whoever saves one life saves the world entire....

Yom HaShoah...in April, sandwiched between days of wet snow and trees aching to bloom...this day begs remembrance...the time of oratory from survivors at libraries, community centers, school and temples is dwindling...the survivors aging out of a world so violent it begs their testimony...and Jews...our assimilation complete in so many ways...and then, once again, we are targeted, scapegoated...often enabled by complacency and reluctance...sin of omission or commission?...the irony that our children now study  abroad in cities where so many of our people were rounded up like cattle...their memory crushed under the wheels of putrid train cars teeming with our brothers and sisters...it is so much easier to forget...the pain of history is often soul crushing...for me it is not a choice...an option...it is a necessary mitzvah...for people I did not know...relatives reduced to a Yahrzeit candle...to affirm that the Holocaust is not just a paragraph skimmed in a text book...to memorize for question #42 on some ridiculous standardized test...it is a chapter from the dark history of my people...of all people...for the sorrow...the guilt...for looking at the ugliness that is man...we remember...for what was lost...we remember...but mostly, as Anne Frank said so eloquently, "look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness"...