Dr. Richard Benkin
Brief acceptance of proclamation from village by Richard Benkin
Good evening.
This is the first night of Passover, which marks the exodus from Egypt and re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. So, I first wish you all a joyous holiday season, regardless of which holiday you celebrate.
And that’s really what this proclamation is trying to protect: the right of all people to believe and worship as they wish without the government stopping them. At the time of the holocaust, fascism threatened those freedoms, and while freedom ultimately prevailed then, and later against Communism and radical Islamism; we today face a new geopolitical authoritarian alliance; because the enemies of freedom never rest, which is why we can’t ever rest—or forget what happens when they hold sway. That’s also what this proclamation is about.
Four years ago, I visited Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar Germany to say kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for a relative of mine interned there. In Buchenwald and other concentration camps, who lived and who died was often a matter of chance. Guards took pot shots at prisoners without regard to whom; people were pulled aside and killed at random. Yet, for whatever reason, my relative survived to have a family. Look around our community. The vast number of American Jews lost family in the holocaust; as did many non-Jewish Americans. All of their descendants here today were in real jeopardy of never having existed if our forebear was randomly killed instead of someone else’s. Genocide takes all of our individualities and puts them into one collective identity, and it doesn’t matter who in that collective is killed.
The holocaust was unique in its centrality to national ideology, its uncompromising nature, and industrial scale; but it has echoes today. As a human rights activist, I have seen them close-up in places and among people who never get the headlines others do: Hindus in Bangladesh, who will not survive past mid-century unless things change; Pashtun Muslims, who face Pakistani terror and cultural jihad, who battled Al Qaeda; stood with me in Buchenwald that day; and fought by our side in Afghanistan, and I’m still trying to get some out.
Today, we lionize Ukraine though it would be difficult to find another country with a more violent history of antisemitism, so firmly embedded in much of the population. Not only were almost a million Ukrainian Jews murdered during the holocaust, but many Ukrainians participated in the killing and joined with the Nazis. (Yes, it’s kind of personal for me, because some of those murdered were my family, an entire section, who lived in a village about eight hours from Kyiv and were killed either in pogroms or at the nearby Belzec death camp.) Yet today—and here’s the point—the face of Ukraine and the patriotic defense of its homeland and people is its Jewish president, whom Ukrainians embrace. A nation and people that took a painful look at history and rose above it.
Yet, right here in Illinois, 15 percent of young adults think the Holocaust is a myth, one in 12 think the Jews caused it; nationally, almost a quarter say it’s a myth. Most of these people aren’t neo-Nazis or conspiracy mongers, but victims of ignorance, which makes our job that much harder—and that much more important.
As a Jewish child growing up after the holocaust, I realized that the Nazis weren’t the real problem. They knew they could not have done all that themselves, and correctly counted on all those “good Europeans,” just looking out for their own, who drove the trains to the death camps, gladly looted empty Jewish homes, or just closed their shutters while their neighbors were being dragged away in the night.
Only by remembering the Holocaust can we live its clarion call of NEVER AGAIN so that we don’t stand by while these things happen. Our village’s refusal to forget the holocaust is a testimony to its people and leaders; and I am eternally grateful for it.
Thank you.