Blog

Alex Patnick

By Alex Patnick

For me, the Holocaust is not a part of my family history but I have met survivors and have friends who are descended from survivors who lost whole families.

I look at those people and am inspired. Despite everything they went through they kept their faith and raised families, which to this day, are happy and living a modern religious lifestyle. I am inspired because they carried on, like a phoenix rising from the (in this case literal) ashes arriving, many as children, in the U.S., England, Australia, South Africa, Latin America among other places, but most importantly, they arrived in Israel.

We owe our existence to their ultimate sacrifice. We must not let the world forget this act.

Since then, the world has seen many more genocides but the genocide with the longest and most permanent impact is the indiscriminate and targeted murder of the Jewish people, the Shoah.

This great act of evil gave a new meaning to the term human rights and in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trial, it enabled the world to set up International courts and Tribunals. These are now being used against Israel, and it seems that the world has forgotten the legacy of the Holocaust.

In a time of rising anti-Semitism, it is our job to make the world remember and all of us, should use their memory to improve the world. We don’t need to become business leaders, we don’t need to run for the Knesset or become a general in the army, we just need to help one person. Find one person around the world and help them. Help them realize their potential, and do it in the memory of a Shoah victim.

We need to make the world see why Israel truly is a Light unto the Nations. And show the world that the mantra that runs through every Israeli, both left and right, both olim and sabras and gives a raison d’etre to the IDF – Never Again – are not empty words. Never again will the Jewish nation be at the mercy of other nations, never again shall we be defenseless, and Never Again will Jews go like lambs to the slaughter. On behalf of every one of us here tonight, I just want to say to those six million souls that we mourn your loss and will never let the world forget.