THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

over Nazi Germany will also be the day of victory of the shared identity over thedivisive religious law.The third day to commemorate the Shoah will be on the Ninth of Av, the date onwhich both our temples were ruined. This day will be a time for our own privatememorial, a family gathering, ours alone. It will be another link in the sequence ofevents of ruins that visited our people. Shoah is actually a new name for thetraditional term of Ruin. The Zionist indoctrinization system considered it veryimportant to open a new page of Jewish history and therefore called this ruin by thename Shoah. One purpose, among others, was to dissociate it from the Jewishhistorical continuum, to make it unique and to separate us from all that MotherJudaism had known until then. It is time then to restore the trauma to its natural placein the Jewish and Israeli calendar. Therefore the third day of Shoah commemorationwill be marked late in the Jewish year, on the traditional Av Ninth. This way theShoah and its lesson will not be alien events in Jewish and human cultural history. TheShoah will return to its traditional name: Hurban, one ruin among many. Indeed it wasa colossal ruin, greater than all that we had known, but still ruin. Only thus we will beable to harness the tools of memory in the Jewish experience, as unfortunately rich asit is in these matters.There are many explanations why Av Ninth is not a very meaningful date in theIsraeli calendar. Some argue that we are busy building and therefore have no time tocommemorate ruins; others say that it is not appealing, since the date markssomething so ancient it is irrelevant to a people who live devoutly and compulsively inthe present. Everyone agrees that redemption is in and exile is out.Av Ninth, usually in July or August, is in the middle of the long summer break. Noschool, no homework. From kindergarten until military service, no one reminds us ofthis day. We are on the beach, vacationing from Jewish history. If five generations ofIsraelis have not studied Av Ninth and its lessons, it’s no wonder that this day ofmourning and fasting has become an unknown “holiday.”There will be no choice but to restructure the vacation calendar and to bring theIsraeli students back to school to start the battle of memory and awareness. Thesummer trimester will be devoted to consciousness and remembrance. It is difficult toimagine much enthusiasm from the students for this enterprise—they will have to hearabout the ruin instead of summertime play and trips—so we will have to be creative.