What should we learn from the murder of six million Jews?” my Israeli high school teacher asked each Holocaust Memorial Day. The response came like a liturgy: “Remember and never forget,” followed by the familiar chorus: “We must never let it happen again. That’s why we need a strong army to defend us.”
The post-Holocaust Jewish identity has been forged by millennia of persecution, where survival itself became a form of resistance. Almost every holiday retells the story: we were strangers, we were hunted, we endured.
