I promised a full explanation of why Israel chose to
remember the victims of the Holocaust but I never got around to it and plenty
of other people did so why redo their work?
This is what the day looked like near my house:
The short story is that when Israel was established there
was a debate as to whether to remember the Holocaust on a traditional day of
mourning (as many ultra-orthodox do regardless of what the State does) or
another day. The decision was made to
honor the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as part of the larger effort to show that
Israel was a land of the “New Jew”.
Of course even that decision was political. In the first few years the only thing we knew about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came from just a couple of people. They were socialists and tried to hide the role of the right, which fit in well with the fight between Ben Gurion and Begin.
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