BBC Radio 4 2016-05-04

BBC Radio 4 2016-05-04

As the sun goes down over the Mediterranean this evening Yom Ha’Shoah begins. It’s what we here call Holocaust Memorial Day - but in Israel. And tomorrow, my mother-in-law will continue her family tradition and drive up the hill from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to visit the Holocaust memorial centre at Yad Vashem. There she will read out the names of her grandparents - Roza and Boris Schonbaum - and eight other family members from Poland who were murdered by the Nazis.

Yad Vashem is an extraordinary place and, amongst other things, bears the responsibility for compiling a data-base of all the names of those who were murdered in the Holocaust. We are, of course, all familiar with the number six million. But at Yad Vashem they are not just one collective six million, but rather six million individuals, with their own names, and families and individual stories.

The phrase Yad Vashem is taken from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 56. The context is actually a discussion about eunuchs. Before Isaiah, some Biblical writers had argued that eunuchs were not allowed into the place where God was worshipped – perhaps because of the priority they attached to having children. But Isaiah insists that this gets things all wrong, that what’s most important is not breeding potential but ethical behaviour. To the people who do what is right in God’s eyes, says Isaiah “to them I will give, within my temple and its walls, a memorial and a name that is better than sons and daughters.”

The phrase “a memorial and a name” is a translation of the Biblical Hebrew words Yad Vashem. It might seem a bit puzzling that this phrase has been lifted from a discussion about eunuchs - traditionally outcasts, of course. But the thing about eunuchs is that they are childless, so may have no one left to remember or mourn them when they’re dead. Likewise, many entire families were murdered in the Holocaust – and the fear has always been that they too may have no one to remember or mourn them either. Which is precisely the mission of Yad Vashem, and why it is so-named – it insists that no one will be forgotten, whoever they are, no one lost to oblivion.

From Yad Vashem’s database Rosa and Boris Schonbaum look out at me from misty black and white photographs. Here they are not just nameless abstract numbers amongst millions of others. They become real. He had a factory. She was a doctor. And, Rosa is the spitting image of my wife, Rosa’s great granddaughter. The Nazis took their lives. But at Yad Vashem their names persist. As they do also in that great database of God’s very existence – a God that Jews often refer to as Ha’shem – or, simply the name. For people of faith, it’s that one name in whom all other names subsist and from whom they draw their being.