(Holocaust Remembrance Day) יום השואה

Today was יום השואה (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in Israel. All day the television stations showed films and shows about the Shoah, radio stations played somber music, and flags on public buildings were lowered to half staff. But the most poignant and powerful moment came at precisely 10:00 a.m., when air-raid sirens were sounded throughout the whole country for two minutes. During these two minutes people stop whatever they are doing -- even cars stop -- and they stand silently to commemorate the six million Jews murdered in Europe. Those two minutes are consecrated time, set apart from the ordinary routines of profane time; they burst in upon it and shatter it.

When the sirens sounded, I was still in my Hebrew class, which was just finishing up. Our teacher, in the middle of explaining something, stopped in mid-sentence and said quietly, "We need to stand up." As I stood together with my classmates in silence, I thought of Psalm 38 ("my sorrow is continually before me"); I thought of my grandmother, who escaped the Nazis by immigrating to America but lost a brother who stayed behind; I thought of my synagogue in Wisconsin, which I learned was defaced with swastikas last week; I thought of the remarkable and courageous woman whose story we had just read, Hannah Szenes; and I thought of the poem we had read the day before, which ends abruptly in mid-sentence like the lives of so many who perished.

כתוב בעפרון בקרון החתום / דן פגיס

כאן במשלוח הזה
אני חוה
עם הבל בני
אם תראו את בני הגדול
קין בן אדם
תגידו לו שאני

Here is my rough translation:

Written in Pencil on the Sealed Train Car / by Dan Pagis

Here at this transfer
I am Eve
With Abel my son
If you see my big son
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I

It was extraordinary and profoundly moving to take part in this public commemoration together at the same time with millions of others throughout the country. Perhaps Emile Durkheim explains it best. "The basis of mourning," he wrote, "is the impression of enfeeblement that is felt by the group when it loses a member. But this very impression has the effect of bringing the individuals close to one another ... and from all this comes a sensation of renewed strength.… To commune in sadness is still to commune, and every communion of consciousness increases social vitality, in whatever form it is done."