Today, April 8 / 27 Nisan, is
Yom HaShoah, the day Israel commemorates the destruction of 6 million Jewish lives in Europe. In full, this day is called
Yom haZikaron laShoah u’laGevurah, Day of Remembrance of Destruction
and Heroism.
Not only are the Jewish victims during World War II commemorated, but also the
Jewish resistance to the Nazis. The reason for the latter was the observation, in the 1950s, that young Israelis could feel little sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, believing that European Jews had been led like sheep to the slaughter.
The Israeli education curriculum therefore began to pay more attention to Jewish resistance to their Nazi tormentors through “passive resistance,” upholding human dignity in the most unbearable conditions, and through “active resistance,” fighting the Nazis in the ghettos and joining underground partisans who fought the Third Reich in the occupied countries.