The first reaction was of anger when hareidim affixed the yellow stars to their jackets to protest against secular incitement.

It was a trivialization, since Beit Shemesh is not Birkenau and the Holocaust is too precious to be used in such a way.

But recent episodes of Jewish history suggest that Jews are allowed to use the Shoah symbol to protest against horrible anti-Semitism.

In 1985 the French policemen hustled a Jewish war veteran from the scene of a wreath-laying at the Arc de Triomphe by then Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The man was wearing a yellow Star of David around his neck to denounce the Soviet oppression of the Jewish people.

Led by Vladimir Slepak, the "Prisoners of Zion" - men and women who spent years languishing in Soviet prisons and labor camps - also used the yellow star to promote an international campaign against Soviet slavery.

In 1976 Soviet police arrested 25 Moscow Jews who demonstrated in a building of the Supreme Soviet to demand an explanation of why their visa applications had been consistently rejected. The Jewish marchers were all wearing large yellow stars.

In 1989 a US hero, Rabbi Avi Weiss, protested in Auschwitz against the Catholic decision to build a convent in the death camp. The cloister, founded five years earlier, was a few feet from the barbed wire fence and Nazi guard towers. It also had a 23-foot wooden cross in the middle. Some Jewish protesters were dressed in concentration camp garb, wearing arm bands with yellow Stars of David. Weiss scaled the walls of the convent and blew a shofar. Polish workmen at the site poured paint and water on the Jewish protesters and physically removed them from the site.

That Vatican convent was the beginning of a global attempt to de-Judaize the Shoah. 

“How dare you throw water at a rabbi or any Jew here at Auschwitz! Shame, shame, shame on you!”, Weiss shouted at the smirking workmen.

The convent was a desecration of the Jews’ memory. Weiss was right to respond by wearing the yellow star. In the anti-Israel magazine The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma accused Rav Weiss of “degrading the memory of all those who died at Auschwitz”.

It’s the same argument used against the hareidim.

During the Second Intifada, when the Jews of Judea and Samaria endured hundreds of deaths and sudden massacres of families, infants and unborn babies, some of them staged demonstrations in Jerusalem wearing the yellow star. They got it right, since Shoah is a word that, to me at least, links the generation of the Holocaust to the Israelis being killed today in their homeland. I

n 2005, Jewish “settlers” from Gush Katif also used orange stars to protest against then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to uproot their beautiful communities.

The Jews have the right to use their tragic symbol because the guardians of memory are now more than ever using the Shoah against the Jewish people. Israel-hatred is devouring the minds of the same intellectual elite which is today protesting against the use of the yellow star

Today, Holocaust memorials dot the Western landscape, dozens of Holocaust “artifacts” have been developed by museum planners, schools regularly use the Holocaust to teach tolerance, Hollywood directors make Holocaust movies for popular entertainment and the usual cast of characters treks from one Holocaust “event” to another.

Through books, museums, memorials and cinema the Shoah has become the global metaphor of victimization, invoked by everyone from African-American activists (who define slavery as the “real holocaust”) to vegetarians talking about a “chicken holocaust” and by homosexual activists referring to AIDS as a “gay holocaust”.

Nobody ever protests against this horrible manipulation.

When Yasser Arafat visited the Anne Frank Museum in 1998 and the genocidal leader used the event to raise the attention on the “Palestinian Holocaust”, the Dutch Jews stood silent.

In 2002 pro-Palestinian militants, dressed in makeshift uniforms and a Star of David pasted on their helmets, protested against Israel outside its Los Angeles’ consulate. Again, nobody denounced the use of that sad symbol with the same fury used against the hareidim.

The public is now completely desensitized to the unique catastrophe that was the destruction of European Jewry. The memory gets muddled, the facts become factoids and then falsified. The result is that the Shoah is daily used against the State of Israel, the living inheritance of the Shoah survivors and their descendants.

Never before has knowledge of the Holocaust been disseminated all over the West as it is today. Amazon stocks hundreds of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust-related volumes are weighing down library shelves. Holocaust curricula are mandated in universities and schools; type the word “Holocaust” on Google and you’ll get about 26 million hits.

But we’ve made a mockery of memory and all our staid vigilance of the dead Jews is rendering all of us indifferent to the genocidal violence against the living Jews.

Next time that Iran’s Ahmadinejad threatens to burn half of Israel or calls the Jews “cancer” and “microbes”, non-Jews should wear the yellow star in sign of solidarity.

It’s the best way to honor the memory of the Holocaust and because today all the Jews in the world are wearing an invisibile yellow star once again.

As history has taught us, while it begins with Jews, it does not end with Jews.