Why jews deserved the holocaust

A Limited God. God is not omnipotent. He does not have the power to bring to a halt such things as the Holocaust. Terrible events such as the Holocaust are the price we have to pay for having free will.

God will not and cannot interfere with history, otherwise our free will would effectively cease to exist. Eliezer Berkovits, for example, stresses that God is all-powerful but that he curtails his own freedom to respect human freedom, even with such horrific consequences.

A Suffering God. Borrowing from Christian reflection on Christ and the passibility of God, Hans Jonas has suggested that God is limited in power but able to suffer with the pain of the Jewish people. Others stress the compassion and love of God, even if not understood in the Holocaust. Jewish Survival. The event issues a call for Jewish affirmation for survival. The rise of the nation of Israel is one way of reading this revelation. Emil Fackenheim s peaks of the th commandment-- " "Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories.

The Shoah exceeds human comprehension. It is a so horrific as to strip away any attempts at explanation. A Theodicy of Protest. If the Holocaust is a mystery, it is nonetheless on the surface a clearly unjust and wicked horror that God should have prevented.

What does this then reveal about the character of God? Some Jews escaped ghettos and joined partisan movements fighting against the Nazis from forest enclaves. Within the ghettos and the killing camps, acts of defiance, small or large, were suppressed and the brave dissidents savagely punished. When the Allies began to close in on Germany in late and early , the Nazis forced the surviving prisoners on long marches to camps believed to be out of the way of the advancing enemy armies. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, violence, and starvation on these death marches.

As the Allied armies moved into Germany and Poland, they liberated the concentration and extermination camps, and witnesses to these scenes—war reporters and military personnel—were horrified by what they found. The world already knew the Germans were gassing, or working to death, Jews and other ethnic victims in these camps.

Escaped prisoners had reported conditions to the media and to government officials in the United Kingdom and the United States. As an adult, Janine Simone Hopkins was encouraged by her family to record her experiences and reflections of her life in Paris during the German occupation. Attached to Canadian and British forces, the first Americans to see ground combat in Europe witnessed disaster at Dieppe. This article examines how World War II marked an important moment in the political history of modern zoos.

When the war in Europe ended in the spring of , Romani survivors were scattered, exhausted, and traumatized. Before she posted her first video about being Jewish, Julia Massey considered whether she even wanted to share that part of herself. A half-dozen Jewish teens on TikTok said they experience anti-Semitism nearly every time they post content to the platform, regardless of whether or not the content is about their Judaism.

Sometimes it takes the form of denying the existence or the severity of the Holocaust; at other moments, it takes the shape of equating Jews as a people with the actions of the government of Israel. Several of the Jewish TikTok users who spoke to NBC News shared screenshots of dozens of comments they'd received, which included nose emoji, a shower and gas pump emoji in reference to the gas chambers of the Holocaust and the word "Heil" with an emoji of a person raising their hand, a reference to the Nazi salute.

In more insidious comments, users suggest either that the Holocaust was a hoax or that Adolf Hitler "might have as well finished his job. Several creators say their comment feeds are often inundated with the slogan "Free Palestine" and the Palestinian flag emoji.

Neither on its own is anti-Semitic, of course. But experts note that when the comments appear over and over again on Jewish content on TikTok — conflating Judaism with Israel and Israeli politics on postings wholly unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — they are wielded in a manner that is anti-Semitic.

She said that those comments imply that those creators have no identity as Jews apart from the state of Israel and that they would fall under the definition of anti-Semitism. We take strong action against hate groups and ideologies by banning accounts and removing content, including those which deny the Holocaust or other violent tragedies," a TikTok spokesperson said in an email.

But Jewish TikTokers say they're frustrated with what they say is often a barrage of anti-Semitism, which sometimes affects their mental health. It gets to me. Speaking up about anything is offensive to people now, and just expressing myself and telling people about myself causes all of this conflict and hatred towards me. It really discourages you from making content and speaking up in the future," Massey said.

The kind of criticism that Jews receive, she said, can cause her to feel more cloistered in her expression of her Judaism. Certainly fear for the consequences—if not physical harm than sanctions of some other kind—rose to the fore in various situations and at certain times—say, in the early months of Nazi rule characterized by terror to eliminate political opposition and during the war and occupation, especially in eastern Europe directly ruled by the Germans.

Focusing too much on fear, however, obscures and oversimplifies the more complicated dynamic behind the choices ordinary people made with regard to the persecution, then killing of Jews. Overemphasizing fear belies the range of complicit behaviors discussed above. Doing so also ignores the political reality that even within Nazi Germany, leaders were sensitive to public opinion. This was true of ordinary people who may have had little or only superficial relations with individual Jews and of the traditional elites with more influence—Church, university, military, and business leaders.

From the beginning of Nazi rule and the fateful years leading up to them, these leaders failed to speak out against hateful speech, violence, and after , legal measures that progressively stripped German Jews of their rights. For example, mindful of popular opinion, German authorities did not harm or punish the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men when the women publicly protested the pending deportation of their loved ones in Berlin on February 27, That protests in these two cases aimed at specific actions or policies and not the regime itself was significant.

Even when it came to participation in the mass shooting of Jews and others Roma, Communist leaders in German-occupied eastern European territories beginning in summer , the German police and sometimes soldiers who were involved had a choice. In his book Ordinary Men , Christopher Browning analyzes the factors that turned most men of one police battalion into first-time, then hardened killers.

A similar dynamic may have been at play for the less studied eastern European collaborators who participated in the German-led shootings; only a few opted out of the face-to-face killing of men, women, and children to serve as guards or in other capacities. Gain came in many forms and dimensions. The systematic plunder of Jewish assets in Germany and German-occupied Europe by agents of the Nazi regime has been well documented. It included businesses bought at less than fair market or reduced competition because of the liquidation of Jewish-owned businesses.

In Nazi Germany the property taken from the Jews following their deportation was distributed through public auctions, the proceeds of which accrued to state finance offices. In eastern Europe, many Jews entrusted household belongings to neighbors or friends prior to their forced move into Nazi-established ghettos.

Goods could then be sold off little by little in exchange for food. This strategy became a matter of life-and-death for Jews, but the temptations for their helpers were great. The war demoralized people who were decent and honest all their lives, and now without any scruples they appropriated for themselves Jewish property.

In the majority of cases, almost 95 percent, they did not return either possessions or goods, excusing themselves that this was done by the Germans through theft, etc.