Reply To: Yom Hashoah, any thoughts?

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#944576
Sam2
Participant

I am going to tell a story here. I personally am not so happy with how the government decided to do Yom Hashoah. They should not have made it during Nissan. They could have chosen any day. They could have done it in a religious fashion. They didn’t.

I was once listening to a Chareidi relative of mine in Israel give a Shiur after Shalosh Suedos. Someone asked him what Da’as Torah about Yom Hashoah is (exact wording of the question). He said that it’s always a good idea to remember what happened and to mourn, but that 28 Nissan is not the right day for that. And therefore, to show that the government was going against the religious with this decision, we should ignore it. An old, frail man in the back of the Beis Midrash stood up and said, quite clearly, “How dare you?! How dare you reduce our nation, our loss, our memory to nothing more than a weighing of when is appropriate to remember it. It doesn’t matter how wrong the government was. We were given a day to be remembered. But you, who are supposed to be my brothers, are trying to cause us to be forgotten.” (Sadly, it’s been a few years since then and I can’t say for sure that the quote is completely verbatim. But the last line I will never forget.)

I don’t care whether I agree or disagree on technical grounds. That’s no longer the point. They were given a day. Maybe it should have been another day. I think it probably should have been another day. But they were given a day, and arguing with that is one of the grossest insults that anyone can hurl at them.