Yom HaShoah: Remembering the Six Million and the Courage of the Few

How the date was chosen

The official name is Yom HaZikaron laShoah velaGevurah (יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה), “Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and of Heroism.” From the beginning Israel’s lawmakers meant to remember not only the murdered but also those who resisted.

The date was debated. Soon after the war the Chief Rabbinate designated Asara B’Tevet, the ancient fast of the siege of Jerusalem, as Yom HaKaddish HaKlali, the “general Kaddish day” for victims whose date of death is unknown. It was first observed in that way in December 1949.¹ Others proposed the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had begun on 19 April 1943, Erev Pesach. Because that Hebrew date belongs to Pesach, the Knesset resolved on 12 April 1951 to set 27 Nisan, after the festival and about a week before Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut, as “Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day.”² So the calendar moves from destruction, through the fallen soldiers, to independence.

The Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day Law of 8 April 1959, signed by David Ben-Gurion and President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, gave the day legal force, with two minutes of silence and a halt to work across the country. A 1961 amendment closed places of entertainment on the day.³

When the date moves. 27 Nisan never falls on Shabbat, but it can fall on a Friday or a Sunday. If it falls on a Friday, the day moves back to Thursday, 26 Nisan. If it falls on a Sunday, it moves forward to Monday, 28 Nisan, so that the evening ceremonies do not require desecrating Shabbat.⁴ Most communities outside Israel follow the Israeli date. See our calendar for each year’s observance.

Many Haredi communities do not mark 27 Nisan. They note that Nisan is a month of joy in which public mourning is restricted, and that a moment of silence is not a traditional Jewish form. They remember the murdered on Asara B’Tevet and on Tisha B’Av instead. The difference is one of form, not of love.

The Warsaw Ghetto and the meaning of gevurah

By spring 1943 most of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jews had been deported to the death camp at Treblinka. When German forces entered the ghetto on the morning of 19 April to complete the deportations, they were met by gunfire. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization, led by the twenty-three-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz, and of the Jewish Military Union had little more than pistols and homemade explosives, yet they held out for nearly a month. The SS commander, Jürgen Stroop, marked the end on 16 May 1943 by blowing up the Great Synagogue.

There were revolts at Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and partisans in the forests. There were also many quieter kinds of gevurah: secret schools, hidden Torah study, and parents who gave their bread to their children. Israel’s law joined “Holocaust” and “heroism” in one name to say that the Jews of Europe were not only victims. They chose life and dignity when every power on earth was set against them.

Six million names

The figure of six million is the conclusion of decades of demographic research, deportation records and the Nazis’ own documents, and historians place the total between about five and a half and six million.⁵ Around one and a half million of the dead were children. In Poland about ninety percent of a Jewish population of 3.3 million was murdered. Whole worlds of Torah and Jewish life vanished within a few years.

The Knesset established Yad Vashem in 1953 as Israel’s national memorial. Its name comes from Isaiah:

Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.

Yad vashem (יד ושם) means “a monument and a name.” For decades Yad Vashem has worked to recover the name of each person murdered. Its Hall of Names holds the Pages of Testimony filled in by survivors and relatives, because each of the six million was a person created in the image of God.

The siren, Kaddish, and El Malei Rachamim

The day opens at sundown with a state ceremony in Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square, where six torches are lit, usually by survivors. The next morning at 10:00 the siren sounds for two minutes. In the Knesset and elsewhere the names of victims are read aloud in a ceremony called Lechol Ish Yesh Shem, “Every Person Has a Name.”

In synagogues and homes:

• Kaddish is said, the Aramaic doxology that never mentions death: Yitgadal veyitkadash shmei rabba, “Magnified and sanctified be His great Name.” To say it on this day is to declare, in the presence of the ashes, that Hashem is still holy and still faithful.
• El Malei Rachamim (“God, full of compassion”), the memorial prayer, is chanted in a version that names the camps and asks shelter under the wings of the Shechinah for the holy and pure ones who were murdered.⁶
• Psalms are read, especially 79, 44 and 130, and memorial candles are lit. Some families light six.

The Scriptures of lament

The Tanakh does not hurry past grief. Psalm 79 reads almost like an eyewitness account:

O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth. Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.

Psalm 44 is bolder still. Israel protests that it has not forgotten God, and still it suffers: “Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?” (Psalm 44:22–23). This is the faith of Avraham at Sodom, which argues with God because it will not let go of Him. Paul quotes this verse in Romans 8:36, not to say that Israel’s suffering proves rejection, but to describe the faithful, whom nothing can “separate … from the love of God” (Romans 8:39).

Lamentations gives the survivor’s cry: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow” (Lamentations 1:12). Yet at its center it holds on: “his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23).

Ezekiel 37:1–14, the valley of dry bones, is the haftarah of Shabbat Chol HaMoed Pesach, read only days before Yom HaShoah.⁷ The bones say, “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost” (Ezekiel 37:11). Hashem answers:

Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

Israel’s anthem answers that despair with od lo avdah tikvateinu, “our hope is not yet lost.” The plain sense of Ezekiel concerns the national restoration of Israel; the Sages also heard in it the resurrection of the dead (b. Sanhedrin 92b).⁸ Both meanings matter on this day.

The honest history: contempt that prepared the ground

Nazism was a neo-pagan, racial ideology hostile to biblical faith itself. But it did its work in Christian Europe, often through baptized men, against a people that churches had taught for centuries to despise. This must be said soberly, without exaggeration and without excuse.

• The adversus Judaeos tradition. From the second century, Christian writings “against the Jews” argued that God had rejected Israel. The most notorious are the eight sermons John Chrysostom preached in Antioch in 386–387, which called the synagogue a dwelling of demons.⁹
• Replacement theology taught that the Church had replaced Israel and that the Jews were cursed wanderers. Together with the charge of “deicide,” it fed Crusader massacres, blood libels, expulsions and ghettos.
• Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543, urging that synagogues and Jewish schools be set on fire, Jewish homes destroyed, prayer books seized and rabbis forbidden to teach.¹⁰ Nazi propagandists later reprinted these pages proudly.

Many churches have since repudiated this teaching, notably the Catholic Church in Nostra Aetate (1965) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in its 1994 declaration rejecting Luther’s anti-Jewish writings.¹¹ Benei Avraham stands firmly in that repudiation. Replacement theology contradicts Paul’s plain words, and the tree it planted bore poisoned fruit.

The Righteous Among the Nations

Yad Vashem gives the title Righteous Among the Nations (Chasidei Umot HaOlam) to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. More than 28,000 have been recognized from over fifty countries.¹² Many acted out of Christian faith:

• Corrie ten Boom and her family, Dutch Reformed watchmakers in Haarlem who hid Jews in their home. Her father and her sister Betsie died after their arrest.
• André and Magda Trocmé, the Protestant pastor and his wife whose village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and its plateau sheltered thousands, many of them children.
• Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose network smuggled children out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
• Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Berlin priest who prayed publicly for the Jews and died on the way to Dachau, and Maria Skobtsova, the Orthodox nun who sheltered Jews in Paris and died at Ravensbrück.

They were few, but contempt was not the only Christian voice in Europe.

The Messianic witness: “Boast not against the branches”

Paul, an Israelite of the tribe of Binyamin, answered replacement theology before it had a name:

I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. — Romans 11:1

I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid.

To Gentile believers grafted into Israel’s olive tree he wrote: “Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee” (Romans 11:18). The history of Christian anti-Judaism is the history of disobedience to that verse. Paul’s own posture was anguished love, “great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart,” for the people “to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Torah … and of whom as concerning the flesh Messiah came” (Romans 9:1–5).

Yeshua was a Jew of Nazareth, circumcised on the eighth day and a keeper of the feasts. He spoke his sharpest words within Israel, as the prophets did, and he never preached hatred of his people. He commanded, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you” (Matthew 5:44). In his parable of the judgment of the nations, the King says, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). In its plain sense, “my brethren” refers to his disciples and to the needy. Since the Shoah many readers have also heard in it a question about how the nations treated Yeshua’s own kin according to the flesh. Either way, the verse leaves no room for indifference.

The prophetic horizon: Israel endures

From Yom HaShoah the calendar moves to Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut, from the pits of Europe to a people restored in its Land. We must not say that the murdered died “in order that” the State might be born. No one knows such purposes, and the dead are not a means to anything. But we can say what the prophets say: Hashem does not abandon His people.

To Avraham He promised, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee” (Genesis 12:3). Through Zechariah He said, “he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zechariah 2:8). Through Jeremiah He bound Israel’s survival to creation itself:

Thus saith Hashem, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night … If those ordinances depart from before me, saith Hashem, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.

Every morning since 1945 the sun has risen on the Jewish people that the Third Reich meant to erase. Ezekiel’s bones stood up “an exceeding great army” (Ezekiel 37:10), and three years after the camps were liberated a Jewish state was declared. Without claiming to know Hashem’s timetable, believers may see His faithfulness to Ezekiel 36–37 in that return.

The final hope is greater still: “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). The murdered sleep. They are not lost to the One who numbers the stars. When the great shofar sounds, the graves will open as Ezekiel promised, and Mashiach ben David, whom we know as Yeshua, will gather Israel to Zion and judge the nations in righteousness.

Keeping Yom HaShoah

The day has no halachic obligations of its own. Its customs are customs of memory:

• Stand. In Israel, stand for the siren. Elsewhere, keep a moment of silence at a community gathering or at home.
• Light a candle, or six. Say Kaddish if you are part of a minyan, or read Psalm 79, 44 or 130.
• Learn a name. Look up one victim in Yad Vashem’s online database, learn where that person lived and whom they loved, and say the name aloud.
• Hear a survivor’s testimony, in person, in an archive, or in a memoir.
• Repent where repentance is due. Read Romans 9–11 slowly, renounce every trace of replacement theology, and refuse antisemitism in all its present forms.
• Tell children about the Righteous, so they know what courage looks like.
• Remember on the other days, too: the general Kaddish day of Asara B’Tevet and the mourning of Tisha B’Av.
• Pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6) and for Jewish communities everywhere.

We cannot comfort the six million. We can remember them truthfully, refuse the hatred that killed them, and hold fast to the God who promised that the seed of Israel would never cease from before Him.