(RNS) — The scene will grip you, and it will be hard to forget.
Israeli soldiers sang the song “Ani Maamin” as they recovered the body of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, the last hostage, from a cemetery in Gaza. “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming,” they sang, as captured on video.
Those were the same words that victims of the Holocaust sang as they went to the gas chambers. The historic resonances are clear and painful.
We would have liked Jewish history to have stayed in the past where it belongs, but it does not. Rather, it walks with us into the present, sits down next to us and will not let us ignore it.
Today (Jan. 27), on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, that collision of griefs feels especially sharp. We are mourning the dead of this moment while remembering the dead of another abyss. Different horrors, same human capacity for cruelty. Same Jewish insistence on memory.
When I was a congregational rabbi, occasionally someone would ask me why the Jewish (and world) calendar has three days of Holocaust remembrance: Kristallnacht, Yom Hashoah and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My answer was because we need all three, as each day holds a different facet of the story.
A woman sits for a moment Monday, Jan. 26, 2026, in Tel Aviv, Israel, alongside photos of Ran Gvili, who was killed while fighting Hamas militants during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and whose remains had been held in Gaza until their return Monday. The recovery of his remains prompted the display of photos in a plaza known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
Kristallnacht teaches us what happens when hatred stops whispering and starts smashing. On Nov. 9-10, 1938, in Germany and Austria, Nazi thugs burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes and desecrated Torah scrolls. Children gleefully participated. They beat Jews in the streets while neighbors watched or joined in.
Kristallnacht served as a public announcement that we have now normalized cruelty. It warns us how quickly a society can descend when it channels its ugliest instincts into the language of patriotism, grievance or “law and order.”
Yom Hashoah teaches a different lesson. It commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising — a revolt that was militarily doomed and morally eternal. Starving Jews, facing a ruthless army, chose resistance. They did not fight because they thought they would win. They fought to assert that even in a world collapsing into barbarism, Jews still possessed agency and dignity. They would not go like sheep to the slaughter.
And then there is today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, so designated by the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 1, 2005. The world’s community needs this commemoration because on this day 81 years ago, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, and the commemoration therefore marks the European participation in liberation.
More than that, though, as Holocaust denial goes mainstream in our culture and as Holocaust education diminishes, it is even that more crucial. As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in The Free Press:
The Daily Mail recently reported that the number of schools teaching Holocaust history in the UK has halved since October 7, 2023 …
The traditional denial of the Holocaust, by people who insist it didn’t happen but rather wish it had, is no longer a strange monstrosity incubated in the dank laboratories of neo-Nazis and cranks. Instead, in traditional denial and ideological distortion, they have been joined by a new alliance that involves what used to be called “radical” or “progressive” and a conservative Islamism, along with Western “anticolonial” supporters of organizations like Hamas and states like the Iranian dictatorship …
This tribal indulgence has made it easier for people with malign agendas to minimize or distort the Holocaust for their own ends. Even worse, many Western universities, media, nongovernmental organizations, and charities have abetted the distortion, erasure, or commandeering of the Holocaust.
But, beyond speaking up for truth, this day forces us to ask: How could civilized people stand by, say nothing and do nothing? How did humanity let things get this far? And what would we do differently now?
Which brings us to Minnesota today.
When we hear reports about aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in places like Minneapolis, and enforcement actions leading to the deaths of civilians, we are not in the realm of abstract policy. We are in the realm of moral temperature-taking. We are asking: How does power treat the vulnerable? How easily do we grow numb when suffering happens to “other” people?
Let me be clear that I am deeply wary of cheap Holocaust comparisons. Not every injustice is Nazism. Not every political opponent is Hitler. That kind of rhetoric dishonors history. But history does offer patterns. Totalitarianism – and yes, fascism – happens slowly. Attach fear to policy, normalize dehumanizing language, encourage people to simply go along to get along, and there you have it.
What protects America from going the way of Germany in the 1930s? Germany did not have thousands of people protesting in the streets. America does.
Jews are in a battle against amnesia. With every passing year, more Holocaust survivors die. Soon, there will be no living witnesses. Memory will depend entirely on us — and, as the philosopher Moshe Halbertal taught, memory is not nostalgia. It always commands the remember-er to act.
So yes, we need all three days — Kristallnacht to remember how hatred escalates and to train ourselves to notice early warning signs; Yom Hashoah to remember Jewish resistance and to teach our children that dignity is not conditional; and International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember liberation and to remind the world that intervention, though late, still mattered.
On Monday, the Jewish people tearfully welcomed their last hostage home. People are removing their yellow hostage ribbons. Some say that the return of his body marks the end of this dark chapter.
But, to remember is not only to dig into the ancient, or even recent, past. It is about who we are right now. It is about how fiercely we insist on the value of every human life. It is about our refusal to let grief turn into indifference or rage into dehumanization.
We remember because the story is not over; neither are we.
