The article “One Fate,” about the October 7 massacre, in which the author favorably contrasted the Nazi atrocities to the ones that happened on Simchas Torah, left me very disturbed.
I know that proximity bias makes the horror of an event recently and closely felt resonate with more trauma. And as someone with one degree of separation from multiple October 7 victims, hostages, and first responders, who has heard too many eyewitness accounts of the horrors, I understand how hard it is to put the breathtaking devastation into words that do not exist.
All that being said, I must protest that any sentence that begins with the words “Even the Nazis didn’t…” is wrong on the facts, usually catastrophically so. Whether it’s torture, humiliation, religious bigotry, degradation, or proud documentation of their crimes, the Nazis did it, and they did it in unimaginable numbers with malicious forethought. Any sentence that begins with the words, “The Nazis just tried to destroy Jewish bodies, but [insert villain] is trying to take our souls…” is likewise wrong and minimizes both the physical horror of the Holocaust and its intent and impact on the destruction of so many souls.
The Nazis were not more humane, less concerned with destroying Yiddishkeit, or in any way better than the enemies that have risen up against us in every generation. The Nazis were animalistically obsessed with the torture and humiliation of rabbanim, shochtim, and pregnant Jewish women. They burned shuls, with and without entire kehillos inside them. They banned any form of essential communal Jewish life in the early stages of the ever- growing cycle of hatred and genocide.
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