I cannot sleep. One thought passes throughout the night. I, a second generation survivor, am only a few years younger than the youngest Holocaust survivors. Who will be the voices of the Holocaust when we are gone? Some answer that it will be our children and grandchildren. Wish it were so.
I believe we second generation survivors have the strongest attachment to the survivors and that after we are gone all the museums, books, and movies will not stop the Holocaust from just becoming a date in history, another tragedy. It hurts me to say so. I have spent my life writing Holocaust books, curriculae, articles and teaching Holocaust studies, but soon the survivors and the their children,will be gone, and the revisionists will go to work with vigor.
It is already happening today. Most museums generalize the Holocaust to deal with human rights instead of concentrating on what led to the unspeakable horrors inflicted on six million Jews in an attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish people and what that actually entailed.
What is the solution to safeguard Holocaust memory? The Shoah must be incorporated into religious ritual. It should be part of the Haggadah, the machzor, High Holiday and other Jewish holidays.
I have redesigned the website for The Rosenberg Holocaust Haggadah and a Holocaust Siddur, a prayerbook . This updated site, at https://holocausthaggadah.com/, offers a clearer layout, improved navigation, and easier access to the rich content and resources that celebrate and preserve this work.
The essence of this project is simple yet profound: to make these contributions more accessible to people around the world - whether they are scholars, students, families, or anyone called on to reflect on memory, tradition, and resilience. It is free on the internet.
The Shoah should be part of the Tisha B’Av service and other fast days.
Perhaps the Shoah should be a day of fasting with the lighting of six candles and reciting Kel Moleh Rachamim and Kaddish, and special Holocaust orientated prayers. I ask that no one be upset at me for predicting the future observance of the Shoah, but this is what I truly believe.
Evil and unwarranted hatred are a reality that exists in our world. The human being has an infinite capacity for evil that, left unchecked, can destroy the world.
The Torah itself tells us that the “impulse of man’s heart is evil from his youth" (Gen 8:21). Man is not born good. He has to become good - by forging his character, by bending his baser instincts, by learning that there is another beside him and an Other above him.
The Holocaust shows what can become of human beings when they permit the beast within them to control them.
It teaches us that we must be alert to the existence of evil, both in others and in our own selves. Once we are aware of its reality, we can work to uproot it. The mitzvot of the Torah are designed to help the spiritual qualities within us dominate the beast within.
Further, we learn from this tragedy that to be silent in the face of evil is to acquiesce in it, encourage it, and help it grow strong. History teaches us that evil triumphs when good people remain silent. But when good people rise up against evil, evil will ultimately perish and the good will prevail.
And that is why I have written the followiing:
To counter contemporary antisemitism effectively, it is necessary to rethink how it is framed in public discourse. We should learn from the rhetorical strategies used by Islamist extremists, who successfully rebrand terrorists as oppressed, starving, dispossessed “freedom fighters." Language shapes perception, and reframing works.
Rather than labeling figures such as Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, or Candace Owens merely as antisemites, it is both more accurate and more effective to describe their rhetoric as anti-Jewish racism, or simply racism. In today’s vernacular, “racist" carries exceptional moral weight and is most commonly associated with hostility toward African Americans. This association persists despite the fact that African Americans are not a biological race and, in fact, exhibit some of the highest genetic diversity of any human population.
What matters, however, is not biological precision but how prejudice functions. White supremacists like David Duke do not concern themselves with genetic nuance; they indiscriminately lump people together and disparage them as groups based on distorted and prejudiced perceptions. Jews are treated in precisely the same way-collectively stereotyped, scapegoated, and dehumanized.
Antisemitism is racism: hostility toward Jews as a group, rooted in conspiracy thinking, essentialism, and collective blame. Naming it as such clarifies the harm.
I watched a movie, The Survivor, based on the life of a boxer who survived the Holocaust. The message I want to share with you is that no one except a survivor can understand the horrors they experienced and no one should judge them. They experienced hell and came back to build a life for themselves and their families. We 2g's may think we understood our survivor parents but in reality, did we - and for the fortunate whose parents are alive, do we?
What do I really know? I know that if the Holocaust happened once, it could happen again. The Jewish idiots who voted for Mamdani in New York should look around the world and see how well socialism is doing in other countries, and watch carefully how he makes antisemitism acceptable. We need to wake up and realize words will not destroy antisemitism, only real action. We must offer self-defense courses in our Yeshivot and teach congregants how to safeguard their synagogues. .
WE NEED A STRONG NATIONAL JEWSIH DEFENSE ORGANIZATION NOW.
For this to happen we need wealthy people to support such an organization and to hire competent leadership.
Why did the Holocaust happen? The answer is and was because most of the world hates we Jews and Israel. We have allowed professors on college campuses to poison the minds of our children and grandchildren. Maybe years ago, there was less antisemitism expressed because of the proximity to the Shoah, the Holocaust, but no more.
Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg is Associate Editor of the New Jersay State Holocaust Curriculum. He appears frequently on radio and TV and has published hundreds of articles regarding the Holocaust. Rabbi Rosenberg published The Rosenberg Holocaust Siddur, in memory of his parents Jacob and Rachel Rosenberg.