Yad Vashem

One of the hardest days by far was our trip to Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Museum (this was done during Jeff’s class but Michelle has been before, and we didn’t want to and weren’t allowed to bring the kids in). We were there for just over three hours, and the time did not allow us to take in all that the museum offered. We’ve seen movies and heard stories of how the Jews were persecuted in horrific ways, and the museum did a really great job at giving an unbiased look into not only the Jewish people as a whole who were permanently affected but also individual families and the hardship they went through. The day really wrecks you but it’s one of those things you have to see.

Hitler writes in his book Mein Kampf, “The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.” It was with this personal ideology that Hitler came to power and swayed the Nazi party to also adopted this twisted mindset. Once they gained power under a number of circumstances they took away democracy, instituted absolute power, and also began to discriminate against the Jews. It first began as a National Boycott Day in 1933, where every non-Jew was urged to not purchase anything from Jewish businesses. It was only six days later that they put the “Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service” into effect, allowing civil services to fire any Jewish person for any reason they wanted. Doctors were fired, lawyers lost their clients, teachers were randomly dismissed. The anti-Semitism continued to the point where years later, when World War II began, Hitler and the Nazi party instituted “The Final Solution”, allowing for full-blown removal of Jewish people from society and placed into city ghettos before being moved to concentration camps. From there most of us know the horrors that took place before those camps were finally liberated six long years later.

This was a shocking experience for a few reasons. One is the depth of depravity and hatred man, one party, almost an entire nation could feel. Many of the images were simply too hard to view, some videos too hard to watch. To think that this is part of our human history is shameful to think. And to think that there were so few non-Jewish people who stood up to denounce or put an end to the tragedy is deplorable as well.

But there is something else that we cannot seem to fathom, and that is what the response was from the outside church and world. Granted, no one really knew the scope of the atrocities taking place, but what was the response of the rest of the world? One country said, “there is not a Jewish problem in our country, and we prefer to keep it that way.” Many others said that the ‘conflict’ between the Nazi party and the Jewish people was an internal matter and it should be left as that. When 939 Jewish people sailed from Germany and tried to land in Cuba and the US, they were turned away because of ‘lack of proper visas’. They were forced to turn back and only at the last minute did England take some of them in briefly. And the response of the church? The Vatican took a formal stance of neutrality throughout the entire time, with no desire to ‘meddle into someone else’s affairs’. They only lightly scolded the Nazi party for their actions over the time. The German and surrounding churches tried to find ways of working with the Nazis, signing agreements and taking very much a pacifist role as well. So many kept silent in a time and situation where that option seems unfathomable.
Granted, this is a pretty heavy post. But again, this is part of the Jewish history and in a very real way, our history, so we must take note once again of what took place. The vast majority of Jewish people are not looking for pity; they do want what most of us take for granted – enjoy freedom in living, working, doing as they wish. At the end of the museum visitors are urged to ‘never forget’ the tragedy took place so as to not allow history to repeat itself. May we never indeed

We did take the kids to Oscar Schindler’s grave which is right here in Jerusalem (he wanted to be buried here). It was a good chance to pay respects to the man who helped save over 1200 Jewish people, and even though the kids didn’t understand fully why we were there, they did put a rock on his grave out of respect (Jewish custom) and we talked about what he did.