Holocaust Remembrance Day- a Unique Experience

This past week has been a unique week due to the fact that major holidays that have a huge impact to Israeli’s occur during this week. We started the week out in the north of Israel, in the Golan Heights. This trip was awesome! We started by going to a few Syrian bases from the wars and learned the in depth stories of the heroes of Israel, one being a great man named Eli Cohen. This was a man that risked his life for Israel. He made the decision to leave his family, friends and home to be a spy in the Syrian government. Him and the Mossad worked hard for months to protect Israel against untrusted borders such as Syria. He was the inside man. He located the bases for us, found out the plans they had to destroy us. But after all of this, working so hard, he was caught and hung and to this day we still have not received his body. This is a hero of Israel. He put the State of Israel in front of everything he knew because he believed in a true and free Jewish state. Another amazing experience that I had this week was Yom HaShoah.During this day, I reflected on the holocaust. I thought about just recently that chemical weapons were used on children in Syria and 20 of them were murdered. I thought about the 1.5 million children that were murdered in a similar way just 70 years earlier. During this day, a siren goes off throughout the entire nation. We were in the middle of the street; we were huddled together on the median, when the siren began. People got out of their cars and stood, leaning on their bumpers, staring at the sky. All around us, on the sidewalks and in the shop windows, they froze in place. No one moved and no one spoke. The lights kept changing, from green to yellow to red and back again, as if there were still cars that would follow their lead. Nothing changed, the wind kept blowing and the clouds kept moving. The weirdest part was when the siren began to sound. All of a sudden we were snatched out of ordinary life; we stood there, silent, as our lively corner of Hod HaSharon became a ghost town. The world progressed, but the human voices, the human activity, were gone. But the most unique part is when the siren ended. As the sound came to a close, I heard the car doors open and the engine start. The time was about the length of a breath. After the siren came to a close, I took a breath and everything carried on as normal as if nothing happened, as if the entire country just froze in time. We turned around, went back to class and continued our lesson. In Israel, the memory of the holocaust takes place in the stark silence, in the streets that don’t move, in the loudspeakers that sound aloud and stop the city.  Throughout the day, all radio and television programs this day are connected with the Jewish experiences of World War II, including personal interviews with survivors, movies about the Holocaust, and music appropriate for the solemnity of the day. We, as Jews, honor the dead by mourning, and we honor them by living. I encourage everyone when I am in America to recognize this day, even if you do the smallest actions, they are working to prevent genocidal atrocities while remembering the names of our Six Million.