A few weeks ago A Night of Unity was held. It was a gathering of over three hundred local residents at the Chai Center in Dix Hills in response to a recent anti-semitic incident involving Commack HS students.
The students were found on Social Media adorned in red shirts with Swastikas on them with the words, hit the showers, and Auschwitz. The photo indicated that the students were also engaged in a game of beer pong (under-age drinking).
Most cringed at this news and said how? How could that happen here on Long Island in 2015? Commack has had strong Jewish roots for years as has neighboring Kings Park with the second oldest synagogue on Long Island. How could it happen to a generation, the millennial’s as they are called, that are so media savvy, a generation residing in the INFORMATION AGE?
A Night of Unity addressed all these issues. “We need to make sure that West Suffolk County is free of bigotry and…the beacon of light for the rest of the Island and beyond,” said Rabbi Yackov Saacks in the April 23rd article. The Rabbi said he spoke to the parents of the teens who were wearing those anti-Semitic t-shirts and they were aghast that their children had participated in such an ignorant display. The Rabbi shared that the parents were heartbroken.
So what’s the problem, has the Holocaust been, like the six millions Jews murdered, erased from history? Is the Holocaust no longer taught in schools? Did these kids understand what they were really doing? Many critics of the incident say it’s all disturbing but the words hit the showers somehow really affected the hearts of Jews and non-Jews alike. It does indeed show that the students understand what happened in one of the notorious and largest genocides in recorded history. Besides the six million Jews who were murdered another five million non-Jews were murdered (sympathizers, mentally and physically disabled etc). The Holocaust took approximately eleven-million lives in four short years.
We said never again – everyone said never again. After the full atrocities of the Holocaust were completely unveiled, long after Hitler took his life, the world was in shock, it was unfathomable. It is still unfathomable to me at age fifty. I have interviewed and worked with victims of the Holocaust. I have had neighbors who escaped the camps and friends parents as well. Some bore the numbers tattooed into their hands or arms. I have always been horrified by the Holocaust and bewildered as to how it was allowed to happen, how no one else in the world stepped in. To this day I am haunted by it – however, I read countless books on it and watch every movie I can covering the complexity of it. This week I saw The Woman in Gold – a provocative true story of the Billions of dollars of artwork, jewelry, musical instruments and artifacts stolen by the Nazi’s. It’s the story of one women’s attempt to retrieve her families artwork from Austria.
According to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning sacrifice by fire. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed inferior, were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community”.
They also say that historically whenever Antisemitism arises or is allowed, the persecution of others has not been far behind. Many say we are seeing this in Europe now, particularly in France where many Jew have recently fled because of the anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The Museum states that the phraseology genocide was non-existent prior to 1944. Very specific, it refers to violent crimes against a group with the full intention of eradicating that group.
There is so much to be seen and read at the nation’s Holocaust Museum, one such thing is the story of Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959). It is said he came up with the word genocide – he wanted to give a name to what the Nazi did to the jews in systematically and brutally killing six million of them. He formed the word genocide by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing.
GENOCIDE
On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes genocide as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnically, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The specific “intent to destroy” particular groups is unique to genocide. A closely related category of international law, crimes against humanity, is defined as widespread or systematic attacks against civilians.
While many cases of group-targeted violence have occurred throughout history and even since the convention came into effect, the legal and international development of the term genocide is concentrated into two distinct historical periods: the time from its coining until its acceptance as international law (1944–48) and the time of its activation with the establishment of international criminal tribunals to prosecute persons responsible for committing it (1991–98). Preventing genocide, the other major obligation of the convention, remains a challenge that nations and individuals continue to face.
THE SWASTIKA
Prior to Natzi German, the Swastika had no negative connotation whatsoever. For over five-thousand years it was really quite the opposite. According the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the word itself emanates from the Sanskrit svastika, which means good luck or well-being.
The motif is a hooked cross and is said to be used as far back as Neolithic Eurasia representing the movement of the sun through the sky. It was used in an astrological manner. To this very day it is a sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Odinism (all religions). Common on temples in India or Indonesia, the Swastika has an ancient history in Europe as well and appears on pre-Christian artifacts.
All was good with the Swastika until 1920 when the Nazi Party adopted it as its official symbol. It was at this time it became associated with being or suggesting that a racially pure state was the ultimate goal. The Swastika at this time forever changed. “I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form, a flag with a red background, a white disk and a black swastika,” said Hitler during his early reign.
A recognized icon and representation of Nazi-ism, it brought absolute terror for European Jews, the swastika changed the face of the world and history. The swastika meant death to millions not because they committed crimes but because of their religious beliefs. It represents WWII and it represents hatred.
The Swastika is like the “N” word, people understand the profanity and most decent people have disdain for it and the fear it ignites. Maybe Commack students’ needs to go on a field trip – maybe every child in America should take a field trip to their nearest Holocaust Museum.
Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County
Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Living Memorial to the Holocaust