Luis F. Mayorgas 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇺🇦

May we honor the legacy of ancestors who fled, survived, and perished in the horrors of the Holocaust by ensuring that it never again happens for others, instead of using it as a justification to inflict devastation on others. May their memories be a blessing — and a call to action.

Now more than ever, that legacy must drive us to reach out to others who are suffering, to see our safety bound up in each other’s. This must be the path forward: shared safety through solidarity with each other, not through building walls and closing ourselves off from others. We cannot achieve liberation and safety while people who claim to be acting in the name of Judaism inflict atrocities similar to those our own ancestors experienced.

But many Jews who descend from survivors from the Holocaust, or who grew up steeped in the memory of it, recognize those ancestors in the suffering of all oppressed peoples. We see our ancestors who arrived as refugees in the faces of asylum seekers who our elected leaders want to deport en masse. We see those ancestors in the entire families wiped out in Gaza. We feel echoes of the pogroms when we see Israeli settlers torch homes and assault Palestinians in West Bank villages.

Authoritarians target the most vulnerable first, seeking to divide them from the rest of society. We see this now as the Trump administration targets trans people and immigrants. Whether human beings are scapegoated as immigrants, as trans people, or as Jews — including those who experience multiple of these forms of oppression —  we recognize the tactics authoritarians use to fear monger, inflict violence and divide. They will continue to target more and more communities that don’t conform to their Christian white nationalist vision for this country. We know that Jewish safety depends on our standing up for the safety of all – that the only true safety is shared safety.

In the global Jewish community, there is an ongoing narrative battle for what the legacy of these horrors will be. On the one hand, right-wing politicians and institutions like Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the ADL say that the lesson is that Jews can only stay safe through military strength, that Jews perished in the Holocaust because they were too weak to stand up to the Nazis. They use the legacy of the Holocaust to crack down on advocates for Palestinian human rights and to bolster militarism.

Many of us have ancestors who were persecuted, murdered, or ethnically cleansed during the Holocaust, when the Nazis wiped out ⅔ of European Jewry and forced most other Jewish Europeans to leave. The Holocaust has left an indelible mark on Jewish communities around the world.

We remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust alongside the millions of Roma, Sinti, queer people, disabled people, political dissidents, and others killed by the Nazi regime. We remember, too, the victims of Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples in Namibia that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.

NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE. Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and honor the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.