This is the great work of the Spirit in us: to take away our enjoyment of sin by giving us a greater happiness in knowing God. For he is not a Spirit of mere morality but the Spirit of life.
Yom haShoah is Israel’s Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, marked each year on the 27th day of Nisan, shortly after Passover.
While the world observes Holocaust Memorial Day in January, on the date that the Auschwitz death camp was liberated, in Israel we commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when heroic Jewish people rose up to fight for their lives. The uprising was crushed by the Nazis, but Yom haShoah remembers both the horrors and the heroes of the Holocaust.
January 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Europe and the United States of America. This day is chosen to commemorate the date in 1945 that Auschwitz was liberated. However, all too often, acknowledgement of the Nazi atrocities and subtle anti-Semitism sit uncomfortably alongside each other. Some even equate the modern state of Israel with Nazi Germany, which goes to show how little of what actually happened is remembered. It is hard to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, but while some actively deny the scope or even the very existence of the atrocities, others simply grow up unaware of the history we vowed never to forget.
In research commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, it was discovered that over half of Britons did not know that 6 million Jewish people were murdered. In the US, more than one in ten believed that Jewish people actually caused the Holocaust. “The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the commissioning body.
Researchers found tens of thousands of documents that had been carefully collected and stored by August 1942. Some were written, in the form of diaries, essays and commissioned surveys, poetry and precise reportage in Yiddish, Polish and other European languages. Among them they found a recipe for how to make rotten fish palatable as the people were starving and turned to desperate measures to make anything resembling food into something edible.
And there was this note from Lichtenstzajn on behalf of himself and his wife, a well-known artist:
“I only wish to be remembered… I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Seksztajn. I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today.”
Let us remember them.
The language of faith, when in exercise, will not be, 'What is most conducive to my temporal ease and prosperity?' but 'What will give me the fairest opportunity of glorifying him, who has bought me with his blood, and called me out of darkness into his marvellous light?'
If we are indeed, believers in Christ, and partakers of the power of his resurrection, we are bound by obligation and required by our rule, to set our affections on the things that are above, not on the things on the earth.