Looking for More than “Never Again”

By ILANA SICHEL

Reprinted with permission from Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility April 2006 (www.shma.com).

Every year in the height of verdant spring, all the students in my suburban Jewish day school filed into the gymnasium for three assemblies in two weeks: commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel’s Memorial Day, and Israel’s Independence Day. Of the three, I always looked forward most to the assembly for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Just hours after getting dropped off by station wagons and yellow buses, hundreds of us, decked out in white Keds and early ‘90s slap bracelets, would file down the bright carpeted halls; we’d enter the darkened gym and fall into a collective hush.

The cavernous space where we spent endless hours running around and turning cartwheels was transformed into a wonderland with shadows of barbed wire flickering across the squeaky floor. We were enthralled. The assembly I remember best happened when I was in sixth grade. After nearly six months of surreptitiously reading Holocaust novels during math class, the dreadful events finally came alive as my older brother’s classmates acted out the travesty right before our eyes. Rachel and Adam pretended to be a couple getting separated by a Nazi, played by David. Stacey was a little girl who couldn’t play with her best friend anymore, and Noah was an old man who got beaten and killed in the middle of the road. The soundtrack was a haunting chorus of humming the tune of “Legacy,” Sue Hampel’s classic Holocaust remembrance song that evokes gas chambers and unknown ancestors in the haunting demand of a murdered spirit. We all wept and eventually filed out past the candles with hands around waists and tears down our faces.

Throughout my Jewish day school education, the Holocaust was the most salient aspect of what being Jewish meant to me. Jewishness meant having grandparents who emigrated to the U.S. only after first moving through Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau. It meant having the glory of telling my classmates on Yom HaShoah that my grandparents were survivors, and later it meant feeling like I, too, had a story of struggle and tragedy in my family history.

My political evolution in college happened against the background of that savored oppression. Even after getting involved with my school’s Progressive Jewish Alliance, the most interesting thing about my Jewish identity was the genocide of two generations past — not religious practice and not my campus activism around the Israel/Palestine conflict. I knew a Jewish genocide was not going to happen in the U.S., so it wasn’t paranoia that drove me. Instead, it was an internalized sense of Jewish particularism in the world of oppression and a fervent desire to not lose my people’s victim status in a world where we are high and getting higher.

Though we learned much about Jewish oppression, we were not taught that such an era has largely passed. Had the annual Yom HaShoah assembly been combined with education about the Rwandan genocide, or about systemic discrimination in the U.S., or about the Israeli occupation, perhaps we would have understood that our privilege, affluence, and security as American Jews could enable our work for social justice. Had the leaders of my school, poised at the front lines of day school education, provided context and connection, perhaps our weeping in the hallway would have led us to raise our bejeweled fists to the air, ready to turn our attention toward the repair of the world.