Yom Hashoa - Holocaust Remembrance Day

Dear Members of Hashomer Hatzair USA, Hadracha, Alumni, Families and Friends,

Today commemorates Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom HaShoa, and 80 years to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising led by members of Hashomer Hatzair that started on April 19th, 1943 on Passover Eve.

To me the holocaust represents a “Uniquely unique” event unparalleled to any other, the industrial annihilation of human beings with such evilness and dehumanization. In the Aichman sentence Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur (pen name Ka-Tsetnik 135633) went up to the stand and said "Auschwitz was another planet". But it wasn't, it was made by people and it happened here on earth. We as a Movement, as a people must vouch that it will never happen again to anyone. We must stay alert to processes that happen in countries around the world and fight hatred, discrimination and anti-semitism wherever they point out their ugly head.

The holocaust also gives real meaning to the concept of resistance, as this poem describes best:

Resistance is...

To smuggle a loaf of bread - was to resist.

To teach in secret - was to resist.

To gather information and distribute an underground newsletter - was to resist.

To cry out warning and shatter illusions - was to resist.

To rescue a Torah scroll - was to resist.

To forge documents - was to resist.

To smuggle people across borders - was to resist.

To chronicle events and conceal the records - was to resist.

To extend a helping hand to those in need - was to resist.

To dare to speak out, at the risk of one's life - was to resist.

To stand empty-handed against the killers - was to resist.

To reach the besieged, smuggling weapons and commands - was to resist.

To take up arms in streets, mountains and forests - was to resist.

To rebel in the death camps - was to resist.

To rise up in the ghettos, amid tumbling walls,

in the most desperate revolt humanity has ever known ...

A poem by Haim Guri and Monia Avrahami

Flames in the Ashes (original Hebrew: P'nei ha-Mered)

As a grandson to Saba Yehezkel from Krusnick, Poland. A sole survivor from all of his grand family I ask you. Never forget! And never let anything like this happen ever again.

Chazak Ve’Ematz

Assaf Galin, Central Shalich