#tw shoah

[chanaleah]

"Seems like Jews didn't learn any lessons from the Holocaust!"

We did. We learned a very important lesson.

We learned that we are not safe without a state.

[kick-a-long]

ok, im making this a new post because im pretty tired of people saying "white jews" are "from europe after the holocaust." um no they are not.

I’m an American Ashkenazi Jew and the American Jewish population is much much older than immigrants from the holocaust. My father’s grandmothers family came from Eastern Europe in the 1850s and my father’s grandfather’s side came 1. some few generations before the civil war and 2. At least the 1840s for unknown reasons because we’ve been here so long my family forgot.

My grandmother personally started a business in her basement in the 20s and 30s to get European Jews work visas in the US so they could escape during and after the holocaust. Huge socialist.

Jews were arrested for union drives in 1909 America waaay before the holocaust. Jews were excepted from prohibition in America because of wine at Shabbat. That whole religious freedom thing in America? It’s always been attractive to Jews fleeing Russia and Europe and the Middle East since the us rolled the constitution out in 1776.

So, like, most Zionist Jews (because American has the second largest Jewish population in the world) are Americans who were here for hundreds of years.

Very few Jews escaped the holocaust. Very few Jews escaped Europe. very few living jews are European or "Escaped" the holocaust at all if you just look at the numbers. Jews only escaped Middle Eastern ethnic cleansing because of Israel. That was the entire reason for Israel. A place to escape the 70 year cycle of Jewish genocides.

6 million isn’t just a big number. It’s an indicator that there are very few “white European” Jews who escaped. When you say European Jews who escaped the holocaust, you are talking a very small number of people. It’s estimated at 240,000 “white European Jews” lived compared to 6 million who were killed.

i'll repeat that. 240,000 European people (340.000 escaped germany but 100,000 stayed in europe and were recaptured and sent to be killed leaving just the 240,000) lived. 6 MILLION DIED.

240,000 lived and 6 MILLION WERE KILLED. IN EUROPE. THE PLACE WHO IS CURRENTLY ELECTING SIMILAR GOVERNMENTS TO THE 1930S.

[dj-of-the-coven]

Reasons why you should take a stand against Jewish hatred as an American:

1. Jewish Americans contributed massively to the advancement of medicine, technology, entertainment, and civil rights in your country without receiving support back from almost any group besides Black and Native Americans. It’s time to do your share.

2. American society, being overwhelmingly Christian, owes much of its culture to elements which it appropriated from Jews. If your name is David, Joseph, Jacob, Isaac, Johnathan, Michael, Benjamin, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Hannah, Alison, etc., you have inherited an aspect of Jewish culture that was stolen from us by the Romans. Every biblical reference with its origin in the Torah comes from us. If you like to talk about “biblically accurate angels”, you have an obligation to respect the Jews to whom this concept originally belonged. Don’t want to? Then forfeit our shit.

3. Whether you admit it or not, the holocaust is a (said with contempt) deeply beloved political cudgel used by all sides of the compass, and this “talking point” is owed completely and entirely to the real persecution and attempted annihilation of six million dead Jews. If you have ever used the holocaust as a rhetorical device in your political organizing, you have a duty to give a shit about the Jews who were murdered to make your point for you. Care about them and their living descendants or get the name of the damn holocaust out of your mouth.

4. If you consider yourself an anti-racist and an anti-Nazi individual, you owe it to Jews to include us in your activism. The very foundations of white supremacy and Nazism are composed of antisemitism. Refusing to do this work is just as counterintuitive to being an anti-racist as refusing to learn about black and brown persecution. You can’t knock down the house and leave the base.

5. It’s the right thing to do.

[stereotypicaljewishmother]

Just leaving this here for tomorrow.

[jewish-joy]

To all my fellow people converting- this is a Call-in post

We are going to be a part of this community, as dictated by Jewish law, once we enter the water of the Mikveh, it will be as if we were Jewish all our lives.

That doesn’t erase the fact that we come from different backgrounds. Most of us didn’t have our grandmother escape genocidal countries. We didn’t grow up around the dinner table hearing holocaust stories about family and friends. The legacy of our families was not split between two choices of what opened up first for amnesty- Israel or the United States.

Our love for Judaism originates from studying theology, culture, and warm moments in the community- not clinging onto it in a generational storm where at any moment you can be expected to run.

Israel has been there for the Jewish people demonstrably, in a world where a Jewish child is taken aside at a young age and told “one day, they could come after you”.

In response, Israel has said “and we will be there to catch you.” This has rung true for the Jewish exile out of Middle Eastern countries, the fleeing from the USSR, and yes- Ethiopia.

Mistakes were made along the way. Tribalism between Jewish religious and geographical sects came up. Refugee camps in the newly established country were a mess- with high rates of death from sickness occurred in the Mizrahi resettlement. Where Ethiopian Jewish women’s translation failed as they were told they were being out on temporary birth control as to not overcrowd struggling camps.

But you don’t get to shake this in their faces. Not when the descendants of those Jewish people know Israel to be what saved them. What gave them life. And what has been threatened everyday by rockets in the sky and terrorist organizations on every side that promises for the painful death of them and their families.

You are under no obligation to support the actions of the Israeli government. But you have to understand why the country was founded, and especially why it was set up in 1948 after the largest slaughter of Jewish people had just ended, where it wasn’t clear if this could happen again the very next year.

You have to see the connection to the land, where Hebrew coins get dug up from thousands of years ago on a daily basis. Even if that’s not apart of your personal practices, you must learn of the background to many of our stories. What Jewish people longed for as they were ostracized and humiliated globally.

This doesn’t come at the price of not sympathizing with the Palestinians. Just as you can hold Jewish pain close to your chest, so can you the pain of Palestinians. The good news is, life isn’t a sports game with your team and their team. The bad news is, that makes it a whole heck of a lot harder.

That being said, we do have the extra responsibility of accurately representing the people we will hopefully call our own one day, BH.

Edit-born Jewish people, if this post speaks to you on any level, feel free to reblog. Your family histories deserve to be represented in our community.

[jewish-culture-is]

jewish culture is having to email your professor at 11pm because they decided a movie set during the Holocaust was a good decision for teaching about the philosophy of art (how i wish this were an exaggeration), and you thought you could power through it but obviously couldn't

.

[ind1g3n0us-lev1t3]

Protest in New York

How surprising, typical "antizionists" displaying how "antizionist" they are by spewing "antizionist" and totally not antisemitic bullshit.

Edit: this image was not recent, it was from years ago. Which demonstrates that antisemitism in the "palestinian" cause has been in it far longer

[rotzaprachim]

it's so horrific that the shoah was so brutal in the balkans that the vast majority of the sephardic jews in some areas (croatia and greece and pretty much everywhere but albania) were murdered and no one even thinks of it happening there anymore

[baroque-hashem]

I broke down crying in a bookstore today. I found a book on the Holocaust and there were pictures in it of the drawings made by Jewish children in the ghetto my family was in. And it just really hit me that the Holocaust isn't personal for everyone. For some people, it's just a story, just a morality play to learn a lesson through.

But for some of us, we actually had family who lived and died in the Holocaust. We still feel its affects today. And it haunts us. A child's hand drew every one of those pictures in the ghetto. Children from my family were in that ghetto. And they didn't make it. And for that I weep.

[stereotypicaljewishmother]

Rest in peace, Mrs. Lily, may your memory be a blessing.

[baroque-hashem]

If you don't understand how disgusting and vile Holocaust inversion is, then maybe you don't understand antisemitism.

[rotzaprachim]

“dor shnei” by yael globerman. Listen to her read it here

[moonlightandmarble]

"Yeah Jewish people were targeted in the Holocaust but you don't need to erase LGBTQ people not everything is about YOU"

Nuance is dead and I'm going to start squirting blood out of my eyes at people like a horned lizard.

[spale-vosver]

reading up on Jewish history for a class I'm in and...fuck. learning about the complete and total extermination of the shtetl is breaking me. I don't have Shoah trauma nor do I ever expect to (my family is Catholics all the way down) but seeing these artistic depictions of vibrant Jewish life in Europe hurts my heart; it's the same when I watch Fiddler. I don't know that we'll ever have it back and it makes me cry.