“Jews,” said, Judge Jim Lammey of the Shelby County Criminal Court, Tennessee, this week, should “get the f**k over the Holocaust”. After over 70 years, is it time to let it go?
My own Jewish identity is not defined by the Holocaust. It is, rather, based on culture, family, history, festivals, ritual, and a belief in social justice and in values shared with other people. My Judaism is positive and outward facing.
The Holocaust is a part of history which teaches us all, Jewish or not, just what can happen when hatred goes unchecked. The Nazis targeted Roma people and people with disabilities as well as Jews, all of who they saw as inferior. And tragically, genocides followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Furthermore, just this year we have seen people being murdered for their religious affiliation. Islamophobia, Afrophobia (racism), homophobia, misogyny, and, of course, anti-Semitism (often expressed as impassioned anti-Zionism) have commonalities and are all on the rise and relate to identity based hatred.
A unique trip last week, challenged me however, to specifically consider role of the Holocaust in understanding Jewish identity. It also confirmed that to tackle the current rise in hatred and, specifically, contemporary anti-Semitism we must attempt to grasp the incomprehensible, the deliberate murder of six million Jewish individuals in the 20th Century.
Our ‘Holy Bus’, one of nine coaches run by the March of the Living UK, was the first multi faith British group on the five day trip, with three Muslims, three Jews, three Christians, a Sikh and a Hindu, all lay or ordained faith leaders.
We visited the key sites of Jewish life (and death) in Poland. We saw the work of the Nazis – Zyblitowska Gora, where 10,000 people were taken into the forest and shot and then dumped in mass graves including 800 children from an orphanage, and Bełżec, an extermination camp where arrival to death took no more than three hours. We also saw hooks at Auschwitz where people were left hanging, and the gas chambers and crematoria at Madjanek and Auschwitz where death was industrialised .
We discussed forgiveness, the nature of collaboration, the dangers of hateful language and the abhorrence of killing children. Most powerfully, we linked arms and marched, as one, out (not in) through the gates of Auschwitz in a display of unity, defiance and of life.
The vast new Polin museum documents 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland. Since medieval days, the fortunes of the Jews went in waves, sometimes protected in return for assistance with raising funds. At other times, ruthlessly hounded and excluded. The image of the Jew as outsiders, scheming, money centric and controlling was established – even at times when Jewish families were paupers.
Maps show how, at the end of the 19th Century, with the national borders ever moving in the region, there was a mass migration of Jews towards the West as thousands fled the pogroms (including my own family) seeking a safer life. Three and a half million remained in what became Poland, of whom three million were subsequently murdered by the Nazis
What really resonated was the same tropes, the same narrative about Jews, which underpin contemporary anti-Semitism. Rich Jews, outsiders, powerful Jews (or Zionists), controlling through their money and with an agenda to take power. We were reminded about negative imagery about Rothschilds, control of the media and a now infamous mural showing Jews counting their money on the backs of workers, here in modern Britain.
This stereotype is deeply embedded and profoundly damaging, currently illustrated in Jews, Money and Myth at the Jewish Museum London.
We are shaped by our experiences – individual and communal. Putting the Jewish story into the context of 1,000 years in Poland not only showed the universal dangers of hatred of any minority, but it crystalised the challenge of long term, engrained and specific stereotypes.
The fear of being targeted is deeply rooted and it helps explain Jewish ‘obsession’ with the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism in the UK today is one of the fastest growing forms of hatred but it is still, thankfully, primarily online, verbal and non-violent.
This trip, with people from other faith groups, confirmed that my identity will always be linked with 1,000 years of Jewish life in Europe.
The Holocaust will not define me – but, Judge Lammey, I will never and should never get over it. Nor, as I saw this week on our ‘Holy Bus’, will good people from other faiths and backgrounds who understand not only its depravity as a genocide, but also the very specific form of hatred which led to it, and which has not gone away.
Mitzvah Day founder Laura Marks OBE is also chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and an interfaith consultant