Yom HaShoah and Searing Remembrances
Recently I watched from afar as my good friend journeyed to
Rwanda. She was drawn there, to this
African country to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan
genocide and the noble work of the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. She is the daughter of a man, hidden during
the Holocaust, but who as an adult reclaimed the forgotten Jewish memories torn
from her father and slaughtered with her paternal grandparents. And now she traveled to the sites where one
million Tutsi were murdered by their neighbors, the Hutu, in the span of one
hundred days. They were not killed in
gas chambers but by hand with machetes and clubs.
Philip Gourevitch observed in The New Yorker (April 21, 2014), “A lot of Rwandans will tell you
that all through mourning week they are prone to bad and bitter feelings. For
those who were there in 1994, during the genocide, memory can feel like an
affliction, and the greater imperative has often been to learn how to forget
enough for long enough to live in the present for the rest of the year. And for
those who were not yet born—more than half the country today—what does it mean
to be told to remember?”
Indeed, what does it mean to remember?
Last week as well the Internet was abuzz with reports of renewed antisemitism in the Ukraine....