Ask Haviv Anything - 108: How personal grief built a nation

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

On the eve of Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day, we explore the profound arc of Israel's national remembrance days -- from Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) through Memorial Day, into Yom Ha'atzma'ut (Independence Day), and ending with the quiet, almost unknown commemoration of Theodor Herzl’s yahrzeit. It is an arc of memory, sacrifice, and renewal -- not abstract, but usually personal and intimate -- that lies at the heart of Jewish strength and survival in a dangerous world.--This episode was sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who asked to dedicate it to the memory of those we lost on October 7.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Haviv Anything. This time we're recording on April 20 on the eve of Yomazikaron Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers and victims of terror in the history of Zionism and of Israel. It's part of a long arc that begins this year with Yomashoua, which was on April 14, which is the day of commemoration of the Holocaust and of the heroism of those who resisted the Holocaust. And it moves on a week later to Yomazikaron, that's tomorrow or tonight. night, and then the next day, Yomatzmaud, Independence Day for Israel. And it has this quiet, soft ending five days after Independence Day, with Yom Herzl, Herzl Day, which this year falls on

April 27, which is Theodore Herzl's Yardtseit. That's the Jewish day of commemorating somebody's death on the day they died. That's the day he died on the Hebrew calendar in 1904. It's an arc that I want to dive into, because I think it tells us a lot about this moment for Israelis, for Jews. So let's get into it. Before we do, I want to thank our sponsor who has to remain anonymous, who just wanted to dedicate this episode in memory of the victims of October 7. Thank you so much for that support. What are these days all about in the end? The simple answer is they're about intimacy. This can be hard to see from far. away. So what am I talking about? The victims of the Holocaust who are commemorated in this period of what we

call the national holidays in Hebrew. The victims of the Holocaust or of the wars, you know, from the other side of the world, they can seem abstractions. From four generations later, they can seem abstractions. These days are about making them not be abstractions. And Israelis try to use these days to connect to those people. Names are read out, stories are told, and transform that sense of the abstract, the distant, the cultural touchstone, the moral concept that these people sometimes become in our conversations into real lived human experiences, that generation of the founding of Israel, who came out of the Holocaust into this independence, this strange new Jewish world, what was that experience? And reliving that is what this ark is all about.

Yomashua, which this year falls on April 14, is set to, on the Hebrew calendar, the 27th day of Nissan. That's a very interesting choice for remembering the dead in the Holocaust. There were other suggestions for a date to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The 9th of Av, Tishabe Av, is a traditional Jewish fast day and day of morning that marks the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem, the expulsion from Spain, and a whole bunch of exiles and colloquial. calamities all throughout Jewish history. And at the founding of Israel, it was actually proposed as a day for remembering the Holocaust. It was in the end rejected because the Holocaust was considered too unique in the vast span of Jewish tragedies. But you can still in many religious communities find people who commemorate the death of the victims of the Holocaust on Tishabyev. The 14th of Nishan was suggested a couple weeks before the day that was actually chosen. It's the eve of Passover each year.

It's the day that the holiday of Passover begins. But it's also the day in which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. That was the most significant Jewish uprising against the Nazis. And it was launched on the 14th of Nissan. That day was also rejected because it was the eve of Passover. Nissan is supposed to be a month of joy, a month of celebration of redemption, of commemorating the redemption from Egypt and the grand redemptive story that culminated in the giving of the Torah

and the self-definition of the Jews and their story and the beginning of their bookshelf, it's not supposed to be in the Jewish calendar a month of sinking into the kind of despair and commemoration and memory of catastrophe that Yomashua necessarily represents. So the 14th of Nissan was rejected, but not entirely. In the early years of Israel,

early 1950s, late 1940s, They still wanted to mark the Holocaust close enough to the date in which the uprising began to connect it to the uprising because it was seen as this act of defiance, of doomed courage, of a statement that you don't go quietly. That was what the early Israelis wanted to understand as the message of the Holocaust. There's no one message of the Holocaust. Every Holocaust Museum ends with a different message based on the culture it's embedded in. But for those Jews, many of them survivors, the single biggest group of survivors actually were early Israelis.

That was part of how they wanted to talk about it. And so they still wanted it to be close to the 14th of Nissan. In the end, the Jews of the ischouv of the Jewish community and the British mandatory period decided on the 27th of Nissan, a week after Passover, still in Nissan, still recalling the Warsaw Giro uprising. but a day that had another advantage over other dates. It was already a day of mourning for the Jews of the new state. It was a day that started to be marked as a day of morning bottom up by ordinary people. To remember specifically the Jews killed in what was called at the time the Arab Revolt. This was the great uprising by Palestinian Arabs against the British, against British rule,

that began in the spring around April 19, the 27th of Nissan, in the year it began, which was 1936. The Arab revolt of 36 to 39 was big, it was complicated, we very much live in its shadow today, we're not getting into it right now, but just to say as part of this story, that about 500 Jews were killed, mostly civilians on buses, in neighborhoods, on farms, in that uprising, in the terrorism that was directed at them. when the Yeshua started to commemorate them, those dead on the 27th of Nissan, it really was, it wasn't organized, it wasn't systematic, there was no law passed, there was no state of Israel yet. It was just a day of remembering held by ordinary people, and here's the crucial thing, they were remembering not abstractions, not political arguments about what the Arab revolt meant. they were remembering specific personal people, viscerally, a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child.

Why would this day then make sense for them as a day to commemorate the Holocaust? Why would a day that recalls an event that was tragic, the deaths of 500, there were many more deaths on the Arab side, there were something like 260 British deaths, it was big and complicated and lasted three years, but why would the deaths of these 500 somehow seem an appropriate square on the calendar

to devote to the unfathomable tragedy of the death of millions of the death of European Jewish civilization wholesale? If Israeli leaders tried to set Yomashua today to the start of the 1936 Arab revolt or, to put it in present-day terms, if they tried to set Yomashoua to October 7, that would be deemed a desecration of the memory of the Holocaust.

They're not categorically the same things. So why did it make sense to them? And what's fascinating is that it made sense to them not because they had abstracted the Holocaust to the point where it was insignificant, less significant, it made sense to them because they were so deeply, intimately close to it. What was happening goes to the heart of the difference

between how Israelis experience Jewish history Israelis have talked about and teach their children about Jewish history and how many others think and look at Jewish history, including many diaspora Jews, not all, but there is a difference between Israelis and non-Israeli Jews. What was powerful about the 27th of Nissan was precisely that everyone was remembering not an abstraction of a death, but a literal person.

when Knesset member Mordechai Nourok led the parliamentary committee writing the bill that set the date for Yomashua at the 27th of Nisan, that's exactly how personal and real and visceral it was for him. Nourouk was a rabbi from Latvia. His wife, Dvora and his sons Eliaou and Svi Baruch were murdered by the Nazis. He wasn't commemorating some moral category. he was setting a day to mark the murders of his children and his wife. And by the time his bill passed into law in 1951, over 140,000 displaced persons from Europe's displaced persons camps.

These are survivors. Jews who came out of Auschwitz, came out of the slave labor camps on German soil, came out of Bergen-Belsen, and were still stuck in these camps because no country on earth would take them in for year after year after year until Israel's founded and suddenly 140,000 of them have somewhere to go. They arrive in Israel. Every Israeli, in other words, they're a fifth of the country when they arrive. Every Israeli knew somebody, a sibling or a friend or a neighbor who had survived the genocide.

Or put another way, every Israeli knew somebody specific who had not survived the genocide. In many ways, therefore, this transformation of the community's existing Memorial Day for people they all specifically knew into Yomashoua, which was an event in which people died who they specifically knew, was a way for these survivors, for these victims, for these people who were themselves, they're the ones who set the date, to lay claim to that personal trauma. They took a day that they were already used to for a decade as a commemoration day for friends, for family members killed in those great troubles, and they applied it to a Holocaust that for all of its vastness and its incomprehensibility was for them still profoundly intimate and real. And it also made Yomashuaham more than a remembrance. The people setting down this day of remembrance on the calendar for the very much,

victimhood for the death for the loss, were the same generation building a new life, a new Jewish civilization. The destruction understood as that intimate experience of specific personal loss was linked to a rebirth, and the rebirth was just as intimate, was just as visceral and real for them, whether it was German Jewish refugees who arrived in the 30s or DPs in the late 40s or Iraqi Jews by 1951, whoever it was, many different Jews with many different stories, the arrival in Israel, often destabilizing, often impoverishing them, and for many also an experience of marginalization,

was nevertheless also a personal experience of sudden arrival from very great danger to a safe refuge. A DP at Bergen-Belsen, a survivor who, despite being liberated, still spends years after the war on the land of their murderers, experiencing how no, on their flesh, as we say in Hebrew, how no country on earth would take them in and give them that fresh start, suddenly arrives in a nation full of Jews willing to fight and die for them. With every problem under the sun, that was a redemption,

a redemption more visceral than any prophetic dream. of any prophet in the Bible. And these were a quarter of the IDF in the 1948-49 war, were these survivors. Yoma Shoa is followed a week after by Yomazikharon, as I said, Memorial Day for those who fell in Israel's wars. And a day after that, by Yomat Smaud, Independence Day, which is almost everywhere in most Israeli cities and towns,

a kind of raucous street party, celebrating the fact of independence, of self-reliance, of safety. This was the moment the Jews stopped dying at everyone else's behest. What would that independence have felt like to that generation of survivors, if not a literal physical redemption, straight from that valley of the shadow of death in which they had lived? So today's holidays form an arc, an arc of remembrance in which we put ourselves in the shoes of that,

that broken generation, that generation whose world fell apart and they had to rebuild it, and in doing so gave us the survival of just about all the Jews who would survive the 20th century in the eastern hemisphere of this earth. Theodore Dornow, the social critic, once said that the world after Auschwitz will forever be a world in which Auschwitz is possible, that Auschwitz fundamentally changed the world. There's no going back to the world before we knew that Auschwitz was a possibility. to, in other words, to a tolerance for vulnerability. And so the Jews, that generation who rose from the ashes

and retooled the Jewish people for this new world, that is what we remember in this arc. And again, it's not supposed to be an abstraction, even if we are generations removed. The experience of moving from the death camp to the freedom of being surrounded by Jews willing to live and die for you in a world that even Auschwitz left you to Roddenberg and Belsen was a literal direct experience of a double-digit percentage of that population.

We now live in an age of great forgetfulness, of great dishonesty. The great and the wise professors and activists and even unfortunately some rabbis occasionally. Forget this history. Forget everything this history represents and means. I don't mean that they want to amplify and center more history. The Arab experience, the Palestinian experience, other people who had a similar experience to the Jews in the Holocaust, like the Roma. I'm not talking about people who want to add to the story. I'm talking about people who insist that this part of the story should not be talked about, should not be part of our moral assessment of 48. I'm talking about people for whom forgetfulness is a political

demand. They forget actual people living in this actual place and the actual options given to them by the brutal exigencies in which they find themselves, and they forget it

for shallow politics or so that they can surrender their story to those who would erase their story, because they can't stand living in the gaze of those who demand that their story be erased. because they don't like what it would mean, to understand it, to learn it, to see it.

And so they succumb to the prejudices of a cultural milieu engaged in a deliberate act of a historical ignorance and projecting every Western self-doubt, self-abidingation, onto this convenient scapegoat, the most convenient scapegoat, the most common and useful scapegoat they've ever had and have always had. And then, of course, what do you do with a scapegoat? you pour all your sins onto it, and then you send it out to die. And its destruction is an act of moral purging.

And so every crime ever committed by the West, in the view of the anti-Israel progressive campaigner, or in slightly different vocabulary, conservative campaigner of late, those also exist now. There's a deliberate attempt to make those, that become a whole other part of this story, to place every possible crime and every possible evil and then destroy. And the Jews who succumbed to it can only do so through a forgetfulness. It's how you get a movement against Israel that's larger, that's more intense, that's more durable, more resonant, pops up in more countries, marches more often than any campaign or opposition

or rallying against any state, any nation, any war, even any atrocity in the history of the West. It is possible to oppose this Israeli government, obviously, and a terrible war, obviously, and every Israeli government, obviously, but the hatred of Israel in its totality of a people's very existence, the demand to relitigate its founding, by ignoring the actual history of its founding. That's totally unique to the Jews,

and the Jews are told to ignore that uniqueness because it definitely isn't relevant to understanding the nature of these campaigns which routinely turn violent against diaspora communities which is a routine thing people do when they're upset about a conflict on the other side of the world. It's a weird time to be alive. It's weird to see it happen in front of you.

There is no moral reckoning that can ever be real if it demands a forgetting of history. That's not what reckoning is. if it shrinks people into dehumanized cartoon villains, you can't forget what happened and claimed to be reckoning with what happened. So this Israeli arc of remembrance, these ceremonies of remembrance focused on connecting

with the real people and real experiences of that generation are therefore also an antidote to this mental architecture of villainization, of abstracting away human people, humans, actual real people, of projecting in that way, of moral bloodthirst. It's helpful to understand why Israelis aren't, don't seem quite as susceptible to it, as diaspora Jews, if you understand that sense of deep, visceral, human connection to that experience of the founding of Israel and the meaning of Israel. Zionism can't be defeated, not because Zionists are more clever or richer or more

manipulative or mystically backed by divine forces, but because Zionism was right. It was right about history. That generation, that success story of coming from the deepest depths of destruction into that independence. It didn't happen by accident. The last day in this arc, five days after Independence Day, a day so forgotten on the calendar that even Israelis generally don't know it's there, is Herzl Day, commemorating his death. That's the same Theodore Herzl who warned us that they would come for us. He famously said, will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below or a reactionary confiscation from above? In other words, which particular social class would come for the Jews? He said, will they chase us away? Will they kill us? I have a fair idea it will take all these forms and others.

Professor Jacques Cornfeld said of Herzl. Herzl could utter chilling prophecies about the fate that awaited Jews in Europe. Even his worst prophecies, it's worth saying, didn't imagine Auschwitz. Professor Cornfeld said he had an ominous sense of the fanatic dimensions that hatred of Jews could take, and hence the special dangers imperiling Jews in an age of potential political instability and disorder. Folks, what a terrible thing that Herzl is relevant again. Ben-Gurion inherited Herzl's ability to see around history's darkest corners, to predict what was to come. In 1938 in October, he was talking this way already in 1934, but in 1938 in October, were just after Chamberlain's capitulation in Munich,

Hungarian uttered these words. The outbreak of a world war which the Arabs are so vehemently in favor of, will place us once again in danger of abandonment and absolute siege. Hitler is not only the enemy and annihilator of the Jews of Germany, his sadistic and jealous desire is to annihilate the whole of world jewelry. And in December of that year, just a few weeks after Kristallnacht, Vengurian said this. The Nazi pogroms of last November, he said, is a signal for the destruction of the Jews of the world.

I hope I will prove wrong, but I suspect that this German pogrom is but the beginning. It started in Germany, who knows what will happen tomorrow, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in Romania, in other countries, until now even Satan did not dare to carry out such a plan. That was Ben-Gurian in 1938. These are all abstractions to the modern westerner. the Holocaust is depicted as this kind of moral argument. That's how it's taught. That's how the museums in America or in Canada or in Britain are structured.

Those Zionist leaders understood the trends and saw what was coming. And that's why they could save what was saved. It's why the Zionists, for example, were willing to negotiate with the Nazis for the rescue of Jews. As in the Ha'avara agreement, this was an agreement in 1933 between the Zionist leadership and the Nazi regime, to allow Jews to leave Germany with some of their property. Nazi Germany didn't let Jews take their property with them when they fled, and that made a whole lot of Jewish families try to stay behind in the hopes that they could survive the new regime, the new anti-Semitism,

and rebuild their old lives afterwards. But not surrender all of their property. Incidentally, Iran today has the same exact rule, and it keeps a lot of the Jews who remain in Iran in Iran, despite the anti-Semitism, because they would have to commit them, to absolute destitution if they leave. Most Jews, most of the time, mostly survived.

When German Jews expected to survive Nazism, that wasn't a crazy expectation. Because it was the first time they'd ever encountered Nazism. But this was different. And the Zionists saw it. And nobody else saw it. Diaspora Jewish leaders, especially American Jewish leaders, were absolutely livid at the Ha'r-Varra agreement.

It legitimized dealing with the Nazis, just when the Jews in America were trying to push for a global boycott of Germany. Why were the Zionists willing to deal with the Nazis, essentially to buy Jews out of Germany? Of course, the answer was not because they downplayed Nazi evil or tried to ruin American Jewish plans for anti-German boycotts, but the opposite, because they knew that the Nazis were infinitely worse than those diaspora Jews. could possibly comprehend. The Zionists understood, not all of them, but enough of the ones who mattered, that every Jew who could be convinced to leave Germany early,

maybe 60,000 by 1939 under the agreement, would be literally saved by it. Vengurian said, now everything is permissible. Our blood, our honor, our property, there are no limits as to what can be done to the Jews. He said that before the war. The Zionists saw ahead, of time, and they were almost entirely alone.

Friends, the intimacy is back. We know our dead once more. It comes back in every generation that has a war. My father fought behind Syrian lines in 1973. When he goes into Memorial Day, he remembers specific friends who died on that day. He gave sermons about it at synagogues over the years. There were some of his most powerful.

I will now remember friends from wars. I will think of specific people. And then on Independence Day, we will celebrate our strength as the great gift those people gave us. And on Herzl Day, those history nerds among us who remember Herzl Day, will thank the great seers of our people who saved our people. And we will also try to learn from their example to see in the Iranian regime all its destructive potential,

that it is a great destroyer, purposeful, and explicit, first of the Iranian people's own potential in future, and then of my people, and then of the region as a whole on its way down. We have to face this enemy with wisdom. You don't bomb everything you see. Before the war, I put out an episode explaining why bombs won't do the job. They're a part of the job, but they're not enough. But you also have to face them with a willingness.

is to take hard and decisive action to stare them down for years, to pay real costs, to take actions of the kind that our friends, even fellow Jews out there in the diaspora, in the safety of distant lands, don't always immediately grasp. A lot of Jews

are here with us. But I get why people would look at Iran and say, well, this isn't an immediate existential threat to me. Maybe the Israelis are going overboard. Maybe. We could be wrong in our assessment. But I don't think we are. And the costs, the big ones, the existential ones, are going to be born by us either way.

Zionism means refusing to pretend not to see. Not to see what Hamas represents to the Palestinian cause. I say that as someone who doesn't think we will ever escape the debt we owe Palestinians to give them their independence from us. And I say that in right-wing spaces as much as left-wing ones. and Hamas represents the collapse of that cause. What Hezbollah represents to Lebanon, not just because the Israeli war against Hezbollah will hurt Lebanon, because Israelis deserve to live free of that mass martyrdom cults never-ending attacks, but because of what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon itself directly.

It has gutted the country. From its political problems that it's caused to the bomb, to the explosion at the Beirut port, It has laid Lebanon on the altar of Iran's regional wars again and again and drawn Israel back in after years of quiet again and again. We Israelis know are dead personally, and we know our sacrifices, and we see our enemies for what they are. We respect them enough to see them for what they are. And these are immense strengths that give us the solidarity and the competence

and the steadfastness to see these enemies felled. These are the strengths of my people in this arc of holidays, in which we remember where we come from, how we became strong and safe, from total decimation, to sacrifice, to rebirth, to great gratitude. and always, always remembering, and this is what we teach on this podcast and in every lecture I try to do it, that real people, flesh and blood people, sometimes wise, often foolish, struggling and sacrificing

and trying to make sense of a crazy world. Real people gave us this gift, real people gave us these strengths. We're now headed into Yomazikon. It'll be painful. We'll remember individuals we knew and we will thank them. and we'll shed tears for them. And then we will celebrate because we see clearly, because we are strong, because we are free.

Thank you for listening.