Destruction and defiance

SHAUN ZAGNOEV

When the United Nations General Assembly voted to introduce International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date 27 January was chosen since it was on that day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. This year’s event is especially significant because it marks the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Our national president, Mary Kluk, and Gauteng Chairman Mark Pozniak will attend the commemoration in Poland as part of the World Jewish Congress delegation.

As in previous years, for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the World Jewish Congress is running a global #WeRemember campaign, in which people are asked to take a photograph of themselves holding a “We Remember” sign and either post it with #WeRemember or send it to weremember@wjc.org. I encourage everyone to join in this meaningful demonstration of Jewish solidarity and commemoration.

It’s not only in terms of our physical survival that the words am Yisrael chai resonate so powerfully. In a very different context, they were uppermost in my mind when last week, I joined about 1 200 fellow community members in celebrating the Daf Yomi Siyum Hashas. This was the 13th such celebration to be held since the institution of the Daf Yomi programme in 1923. From modest beginnings, the programme, in which Jews around the world together learn the entire Talmud at the rate of one page per day, has grown to become a worldwide phenomenon, both a potent vehicle for and a striking reflection of the extraordinary revival of Torah learning that we are seeing everywhere, not least in our own country.

All this is being accomplished in spite of the wholesale destruction of the yeshivot and other great centres of Jewish learning for which Eastern Europe was particularly renowned, initially at the hands of the Nazis and afterwards under Communism. It shows that those who wish us harm have not only failed to prevent the physical survival of the Jewish people, they have been unable to break the Jewish spirit. There is perhaps no more dramatic a demonstration of how the Nazis and everyone else who has sought our destruction have failed than this.