Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the holocaust called by Jewish people?
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th-century Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes "The Holocaust". It may be spelled Ha-Shoah or HaShoah, as in Yom HaShoah, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day".
Some campaigns have been particularly controversial. Newkirk was criticized in 2003 for sending a letter to PLO leader Yasser Arafat asking him to keep animals out of the conflict, after a donkey was blown up during an attack in Jerusalem. The group's 2003 "Holocaust on your Plate" exhibition—eight panels juxtaposing images of Holocaust victims with animal carcasses and animals being transported to slaughter—was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, which said, "the effort by Peta to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent" and "[r]ather than deepen our revulsion against what the Nazis did to the Jews, the project will undermine the struggle to understand the Holocaust and to find a way to make sure such catastrophes never happen again." In July 2010, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that PETA's campaign was not protected by free speech laws and banned it within Germany as an offense against human dignity. The exhibit, however, had been funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist and created by Matt Prescott, who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Prescott said: "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible—that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior'—is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms." And analogies between animal rights and the Holocaust had been initiated by the prominent Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer. In 2005, the NAACP criticized the "Are Animals the New Slaves?" exhibit, which showed images of African-American slaves, Native Americans, child laborers, and women, alongside chained elephants and slaughtered cows.
Radio Islam denies the view of leading historians relating to the Holocaust, claiming that most of those who died were non-Jewish victims of typhus, and that many fewer people died than what mainstream scholars say. Their website claims that "[m]ost people in the West generally accept the last Jewish/Zionist claim about the so-called "holocaust" without any challenge as if it were a "divine truth". This holocaust hoax has been bought and sold by educated and uneducated Westerners alike, whether they are from the far right (such as Christian fundamentalists), or from the so-called "moderates", or even from the far left (such as socialists and communists)."
In 2006, BAV published a book affirming the Holocaust, called "The Holocaust Violence". "The Holocaust Violence" states "The Nazis subjected European Jews to indisputable and unforgivable cruelty during World War II. They humiliated, insulted and degraded millions of Jewish civilians, forcing them from their homes and enslaving them in concentration camps under inhuman conditions... Certainly the Jewish people, of whom 5.5 million died in concentration camps, were the worst victims of the Nazi barbarity."
Milgram's interest in the Holocaust had its basis in what his biographer, Professor Thomas Blass, referred to as Milgram's "lifelong identification with the Jewish people". Author Kirsten Fermaglich wrote that Milgram as an adult had "a personal conflict as a Jewish man who perceived himself both as an outsider, a victim of the Nazi destruction, and as an insider, as scientist". Alexandra stated that Milgram's Jewish identity led to his focus on the Holocaust and his obedience-to-authority research. He shared this as well with Herbert Winer, one of his obedience study subjects, who noted after speaking to Milgram about the experiment that "Milgram was very Jewish. I was Jewish. We talked about this. There was obviously a motive behind neutral research."
Irving Greenberg is a Modern Orthodox rabbi who has written extensively on how the Holocaust should affect Jewish theology. Greenberg has an Orthodox understanding of God, he does not believe that God forces people to follow Jewish law; rather he believes that Jewish law is God's will for the Jewish people, and that Jews should follow Jewish law as normative.
In 1943 the Nazis began brutal, inhumane actions against the historic Jewish population in Thessaloniki, forcing them into a ghetto near the railroad lines and beginning deportation to concentration and labor camps where they dehumanized their captives. They deported and exterminated approximately 96% of Thessaloniki's Jews of all ages during the Holocaust. The Thessaloniki Holocaust memorial in Eleftherias ("Freedom") Square was built in 1997 in memory of all the Jewish people from Thessaloniki, who died in the Holocaust. The site was chosen because it was the place where Jewish residents were rounded up before embarking to trains for concentration camps. Today, a community of around 1200 remains in the city. Communities of descendants of Thessaloniki Jews – both Sephardic and Romaniote – live in other areas, mainly the United States and Israel. Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker recorded a song about the Jewish people of Thessaloniki, called "Wait for me, Thessaloniki". Not only did the Jewish-Greek population of Thessaloniki perish during the Holocaust, but a unique civilization filled with rich culture and beauty was lost.
Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: … Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe." He also contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.[26] Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem, an Israeli state institution in Jerusalem established in 1953 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.[27] They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.[27] Nobel laureate and Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, does consider other groups, besides the Jews, as Holocaust victims, declaring to President Jimmy Carter, "Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims," when he asked his support for a national Holocaust museum in Washington.
In 2008, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors announced that, since church members had repeatedly violated previous agreements, it would no longer negotiate with the church to try to prevent vicarious baptism. Speaking on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Ernest Michel, a Holocaust survivor who reported on the Nuremberg Trials, speaking as the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, called on the LDS Church to "implement a mechanism to undo what [they] have done", and declared that the LDS Church had repeatedly violated their agreements, and that talks with Mormon leaders were now ended. Jewish groups, he said, would now turn to the court of public opinion for justice. Michel called the practice a revision of history that plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers, stating: "They tell me, that my parents' Jewishness has not been altered but ... 100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?"
Jon Stewart, former host of "The Daily Show", was repeatedly called a "self-hating Jew" by people whom he described as "fascistic". Considering the term to be like equating someone with the Jews who turned their backs on each other during the Holocaust, he said, "I have people that I lost in the Holocaust and I just … go fuck yourself. How dare you?" Stewart commented that the way his critics used the term—to define who is a Jew and who is not—was formerly always done by people who weren’t Jewish. He saw this as "more than nationalism". Stewart also criticized right-wing Jews for implying that they are the only ones who can decide what it means to be Jewish: "And you can’t observe (Judaism) in the way you want to observe. And I never thought that that would be coming from brethren. ... How dare they? That they only know the word of God and are the ones who are able to disseminate it. It's not right." To "The Hollywood Reporter", he said, "Look, there's a lot of reasons why I hate myself — being Jewish isn't one of them."
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, located in Battery Park City in Manhattan, New York City, is a memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust. The building, designed by Roche-Dinkeloo, is topped by a pyramid structure called the Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The museum opened in 1997. More than 1.5 million visitors from all over the world have visited the museum. The mission statement of the museum is "to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about the broad tapestry of Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries — before, during, and after the Holocaust."
At the beginning of the 1990s, Verbeke distributed pamphlets in the Netherlands to people with presumed Jewish names. In 1993, a Belgian court sentenced Verbeke to a one-year suspended prison term for distributing pamphlets belittling the Holocaust. Verbeke was also stripped of his civil rights for 10 years (his active and passive right to vote). The next year Verbeke circulated a booklet challenging what the authors called "the official version of the Holocaust."
Crimes during the Holocaust included physical crimes. In Ukraine, an estimated 400,000 Jewish people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. On average per day about 1,864 Jewish people died. Most of the people who were murdered during the Holocaust never had proper burials. Ukraine has over 750 mass graves where groups of five or more Jewish people were marched into mass pits and shot in the back. 5,000 Jews were marched from Ukraine into these pits. To save bullets children would be thrown into pits of fire to be burned alive.
Bauer believes that Hitler was the key figure who caused the Holocaust, and that at some point in the later half of 1941, he gave a series of orders which called for the genocide of the entire Jewish population. Bauer has pointed to the discovery of an entry in Himmler's notebook dated December 18, 1941 where Himmler wrote down the question "What to do with the Jews of Russia?". According to the same notebook, Hitler's response to the question was "Exterminate them as partisans." In Bauer's view, this is as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust. Bauer believes that, at about the same time, Hitler gave further verbal orders for the Holocaust, but unfortunately for historians, nobody bothered to write them down. What the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was formalized at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.
The remarks immediately provoked international controversy as well as swift condemnation from government officials in Israel, Europe, and the United States. All six political parties in the German parliament signed a joint resolution condemning this Holocaust denial. In contrast, Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal described Ahmadinejad's comments as "courageous" and stated, "Muslim people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their hearts, in particular the Palestinian people." In the United States, the Muslim Public Affairs Council condemned Ahmadinejad's remarks. In 2005 the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.
In 2007 Schumann premiered "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" in Boston and Burlington, Vermont. The series was inspired by ten days Schumann spent in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, as well as John Hersey's 'The Wall', a graphic account of the birth, development, and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany during the Jewish Holocaust. The series proved controversial, with critics labeling Schumann's works as "anti-Zionist", "anti-Semitic" and "soft-core Holocaust denial", accusations Schumann denied, stating that "I'm not saying that what's happening in Palestine is the same as what happened in Warsaw ... but it's certainly a reminder." While Schumann later acknowledged that he "may have unnecessarily hurt some people's feelings" with the series, he returned in 2008 to the theme of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in his subsequent art series, "The University of Majd: The Story of a Palestinian Youth", which addresses a case of false imprisonment in Israel.Peter Schumann has one daughter called Laura.
The memorial consists of two elements which symbolize the transition from darkness to light reflecting the Russian military victory to stop the Holocaust of the Jewish people, followed by the establishment of the Jewish state in Israel. The memorial is designed as a maze, in which key tragic events in the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust are depicted in reliefs.
Hertzberg challenged the wisdom of what he viewed as banking the future of Jewish continuity on the twin pillars of unquestioned support for Israel and the veneration of the Holocaust. Referring to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as "the national cathedral of American Jewry's Jewishness", Hertzberg questioned whether the memory of the Holocaust was sufficient to keep Jews "on the reservation." Citing demographic studies, he contended that the proliferation of courses on the Holocaust would not be sufficient to stop a large number of Jews from leaving the Jewish community.
The problem of evil gained renewed interest among Jewish scholars after the moral evil of the Holocaust. The all-powerful, all-compassionate, all-knowing monotheistic God presumably had the power to prevent the Holocaust, but he didn't. The Jewish thinkers have argued that either God did not care about the torture and suffering in the world He created—which means He is not omnibenevolent, or He did not know what was happening—which means He is not omniscient. The persecution of Jewish people was not a new phenomenon, and medieval Jewish thinkers had in abstract attempted to reconcile the logical version of the problem of evil. The Holocaust experience and other episodes of mass extermination such as the Gulag and the Killing Fields where millions of people experienced torture and died, however, brought into focus the visceral nature of the evidential version of the problem of evil.
The exhibition was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist, and created by Matt Prescott, who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Prescott said: "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' – is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms."
Greenberg's break with Orthodox theology comes with his analysis of the implications of the Holocaust. He writes that the worst thing that God could do to the Jewish people for failing to follow the law is Holocaust-level devastation, yet this has already occurred. Greenberg is not claiming that God did use the Holocaust to punish Jews; he is just saying that if God chose to do so, that would be the worst possible thing. There really is nothing worse that God could do. Therefore, since God cannot punish us any worse than what actually has happened, and since God does not force Jews to follow Jewish law, then we cannot claim that these laws are enforceable on us. Therefore, he argues that the covenant between God and the Jewish people is effectively broken and unenforceable.
For Jews in Nazi Germany, passing as "Aryan" or white and non-Jewish was a means of survival. There were three ways to avoid being shipped off to the death camps: run, hide or pass. No option was perfect, and all carried the risk of getting caught. People who could not run away but wanted to maintain a life without hiding attempted to pass as "aryan." People who were "visibly Jewish" could try to alter their appearance to become "aryan", while other Jewish people with more ambiguous features could pass into the "aryan" ideal more easily. In these attempts to pass as "aryan", Jewish people altered their appearance by dying their hair blonde and even attempting to reverse circumcisions. Edith Hahn Beer was Jewish and passed as "Aryan"; she survived the Holocaust by living with and marrying a Nazi officer. Hahn-Beer wrote a memoir called: "The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust". Another such example is Stella Kübler, a Jewish collaborator who initially attempted to hide her Jewish background.
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust has received criticism regarding the use of the word "holocaust" in their name. Although "Merriam-Webster Dictionary" defines "holocaust" as "a mass slaughter of people: a genocide", since the 1940s "the Holocaust" usually refers to the mass slaughter of Jews by Nazis during World War II. Fueling the controversy over their name, in 2013, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust held an anti-abortion demonstration at the New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum, and they demanded the museum include exhibits on abortion, offending local Jewish leaders. Rabbi Harry Ronsenfeld said, "It is offensive when someone co-opts what's yours". In defense of their use of the term, the Survivors said the number of abortions that take place in the United States qualifies it as a genocide.
In a rare view that has not been adopted by any sizable element of the Jewish or Christian community, Ignaz Maybaum has proposed that the Holocaust is the ultimate form of vicarious atonement. The Jewish people become in fact the "suffering servant" of Isaiah. The Jewish people suffer for the sins of the world. In his view: "In Auschwitz Jews suffered vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind."
Gershom is best known for having written several books on the topic of the Holocaust and reincarnation. "Beyond the Ashes" and "From Ashes to Healing" recount stories of people who claim to have died in the Holocaust and are now reincarnated, while "Jewish Tales of Reincarnation" deals with Jewish accounts of reincarnation, including a few from the Holocaust but mostly others from classical Jewish texts and oral tradition.