning a blind eye to the indifference of the Netanyahu government towards the fate of those many Palestinian people who are not Hamas terrorists seems to us to be the height of cognitive dissonance. Doesn’t their blood also call out, “Do not forget us”?