On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, many in the Jewish world are worried about the future of how we remember the past. As the Holocaust becomes relegated to the more distant past, how do we ensure that it is not forgotten? More at The Jewish Journal.
A continuing positive consensus about the Holocaust will require active vigilance in the effort to protect all liberal democracies – the open societies that value ethnic diversity and religious tolerance.
All the same, change, like taxes and death, is inevitable. Nothing remains the same.
As the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, and those who remain confront the inevitable limitations of advancing age, Holocaust educators are being forced to confront a fraught question:
What will happen to the teaching of the Holocaust when the firsthand witnesses are gone? Some believe the field of Holocaust education will be forever changed…
But others are less concerned, pointing to the existence of a critical mass of recorded testimonies and the absence of a direct correlation between the availability of those accounts and society’s interest in the Holocaust.
With the passing of the World War II generation and the rise of extreme right-wing parties around the world, some with fascist pasts, the voices of Wiesel, Levi, and Appelfeld need to be heard more than ever. Now, though, they must speak in a unified language understandable to all audiences, American, European, and Israeli alike. And their message must be one — that the Holocaust teaches us multiple messages, all of them complementary. It is a message of hope, of humanism, and of Jewish national rebirth.
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Preceding
75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
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Additional reading
- Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated?
- January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
- Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
- World remembers Auschwitz survivors
- Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
- Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Seventy-five years ago on January 27
- the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served
- Through the Lens of Faith
- A Quarter of Europeans are Still Antisemites
- Israeli leaders delight in Europe’s cruelty toward refugees
- The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium
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