“The first, the universal approach, negates the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a historical event that has no parallel, that happened to us, the members of the Jewish people.”
“This is a dangerous approach. It downplays the Shoah. It distorts history. It denies the program of systematic extermination that was aimed specifically at the Jewish people. It denies anti-Semitism, a malignant disease that is thousands of years old. It denies the right and the obligation of the Jewish people to a history of its own, and to a state of its own.”
“On the other hand, there is the second approach, whereby the Shoah becomes the lens through which we view the world. Here, the Shoah, and preventing it ever happening again, are all that is important.”
“This approach is dangerous to us both internally, and also dangerous externally. Internally, it obscures the richness of the Jewish existence of before the Shoah. Externally, this approach damages our ability to develop relations with the nations of the world and with our critics from a safe place, appropriate for dialogue.”
“But there is also a third approach, an approach that we can trust and that stands ready,” the president continued.
With this third approach, Rivlin said, Holocaust remembrance and the lessons to be learned are founded on three central pillars: self-defense, a shared destiny, and human rights.
“Man is beloved, every man, created in God’s image. This is a sacred obligation that the Jewish people cannot and does not wish to evade. At all times. In every situation. So too, we cannot remain silent in face of the horrors being committed far away from us, and certainly those happening just across the border,” he noted, referring to the Syrian civil war that is estimated to have cost over 300,000 lives. “Maintaining one’s humanity: this is the immense courage bequeathed to us by the victims – and by you, the survivors of the Shoah ”
Rivlin’s word’s stood in stark contrast to Netanyahu’s, whose main thrust was to blame the Allies’ failure to bomb the Nazi concentration camps from 1942, which he said cost the lives of four million Jews and millions of others.
Citing recently released UN documents that show the Allies were aware of the scale of the Holocaust in 1942, some two years earlier than previously assumed, Netanyahu said this new research assumed “a terrible significance.”
“If the powers in 1942 had acted against the death camps — and all that was needed was repeated bombing of the camps — had they acted then, they could have saved 4 million Jews and millions of other people.”
“The powers knew, and they did not act,” he told the audience to a national ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
In a bleak and bitter address, the Israeli prime minister said that the Holocaust was enabled by three factors: the vast hatred of the Jews, global indifference to the horrors, and “the terrible weakness of our people in the Diaspora.”
The six torch lighters at the ceremony were Moshe Ha-Elion, Moshe Jakubowitz, Jeannine Sebbane-Bouhanna, Moshe Porat, Max Privler, Elka Abramovitz.