Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 24th January 2026/ 6th Shevat 5786

Holocaust Memorial Day

Tuesday will be Holocaust Memorial Day, and I am uneasy for a number of reasons. First, I do not like the word Holocaust. Second, I am uncomfortable with this framing of Jewish memory. Third, I am deeply sceptical.

Let me explain.

The choice of the word “Holocaust” over the Hebrew Shoah is not neutral. The Greek root of the term, holokauston, means a “burnt offering” — a sacrifice consumed on an altar. That religious undertone introduces a dangerous narrative: that the destruction of European Jewry functioned like a sacrificial rite, and that out of this “offering” the Jews were later “rewarded” with a State. In this framing, the birth of Israel is no longer understood as the fulfilment of a legitimate national aspiration rooted in centuries of history, but as a form of compensation — a redemptive payoff for suffering.

This framing must be rejected. It turns genocide into theology. It turns history into moral bookkeeping. Claude Lanzmann, who’s monumental 1985 documentary is titled Shoah, explicitly rejected the word “Holocaust.” He insisted it was not a holocaust — a burnt offering to a god — and chose Shoah to name a catastrophe without any sacrificial meaning. The Shoah cannot be narrated as sacrifice, and it cannot be used to suggest that Jewish self-determination is a sort of moral debt. I am equally sceptical about the way “memory” is mobilised around Holocaust Memorial Day. Too often, the memory of the Shoah is framed as a moral test imposed on Jews. It is the claim that Jewish persecution should have produced uniquely virtuous behaviour, and that any perceived failure proves that Jews have “learned nothing” from their suffering. Memory, in this form, becomes accusation. Instead of confronting antisemitism, it recasts Jewish past as an indictment against Jews in the present.

This logic surfaces clearly in political discourse. Remember when MP David Ward, after signing the

Holocaust Memorial Day book of remembrance, wrote that he was “saddened that the Jews… could… be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians,” adding that “those Jews… have not learned those lessons.”? In this twisted logic, Jewish suffering becomes a moral debt. Memory is no longer about what was done to Jews, but about what Jews are now accused of doing, it has now become a recurring pattern. The Shoah is inverted into a moral weapon against Jews. It is what Deborah Lipstadt has called Holocaust distortion: the familiar “yes, but” spiel. Yes, the Holocaust was

terrible — but look at what the Jews are doing now. Blame is shifted from perpetrators to victims. [1]

I am also sceptical of the idea that dedicating a single day to the memory of the Shoah should somehow vaccinate society against antisemitism. Holocaust Memorial Day was established with an educational purpose: not merely to commemorate, but to teach—especially younger generations—about antisemitism, racism, and the processes of dehumanisation. As the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust itself states, HMD exists “to learn from the past for a better future” and aims “to educate people about the Holocaust and more recent genocides, and to challenge prejudice and hatred in society today.” Yet this educational promise is failing. Participation by schools has collapsed, even as antisemitism has surged.

According to figures reported by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the number of UK schools formally marking Holocaust Memorial Day has fallen sharply, from over two thousand in 2023 to fewer than a thousand by 2025. Over the same period, the Community Security Trust has recorded the highest levels of antisemitic incidents ever documented in the UK, with 2023 marking a record and subsequent years remaining at historically elevated levels. Holocaust education, as presently structured, is clearly not translating into greater resistance to antisemitism. [2]

I am also sceptical of an ideology that has been reinforced by the institutionalisation of Holocaust

Memorial Day: the generalisation of the Shoah. In contemporary discourse, the Shoah is presented as one atrocity among many, morally interchangeable with other historical horrors; and not unique: this is problematic.

This move is usually framed as an appeal to shared human suffering, but it is often followed by an

invocation of Palestine as the supposed moral “lesson” Jews should have drawn from their own

catastrophe. In this way it undermines the suffering of today’s Jews.

The over-insistence on Palestinian suffering threatens us Jews: those of us who live in Israel,

permanently under attack by neighbouring dictatorships, and we in the Diaspora. Palestinian history is always narrated by the media to blame the Jews, and the Jews only. And because of this persistent propaganda, we Jews are deprived of our religious rights. Is there any other religious community that needs so much armed protection? See? You start from a good place — acknowledging other people’s pain — and end up denying your own. The road to hell is paved with this kind of good intention.

The demand that Jews must “universalise their pain” by dissolving the Shoah into a general catalogue of human suffering is not an act of empathy; it is an act of erasure. It begins with a seemingly generous premise — that all victims deserve recognition — and ends by denying us Jews precisely what that premise claims to defend: the right to speak of our catastrophe in our own historical and moral terms.

One should not be forced to state the obvious, but here we are again. The call to “universalise the

pain” is an insult to real suffering and an offence to historical reality. It is fake news dressed up as

morality.

The Shoah was historically unique not because Jewish suffering is superior, but because the event

itself was unique. Other mass killings, including genocides, have followed their own logics: conquest, exploitation, political control, or repression. The Shoah followed none of these. It was an industrial project of total annihilation. Even military rationality was subordinated to this goal: trains deporting Jews to death camps were prioritised over those carrying soldiers and supplies, while Germany was losing the war. This was total madness, but it was systematic, organised, and well-functioning madness, run by an entire state apparatus.

And yet, despite these failures, there are very good reasons, rooted in Jewish ethics and Jewish

tradition, for us to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day. Because the real question is not whether

HMD is perfect — it is not — but what would happen if we refuse to enter that space.

If we do not tell our story, others will tell it for us. In Jewish tradition, memory is not a private

possession; it exists only when it is actively transmitted. The first commandment of Pesach is

precisely this:

”…Exodus 13:8) “And you shall tell your child on that day, saying(וְ הִ גַּדְ תָּ לְבִ נְךָ בַּיּוֹם הַּהוּא לֵאמֹר

The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael makes this point with striking force: “If you do not tell it, it is as

though you yourself did not go out of Egypt” (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Bo, Parashah 17).

Memory that is not spoken does not remain neutral. It disappears. It is replaced. If we Jews withdraw from public remembrance, then someone else will tell the story of the Shoah—often presenting it as evidence of Jewish, or Zionist, moral failure, in yet another perverse “universalising” move.

In Jewish terms, not telling is itself a form of disappearance. The story of the Exodus — which we read this week — ceases to exist for the one who does not recount it. And the Shoah, too, risks becoming something other than what it was when Jewish voices recede.

The appropriation of the Shoah for non-Jewish and anti-Jewish causes is an attack on liberal

democracy, the political and moral system in which we live. We see people presenting the Nakba, the defeat inflicted by the Israeli army on the Arab countries in 1948, as a moral counter-Shoah.

But who are they? On whose side are they now, when liberal democracy is under attack in Ukraine? When the Iranian people are being slaughtered in the streets? The aficionados of the Nakba narrative are aligned with two ideological forces that have repeatedly shown hostility to Jews: the radical left and contemporary Islamism. Both ideologies are innervated by antisemitism—conspiratorial thinking, victim–perpetrator inversion, and the portrayal of Jews as uniquely powerful and undeserving of protection.

That Holocaust distortion — the equivalence between Nakba and Shoah, between Nazis and Israelis — is not only an attack on Jews; it is an attack on liberal democracy itself. Liberal democracy, with all its flaws, is and remains the only political framework that has consistently offered Jews legal equality and civic protection. Not by chance, those who weaponize the Shoah are opposed to liberal democracy.

Does affirming the uniqueness of the Shoah mean that other tragedies and massacres should not be remembered? Absolutely not. On the contrary, we have a clear moral duty to remember other

genocides — most notably the Armenian Genocide, whose destruction began in 1915. On 22 August 1939, that failed painter, while presenting the plan for the annihilation of the Jews to his commanders, cynically asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Well, we do, And we must.

Remembering the Armenian genocide is a moral imperative. It exposes the crimes of pan-Turkish

totalitarianism, that is raising his ugly head nowadays. It is also true that for many years this duty was not fully met by the State of Israel. Governments led by the Left, avoided formal recognition largely for reasons of realpolitik and relations with Turkey.

One must name here real menschen such as the journalist Yaakov Ahimeir, and politicians such as

former President Reuven Rivlin and Likud MP Yuli Edelstein — those supposedly “genocidal,”

“racist,” and “tribal” Israelis were the ones insisting that Jewish memory loses all credibility when it

is selective. Apparently, even the caricatured Zionist Right can sometimes recognise a genocide when it sees one. [3]

For the same reason that Holocaust Memorial Day must resist the distortion of memory, it must also give voice to those who are today resisting openly antisemitic totalitarian regimes. This is why it is not only legitimate but necessary, during Holocaust Memorial Day, to speak about the Iranian

opposition and the Ukrainian people—both victims of aggressive totalitarian systems built on

conspiracy, antisemitism, and the denial of individual dignity.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not merely authoritarian; it is structurally antisemitic and openly

eliminationist. Its leaders deny the Shoah, call for the destruction of Israel, and crush dissent at home through public executions, torture, and terror—often quite literally in the streets. It is pure cowardice to refuse to name this regime during Holocaust Memorial Day while obsessively rehearsing the language of Palestine and Nakba.

The same is true of Ukraine, whose population has been subjected to a war of aggression grounded in a conspiratorial worldview that portrays liberal democracy, Jews, and the West as a single corrupt enemy. Russian state ideology openly traffics in antisemitic tropes, historical falsification, and the glorification of imperial violence. Ukrainians are dying because a totalitarian regime refuses the legitimacy of a plural, democratic society.

What is striking — and disturbing — is the tepid response of large parts of the liberal Left to these

realities. Because Ukrainians and Iranian dissidents are perceived as aligned with Israel, or with

“Zionism,” their suffering is treated as politically inconvenient. The result is a grotesque moral

hierarchy: endless attention to Palestine and Nakba, and near silence when women are hanged in Iran or civilians are bombed in Ukraine. There are Jews who are obsessed with Palestine and remain silent — or nearly silent — when it is time to speak out about Iran. This is not Prophetic Judaism. This is moral cowardice.

To those who aggrandise themselves with the offensive exhortation to “universalise the pain,” we

must answer bluntly. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that Jewish existence must be justified through pain, or that Jewish survival becomes suspect when Jews exercise power.

The Midrash makes this explicit. In Midrash Tanchuma (Bo:7), commenting on the Exodus narrative

read this week, the rabbis insist that God does not demand that Israel explain, rationalise, or redeem its existence through suffering. Pain is not currency. Jewish being does not require moral permission slips.

Today, however, the Shoah has been transformed into a tool used to judge, discipline, or delegitimise Jews or the Jewish state. A line has been crossed. The Shoah is no longer remembered in order to understand antisemitism; it is repurposed to produce political verdicts in the present — often explicitly anti-Israeli, and increasingly anti-democratic. Jewish catastrophe has become a moral weapon against Jewish life.

This is precisely why Jewish participation in Holocaust Memorial Day remains necessary — even

when its frameworks are flawed. “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man” (Avot 2:5),

says my beloved Pirkei Avot.

When truth is not defended, when memory is distorted, when moral language is hollowed out, we

must step forward and reclaim not only our narrative, but the plain truth: the defence of Holocaust

memory and of liberal democracy today are inseparable.

If we retreat from public remembrance others will remember in our place, and they will do so

according to agendas that are blatantly hostile to both Jewish life and democratic values. The Shoah

will be “universalised,” yes: emptied of meaning, moralised, weaponised, and finally turned against

the very people it sought to destroy. Us.

This is not speculation. It is already happening. And we must not allow it to happen.

This is why I warmly invite you to the commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, Tuesday 27, at

Hove Town Hall, at 11:00 am.

See you there.

1. A cultivated version of this logic appears in contemporary intellectual discourse: as analysed by

Jack Jacobs in Dissent (Fall 2025), Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza risks presenting

Jewish suffering as a moral burden Jews are accused of having betrayed.

2. Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2024, February 12, 2025,

https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2025/02/12/antisemitic-incidents-report-2024.

3. Adolf Hitler’s remark on the Armenians (“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the

Armenians?”), address to Wehrmacht commanders, Obersalzberg, 22 August 1939, documented

in Louis P. Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942), 2–3; see also

Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide (New York: Knopf, 1991), 8–9.