Yom HaShoah
(Holocaust Remembrance Day)

Yom HaShoah is the day designated by Jewish communities around the world to memorialize the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.  Jewish tradition requires that a memorial prayer called the Kaddish is recited in the synagogue on the yahrzeit (anniversary of a person’s death).  The actual date of death for most of those who died under the Nazi regime is unknown.  Yom HaShoah, therefore, is a Yom Kaddish K’lalli, a day established by the Jewish community to recite the traditional Kaddish prayer communally for all the people whose deaths occurred during the Holocaust. 

When the idea of a Yom Kaddish K’lalli was first proposed, world rabbinic leadership could not come to an agreement as to what day in the Jewish calendar year would be most appropriate for marking this occasion.  A group of survivors from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising suggested doing it on the 27th day of the month of Nisan,( to learn more about the Jewish calendar, click here) five days after the end of Passover. This was also the actual date of the beginning of the Jewish revolt in 1943. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the first large scale, organized civilian rebellion against the Germans in all of Nazi occupied Europe.

The first official Yom HaShoah commemoration took place in Israel in 1951 and was called Yom HaShoah V’HaGevurah (“The Day of Remembering the Destruction and the Resistance”).   Jewish communities in other parts of the world began to adopt the 27th of Nisan as the Yom Kaddish K’lalli and organized communal memorial services.  In 1959 the State of Israel made Yom HaShoah a national holiday.

In the United States, Yom HaSahoah received official recognition by the government in 1979. President Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Congress created the U.S. Memorial Council and established the week during which Yom HaShoah falls in the Jewish calendar as a week of  “Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust”. Today, the 27th of Nisan is known in Jewish communities around the world as Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day).

The Meaning of the Words “Holocaust” and “Shoah”

“Holocaust” is the term used most widely to refer to the mass murder of Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime.  The word is Greek in origin and comes from two words, olos (whole) and kaustos (burnt).  Olos and Kaustos combine into the word holokauston, which originally meant, “a sacrifice totally consumed by fire”.  It is used in the Greek translation of I Samuel 7:9, “a burnt offering to God”.   In Classical Greek writings the term means, “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire” or “a great destruction of life”.

The word “holocaust” spelled with a small “h” has been applied to many different disastrous events in human history. After World War II it led to a new word in our language, “genocide”, which describes the concept of the murder of an entire race.  Starting in the 1950’s, “Holocaust” spelled with a capital “H”, has come to have a specific meaning — the mass murder of the Jews of Europe as well as millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Other terms have also been used by Jews to name this cataclysmic event.  Yiddish speaking Jews living in the Displaced Persons’ Camps after World War II ended referred to the event as the “Khurb’n”.  “Khurb’n” is a Hebrew origin word meaning “great destruction” and has traditionally been associated with the Destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E and 
70 C.E.

Because the word “Khurb’n” is laden with other connotations in Jewish history, it was eventually abandoned in favor of the word “Shoah”, another Hebrew word for “great destruction”.  “Shoah” was used for the first time in a booklet in Hebrew entitled “Sho’at Yehudei Polin” (“The Destruction of the Jews of Poland”).  The United Aid Committee for the Jews of Poland published this booklet in 1940 in Jerusalem.   It contains reports and articles on the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe from the outbreak of World War II written or verbally reported by eyewitnesses in Poland and was published long before the actual mass gassing of Jews began in December 1941.    Khurb’n continued to be favored by most Jews until Zionist writers in 1942 started to substitute the word Shoah.  Today, Shoah has become the word of choice for Hebrew speaking Jews around the world.

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