Last week, I wrote about names and lists — the agony of waiting for the identity of the first Israeli hostages to be released under the recent ceasefire deal. Not knowing whether they were even alive or dead.
And this week, the agony anew — with the just announced names of four female IDF soldiers to be returned from captivity tomorrow: Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy, and Liri Albag. As their families anticipate an extraordinarily joyous reunion, other families torturously await what comes next.
Waiting for these lists takes us back to the darkest chapter of modern Jewish history, when who lived or died could be determined by what name was on what list.
And let us not forget, when names were obliterated entirely, replaced by numbers tattooed on arms, the ultimate attempt to strip us of our humanity. To render us nameless.
On Monday, we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day — this year, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. With each passing year, we recognize that the Holocaust is shifting ever more closely from living memory to recorded history. And as we face a world with fewer eyewitnesses, our efforts must adapt to ensure the preservation of memory.
To that end, on both Wednesday and Thursday evening, I walked through the rooms of Anne Frank’s secret annex. Not in Amsterdam, but here in New York — in a meticulous re-creation made possible in part by our funding.
The urgent need for this experience grows clearer by the day. In 2020, a 50-state study of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Gen Z found enormous gaps. Just one example: Sixty-three percent of all respondents didn't know that 6 million Jews had been murdered. That was five years ago, and we know all that has happened since then to fuel denial and ignorance.
A goal for the organizers of Anne Frank The Exhibition is to reach 250,000 New York City public school students, confronting ignorance and hate through education. They also hope to reach another 500,000 students around the country through online resources, part of a curriculum that uses Anne’s story to contextualize antisemitism then and now.
The power of Anne’s story lies in her relatability. She was a young teenager, sad to leave her friends and school behind. She fought with her mother, admired movie stars, and was hungry to live life to its fullest. Nothing made her that different from any other teenager, except that she was persecuted for being Jewish.
Beyond the work of transmitting memory, we also have an obligation to care for the survivors still with us. Roughly 13,000 live in the New York area, and they are three times more likely to face poverty than other older adults.
One of my predecessors, the incomparable Ernie Michel, z”l, who served at the helm of the United Jewish Appeal from 1970 to 1989 and oversaw the merger that created UJA-Federation, was a survivor of Auschwitz.
In 2004, he helped UJA launch our Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors, which raises and distributes millions of additional dollars in funding to provide an array of life-enhancing services to survivors in Israel and New York. Over these years, the funds have provided food, benefits enrollment, legal services, emergency cash assistance, home health care, socialization, and so much more. Our most sacred responsibility.
Had Anne survived, she might have been 95 years old today. She might have had a family, children and grandchildren, a career as a writer. She might have lived her life in Amsterdam or resettled in New York or Israel. Instead, she died at the age of 15 in Bergen-Belsen, shortly before the camp was liberated.
And while lifting up Anne's story, we can never forget that she was but one of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, with far too many of their names lost to history.
Particularly in these fraught times, we must do all we can to ensure the world remembers — for those children, for our own children, and for future generations.
Shabbat shalom