Arts & Culture

Holocaust Remembrance Day: Legacy and Exodus

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Exactly 80 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the remaining 7,000 prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The largest of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz saw the murder of 1.1 million civilians in the span of five years.  In total, the lives of six million innocent men, women and children who loved and were loved, were cruelly ended due to hate. But that is not the entire story. 

Holocaust lessons tend to start from events beforehand — the rise of antisemitism and fascism in Europe, pogroms, Kristallnacht —  then continue on to concentration camps and end with liberation. However, that is not the end of the Holocaust story.

Columns

GUEST ROOM | The Urgency of Listening: A Reflection for Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Holocaust testimonies bear witness to humanity at its most vulnerable. They urge us to confront the fragility of memory and the weight of history. These stories are rarely neat or complete — they are raw, fragmented and profoundly human. Yet, it is precisely in their complexity that they offer vital lessons in a world that continues to grapple with division and the consequences of silence.

Arts & Culture

Cornell Celebrates Annual Israel Week

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This upcoming week, from May 1 to May 7, Cornell will celebrate its annual Israel Week, run by Cornell Hillel. The week will focus on Israeli culture and traditions, with events ranging from a book fair to a food market, Tel Aviv Bar Night to Israel Shabbat and so much more. 

There has never been a more critical time for Israel Week. Presently, an encampment stands on the Arts Quad, where only a few days ago protestors chanted together, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada.” This “intifada” they mention is referring to the First and Second Intifada, two Palestinian uprisings which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Calls for another intifada revolution are calls for violence against Israel and those who support Israel’s right to exist. Calls to “globalize” the intifada are worse.

Opinion

JOHNS | Lessons from Yad Vashem

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Up the slope of Mount Herzl, in western Jerusalem, lies a 44-acre complex that is one of the world’s most moving testaments to the real life costs and consequences of totalitarianism. Yad Vashem, which I visited earlier this month as part of a small Cornell student delegation, is often described oversimplistically as Israel’s “Holocaust memorial.” Yad Vashem memorializes the millions of innocent lives lost to the Holocaust, but also those — Jews and non-Jews — who bravely resisted it. One does not leave Yad Vashem without a deep recognition of what happens when the power of the absolute state is wedded to an ideology that denies the God-given, individual rights of man. This past Sunday, the world appropriately commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the most solemn international memorial days marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and death camp operated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Each International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hear the phrase “Never Again.” Yet, sadly and frighteningly, we appear to be in the process of forgetting anyway.