We aren’t witnessing the genocide of World WarII, but the utter destruction of kehillah life that was World WarI
After more than seven decades of peace, the blood-soaked continent that swore “Never Again” is at war again. Inevitably, Holocaust comparisons abound. Putin justifies his invasion by claiming that he needs to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Kyiv points to Russia’s shelling of Babi Yar as evidence that the Russians are in fact the fascists.
For Jews, the Holocaust conversation takes two forms. One impulse is to be moved by ordinary Ukrainians’ plight — remembering the anguish of our own grandparents as they fled from the German fiends.
A second strain questions whether today’s Ukrainians are all that distant from their own grandparents, many of whom “imbibed anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk,” in an oft-repeated phrase.
The very fact that this debate appears in almost identical form in both Hamodia and Ha’aretz is a sign that in a Jewish world split along religious-secular lines, our shared pain is a great unifier.
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