[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 7]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 9637-9638]
[From the U.S. 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.

[[Page 9638]]

       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 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.

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