"NEVER AGAIN"

Jews are a people of memory. In the Ten Commandments they are commanded to "remember the Sabbath day." In the Bible they are told to remember the exodus from Egypt, as well as the Amalekites who attacked them as they wandered in the desert. Memory is the key to survival. Indeed, as the philosopher George Santanya so perceptively put it, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

That is why the Jews feel a special obligation today to add yet another commandment of "remember" to their liturgy. Remember the Holocaust - so that its millions of victims at least the gift of living in our memories. Remember the Holocaust - so that as the philosopher Emil Fackenheim has demanded, we do not give Hitler a posthumous victory by having us forget our past and our heritage. Remember the Holocaust - because, in the words of Elie Wiesel at the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993, "To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time. We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to be killed again."

from: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture," p. 268, by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, Alpha Books, New York, 1999

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