Rabbi Mayerfeld: Why we must remember the Holocaust

What does a protest against evil really look like? Eighty-one years ago this week, 7,000 desperate, starving, and poorly equipped Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against their Nazi captors. For 27 days, through sheer willpower and determination, they fought against the Germans. With massive manpower and firepower, the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground and killed all but a handful of fighters.

This past Sunday, The Zekelman Holocaust Center held its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration, marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Local Holocaust survivors, including some nearing and past 100 years of age, lit memorial candles for the dead. Their families stood beside them, like the branches of a tree that cannot be cut down. They vowed once again to remember the six million Jews who perished due to systematic, state-sponsored murder, at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

But why must we, outsiders to the community of survivors, also remember the Holocaust? And what exactly should we remember? The short answer is human Free Will. Between 1933 and 1945, ordinary people, like you and like me, chose to perpetuate violence against their Jewish neighbors, alongside many who chose to stand by and do nothing, or, in rare instances, a few who chose to resist and help Jews.

In our museum’s newly renovated permanent exhibit, we narrow the distance between what seems long ago and today. Visitors immerse themselves in soundscapes, artifacts and wartime footage, and watch, read and hear recorded testimonies, primarily from local survivors who made Michigan their home after World War II. We meet local residents like Ina Silbergleit, a Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor whose father and brother were shot, and who spent time hidden with her mother thanks to the kindness of a stranger.

Ina later immigrated to the United States and built a life with her husband in Detroit. She was among more than 4,000 survivors who settled here, who helped shape our communities, and who count tens of thousands of descendants whose very existence is the strongest possible rebuke to Nazi evils. With wisdom borne of their experiences, survivors and their children-built businesses, became educators, healed the sick, and on Orchard Lake Road, erected a lasting Holocaust memorial to the victims.

Their stories paint in vivid relief the scale and scope of the Holocaust, and as such they serve as cautionary warnings. They challenge us to be alert to and aware of the dangers of depravity, apathy, ignorance and antisemitism lurking in our midst, or outright roiling our college campuses and international courts.

Facile comparisons to unrelated current events obscure, rather than illuminate, the challenges we face. It is said, “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” If we do not heed the lessons of the Holocaust and conduct ourselves responsibly in society, at home, at school and in the workplace, it is entirely possible for the familiar to reoccur. As the Passover holiday that just ended instructs us, we are to see ourselves in every generation as having experienced what our ancestors endured. The events that turned Europe into a mass graveyard for the Jewish people can happen in any generation.

If we do not fight against the malevolence of hatred and antisemitism, we all face the dismal prospect of finding ourselves where the Jews were in the 1930s, increasingly isolated and abandoned.

The antidote is to educate ourselves about the dangers of indifference and to prevent the precursors to violence. We must all learn the lessons of the Holocaust and choose to behave ethically to ensure that good prevails and conquers evil. This is the kind of protest we should all join. The time to act is now.

Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld is CEO of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills.