[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 68 (Tuesday, June 6, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E895-E896]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     REMARKS OF RABBI IRVING GREENBERG AT THE DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE 
                             COMMEMORATION

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 6, 2000

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, May 4, Members of Congress 
joined with representatives of the diplomatic corps, executive and 
judicial branch officials and hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their 
families to commemorate the Days of Remembrance in the Great Rotunda of 
the United States Capitol. The theme of this year's commemoration was 
``The Holocaust and the New Century: The Imperative to Remember.''
  Even after more than half a century, Mr. Speaker, it is imperative 
that we continue to commemorate the horrors of the Holocaust in order 
to honor the memory of those victims of Hitler's twisted tyranny. We 
must also mark this catastrophe because mankind still has not learned 
the lessons of this horror, as evidenced most recently by the mass 
killings in Kosovo.
  Mr. Speaker, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the newly designated Chairman of 
the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, delivered a moving 
address at this year's Day of Remembrance ceremony. Rabbi Greenberg was 
appointed Chair of the Holocaust Council on February 15 of this year. 
He previously served as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 
Council's founding board from 1980 to 1988 and again as a member of the 
board since 1997. He is a pioneer of Holocaust remembrance and 
education in the United States and in the Jewish-Christian dialogue 
that has sought to revise theology in light of the Holocaust. He 
received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, he is the President of the 
Jewish Life Network in New York, and from 1974 to 1997 he served as the 
founding President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and 
Leadership. He also was executive director of President Jimmy Carter's 
Commission on the Holocaust. He and his wife, Blu Grenauer Greenberg, 
have five children.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that Rabbi Greenberg's excellent remarks at the 
Days of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol be placed in the Record, 
and I urge my colleagues to give them thoughtful consideration.

   Rabbi Irving Greenberg's Remarks: Days of Remembrance--May 4, 2000

  ``Behold I place before your today [for your choice] life and good, 
death and evil'' (Deuteronomy 30:15)
  And again: ``I call heaven and earth to witness to you: [the choice 
of] life and death I have placed before you, the blessing and the 
curse; choose life so that you and your children may live.'' 
(Deuteronomy 30:19)
  These biblical words are more than sacred scripture. They are the 
wisdom of living.
  Every moment of living is a moment of choice. From the time we are 
born, we start to die. Unless we choose to live, unless we choose to 
love, to create children, to build society, then death will win out 
finally. No action is neutral. The next food we choose to eat is a 
choice of health and life or it is harmful and a choice of death. The 
next word we speak is a word of love, of healing, of encouragement and 
hope, or it is a word of stereotyping and degradation, of dismissal and 
death of the soul. The next act we do builds society and repairs the 
world; or, it is an act of vandalism, of environmental degradation, of 
breaking down the world and death.
  As it is with individuals so it is with societies and nations. There 
are forces that can be deployed for human dignity and freedom and life 
or these same forces can be deployed to degrade and enslave, that is in 
the service of death.
  Sixty to seventy years ago, in a tragic process we now call the 
Holocaust, nations and individuals made a series of decisions that in 
sum added up to the choice of death for millions and millions.
  Panicked by economic depression and fear of social instability, 
millions of German voters chose to undermine democracy. They voted for 
a politician promising to restore them by removing the conflicts and 
risky choices of modern society, by concentrating power and by 
excluding foreigners and strangers and Jews. Thereby they unleashed a 
force of death. Fearful of making hard choices and of confronting an 
extremist, political leaders chose to make a pact with the devil and 
brought Adolf Hitler to power. Then legislators elected to go along 
with concentrating that power. Then the Nazis chose to suppress 
democracy, to crush the unions and the socialists and to exclude and 
isolate the Jews. Then jurists opted to go along with perverted justice 
and bureaucrats decided to classify and discriminate. These were all 
choices that brought death to power. These were the choices of death.
  Two thousand years earlier, a great world religion had chosen to 
pursue its own encounter with God and salvation and its message of 
love. But those great people chose to express their spiritual 
liberation in the form of a religious monopoly and asserted that 
Christianity had superceded the mother religion, Judaism. This claim 
was followed by stereotyping and devaluation of the carriers of the 
ancestral religion, the Jews. Thereby Christians set the Jews up in 
isolation, as targets of hatred and stereotyping. In the 20th century, 
in the hands of new pagans, new secular racists, even anti-Christians, 
these attitudes were turned into lethal decisions to rain death and 
destruction on the Jews.
  In the Holocaust, whole societies chose death. Generals in the German 
Army chose to set up killing squads. Businesses competed to build gas 
chambers and crematoria and supply poison gas. Corporations elected to 
use slave labor and work people to death.
  Democracies chose to close their doors to refugees and to remain 
indifferent and inactive in the face of the anguished cries for help of 
the victims. Hundreds of thousands of professionals and workers 
exercised their career choices to seek out and deliver Jews to their 
cruel fate. Millions of neighbors chose to remain silent or to look the 
other way or even to actively cooperate with despoliation and death.
  Unchecked by counter choices, the forces of death and degradation 
always spread their focus. The Nazis set up a machinery of oppression 
so millions of Poles were enslaved and persecuted and whole cadres were 
seized and killed. Roma/Gypsies were rounded up and tens of thousands 
were killed. Millions of Russian POW's were starved and brutalized and 
executed.
  Worldwide, Jewish leadership failed to grasp the enormity of the 
catastrophe and to risk all their standing to goad or dragoon the world 
into acting to save lives.
  These were all choices of death. In a cascade of such choices, 
humanity abandoned millions of humans. Death reigned supreme and the 
forces of hatred killed and degraded millions.
  After the war, banks chose to deny the survivors the return of their 
own bank accounts, and insurance companies rejected paying for life 
insurance policies they had issued. Others opted to reject 
responsibility for this catastrophe or for healing its survivors. 
Others choose to this day to deny that this tragedy even happened.
  Thus in the 20th century, a realm of death was created. A decision to 
kill a whole people--every last person--was made by a government and 
six million Jews died in the Shoah. When humanity looked into the abyss 
and realized that it now had the power of technology and human nature 
had the capacity for evil to the point of unlimited murder and the 
death of life itself.
  It would appear that the world failed to stop the triumph of death. 
But death and evil did not have the final word.
  Then the survivors arose. They chose not to revenge, not to hate, not 
to give up in despair and go silently to the grave. They chose life. 
They chose to love, to marry, to have children, to make new lives in 
new places. The Jewish people arose and rebuilt its life; it created 
the State of Israel where 250,000 survivors and millions of refugees 
created themselves anew. Jewry took power to protect itself. Throughout 
the world, millions, then hundreds of millions learned the lesson: 
NEVER AGAIN should people of any religion, of any race or color, be 
vulnerable and dependent for their dignity on the arbitrary power of 
others. National liberation and the demand for self-determination 
spread worldwide. Then outsiders, and second-class citizens, and 
second-class genders and sexual orientations learned the lessons of the 
Holocaust and determined to be free and equal by right. They chose to 
work for a world where human dignity would be universal and human life 
supported by political/cultural/legal structures by right. And 
traditional groups shifted from passive acceptance to activity to 
insure that their values be heard and their dignity upheld.
  For decades now, more and more people have awakened to the need to 
learn the lessons of this catastrophe. Out of love of life, they 
determined to preserve the memory of the victims, of their lives, of 
their dignity and courage in their struggle for existence, of their 
worlds that were destroyed. Thus they chose to reaffirm the value of 
life. More and more religions chose to confront the

[[Page E896]]

tragic flaws which facilitated this catastrophe and moved to purify 
themselves. More and more Christians worldwide have studied the 
lessons, confessed the sins and determined to correct the teachings. 
Thereby Christianity chose life and love again and reasserted its own 
vitality as a gospel of love bringing healing to the world.
  This process led the United States Government to establish a United 
States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the national mall, and to establish 
Days of Remembrance in the very week of Yom Hashoah when the survivors 
and the victims' families devote their days to remembering. Millions of 
Americans--the vast majority not Jewish, not Poles or Gypsies or gays 
or any of the Nazis' victims whose story is told in the Museum--come 
there to confront the painful truth. Through this encounter, they learn 
how democracies fail, when governments turn indifferent, and by what 
process bureaucracy, technology, and obedience were turned into 
servants of death. Inwardly they pledge to work that this democracy 
shall not fail; that never again will this people stand by 
indifferently as millions of others are degraded or destroyed.
  Each of these steps represents the choice of life.
  Everywhere, people are coming to understand that the evil we have 
witnessed, this model of death and degradation cannot be ignored or 
even bypassed. Rather there must be an active response--nothing less 
than a mighty outburst of freedom, a choice to universalize human 
dignity for life. Worldwide, there is a frenzy of attempts to restore 
the human image of God that was defaced and destroyed. There are urgent 
efforts to clear up stereotypes in religion or culture that degrade 
others or may lead to indifference to their fate. There is a powerful 
thrust to develop pluralism in culture, in religion, in political 
process, in economic power--to prevent any concentration of power that 
could lead to a future choice of destruction or suppression of others.
  Everywhere worldwide, these forces turn to the study of the 
Holocaust. Millions seek out encounter with its story and people 
because the encounter evokes the forces of love, compassion, human 
responsibility, the forces of life. Wherever people seek life, they 
draw strength from the bedrock of memory. Everywhere, humanity is 
driven by the goad to conscience which is intrinsic in Holocaust 
education.
  Of course the forces of death are not quiescent. Out of fear of a 
changing world and the transformation of culture, intolerance reasserts 
itself. Forms of fundamentalism which deny others their freedom of 
religion appear. Anti-Semitism and denial of the rights of foreigners 
and other outsiders surge again. Forces of neo-Nazism and terrorism 
strengthen. Not surprisingly, such forces often deny the reality of the 
Holocaust or belittle its dimensions.
  We are asked. Will there be an imperative to remember the Holocaust 
in the 21st century? The answer is: As long as humanity chooses life, 
then more and more people will remember and learn the lessons of the 
Holocaust. Then governments will more likely intervene to stop 
genocide, more likely create open, pluralist multi cultural societies, 
more likely deny dictators the claim that no one dare interfere in 
their internal affairs.
  The true question is not whether humanity will honor the imperative 
to remember the Holocaust. The true question and challenge is: will 
humans rise to greatness in the choice of life.
  Can our conscience seared by the fires of Auschwitz, become an 
irresistible political force so nations will not tolerate, nay, will 
intervene to stop genocide? Can the model of the survivors and the 
righteous gentiles, inspire us to a new human solidarity that will 
enable all peoples to live in freedom and peace?
  The memory of the victims and the voices of the survivors, the 
actions of the righteous and the rescuers call out to us: Choose life 
that you and your children may live.

                          ____________________