Arutz Sheva-Israel National News and the Gesher Leadership Institute, in collaboration with the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Ami, teamed up to create a new video series titled "Jewish-Share" an initiative aimed at helping Israelis connect with their fellow Jews in the Diaspora.
In this episode, Orli Barnett from the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre talks with Yad Vashem's Shani Farhi Lourie on differences in instilling memory and lessons from the Holocaust between Israel and the Diaspora.
"Yom HaShoah is a very important date on the South African Jewish community’s calendar," says Barnett. "We feel deeply connected to Jews worldwide as we commemorate not only the Holocaust but also major anniversaries, such as the 82nd year since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and 80 years since the end of World War II and the liberation of the camps in Europe. So we feel that it is a very important day for us this year."
“In previous years,” Barnett explains, “we’ve connected Yom Hashoah with other important dates, for example last year we highlighted that it was eighty years since the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes, as well as the Jews of Hungary towards the end of World War II. In this respect we usually connect to our living survivors in the South African Jewish community and connect to survivors who come from these regions.”
Farhi Lourie says that, “today there is a platform for having meaningful discussions about the Holocaust. It's not as if we are introducing a new concept. I think it's true for every Jew in the world, everybody knows about the Holocaust. But the question is when do we have an opportunity to actually stop our routine life and give a deeper thought or in-depth conversation and discussion about the meaning of the Holocaust for us today, not only remembering what happened in the past but, also as we have just celebrated Pesach, also about Jewish identity, commemoration and remembrance.”
“Remembrance,” she emphasizes, “is always about intensive meaningful discussion between the past, the present and the future. Yom Hashoah is an opportunity for people to stop and discuss the meaning of the Holocaust. So we have a lot of very meaningful days for army staff, starting from privates and the chief of staff was at Yad Vashem this week. It's not just a ceremony, every year we have a whole discussion on different topics. We have schools and educators who come from Israel and abroad asking for tools for educational materials, so they can have a meaningful discussion with their students and staff about the Holocaust.”
Farhi Lourie continues to say that, “every year we try and bring a new angle that's relevant, whether it's eighty years since the end of the war, or how people return to life after the Holocaust. How do they rebuild themselves. We take it for granted that since the Holocaust is over and people have been liberated, they have returned to life, they built families. But it's not so obvious so there's a lot of meaning behind what it means to me in today's world, as a person living here in Israel, as a Jew. What does it mean that these people had the inner power, not just a physical power to not just crawl in a corner, but also to being part of a community again and contributing to the community, to the establishment of the state of Israel. We focus on light in the darkness. The Holocaust was a lot of darkness, there were some sparks of light that we find when we talk about the Holocaust. They bring a lot of meaning, because commemoration is not just about being sad. Commemoration and remembrance is about looking forward and saying "What do I take from the past and bring it into my present to build a better future for ourselves as a nation."
Barnett adds that “one of the greatest challenges in teaching about the Holocaust today remains the fact that we are less and less able to meet survivors in person to tell us their eyewitness testimony, making it harder for learners to connect to the history. Here in South Africa we really are at the tip of Africa and for a lot of our students this history is ancient history. They find it hard to believe that people are still alive in the world who lived at this time and when we tell them and share with them that there are people alive from this time they are quite shocked. They see it as something that happened on a different continent to people who are different to them, who look different, who speak differently, who have a different religion and sometimes that is a very difficult connection to make.”
She explains that, “Our South African national curriculum is focused on the history of Africa and South Africa, so the question is often why do we need to learn about the Holocaust. We are privileged and very fortunate that the Holocaust forms part of the South African mandated history curriculum particularly for our grade nine students, that's 14 to 15 year olds. This gives us an opportunity at the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre to host school groups on an almost daily basis, most of whom are not Jewish. We do have Jewish day schools here in Cape Town, but of course they don't come every day. So we have an opportunity to reach out and educate learners and students far beyond the Jewish community, which I see as a great privilege to teach them not only about what happened during the Holocaust, but who are Jewish people, who were they before they became victims. I know that Yad Vashem also has a big focus on Jewish life before the Holocaust, as well as rebuilding after the Holocaust.”
Barnett continues, “One of the things that we do here in South Africa is we incorporate our own dark past, our own challenging and difficult history of the Apartheid, which was an almost fifty-year racial regime, which ended in 1994. We are currently commemorating thirty years of democracy in our country. Sometimes we use the Holocaust as a lens to talk about how our own country endured discrimination and racism and how it was so divisive instead of unifying people in one country and how racism was left unchecked. Of course these are two vastly different histories, which we don't ever compare, but sometimes it helps our students to reflect on how they are now living in the shadow or the legacy of a racial state and how they too are affected by racism and need to work on how they build the society that they would like to live in in the future and what kind of behavior they accepted in that society, what kind of people they'd like to be, in terms of being tolerant, celebrating differences, honoring the fact that we come from different, backgrounds, different heritage, and how they would like to bring respect and communication and lack of diversity, but rather unification into our community here.”
Farhi Lourie believes that there is no doubt that, “October 7th triggers Holocaust remembrance, in other words many events that happened or have similarity to scenes from the Holocaust. Nevertheless it's very different. The fact that something triggers a memory or triggers an understanding doesn't mean it's the same. It's not the same thing on many levels but the differences don't make October 7th less of a horrifying event. The Holocaust was horrifying and there were other horrifying events during our history, but I think that it may be too early to talk about commemorating October 7th, because the events are still taking place. It's not over yet. In order to think of commemoration and remembrance you need somewhat of a perspective. You can’t know what you want to commemorate, what needs to be remembered immediately after it happened. Even the Holocaust took some years till the commemoration as we know it today was formed.”
“On the other hand,” she adds, “AI is a big challenge for us, because it's a great tool, but it creates a lot of distortion, misconceptions and misunderstandings of the Holocaust. So we have a lot of challenges in education, because fewer and fewer people are hearing the stories first hand.”
Farhi Lourie adds that, “The fact that Israel went through such a horrific event life-changing event as a nation, not just Israel but the Jewish people in the world also, the triggering of the Holocaust just makes it even more questionable or more powerful in a way, even though it's not the same kind of event. So for people personally thinking that this clicks a memory, makes it even more unbearable. The fact that a mother had to hide in an attic, yes it is unbearable that an event like that can happen in today's world, but it's not the same as the Holocaust.”
“The fact that it's not the same doesn't undermine October 7th,” she states. “The magnitude of the Holocaust, the extent of it, the length of time, the fact that we didn't have a country, the fact that we did not have an army, there are so many ultimate differences that it can't be the same thing. Nevertheless it's still pretty horrific, and we can still draw meaning from the Holocaust to understand things. It's not that recovering or rebuilding ourselves after October 7th is the same as the Holocaust, it's not, but the idea that after such a tragic event people had the inner power and the will and the understanding to be part of this nation, that's a meaning that we can take into the circumstances or the struggle we have in today's day, because we look back and we say who are.”
“We talk a lot about the fact that as Jewish people we’re a link in a chain of generations. If you look at the Holocaust and one of my previous roles in Yad Vashem was being in charge of the Diaspora Department, working with Jewish educators around the world, one of the things I used to emphasize to educators if our Jewish identity is going to be only about how horrible the Holocaust was and we're part of a generation that was haunted in the Holocaust, that had no rights to live then, that doesn't promote a positive connection to Jewish identity. But if I say I'm part of a nation, I'm a link in a chain of generations, where people were committed to their identity, where even in the darkest of darkest times people wanted to be Jewish, they found inner power, they found strength, they were proud to be Jewish. They maintained their Jewish identity in the darkest times, then that has a positive meaning,” she adds.
“I want to be connected to that,” says Farhi Lourie with hope. “I don't want to be connected to a haunted, hated nation. It's not that we really have a choice, but I'm saying if you if you talk about education, education about is about a positive outlook at the world, a positive outlook at your identity. How do we promote that; when looking at October 7th, I'm saying let's look at the Holocaust and say what power, what strength, what meaning can we find in the Holocaust that will help us cope with this difficult situation that we're living through right now.”
Barnett says that, “the attempts to connect between Israel and the Diaspora is something that might be evolving over time. Israel has always played a very, very significant role in South African jury. Zionism has been a pivotal pillar of so many of our youth movements, our community centers, our synagogues, our Jewish day schools and so we actually learn about Israel, Israeli culture and Jewish history, even up to biblical history, from a very young age. We learn Hebrew and we learn the songs and we all feel very, very connected to the State of Israel, even though some of us have never been there. I've had the privilege of living in Israel and I was surprised to find out, that of course Israelis don't know so much about our communities, because it's not part of their Jewish education to learn about Diaspora communities, for example in South Africa.”
“Of course there's also a connection between Israelis who've moved to South Africa and South Africans who moved to Israel and made aliyah and contributed to the growing of the country, so I think that there is a lot to talk about and a lot to connect on. I think that we both have very beautiful and diverse countries with a lot of multiculturalism, a lot of difficult history, a lot of rebuilding, a lot of focus on human rights, on free speech and on freedom of religion. These are all things that we can connect on. I think it's important that even in these very difficult times Israelis know that they are supported by Jewish Diaspora communities around the world and in fact here in South Africa we have a lot of communities who are not Jewish who are also supporting the State of Israel,” she add.
“Despite all the politics, despite all the government elections and factions and so on, we remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting the Jewish people of Israel and Israelis and Jews around the world. Of course we invite Jews and Israelis alike to come and visit us here on the tip of Africa, where we also have a synagogue, a Jewish history museum, kosher restaurants and we hope to forge further community connections in the future,” she concluded.