Today is Veterans Day, established by Congress in 1954 to pay tribute to members of the United States Armed services, but, Veterans Day did not begin as a means of honoring those who prepare to wage the nation’s wars.
First inaugurated as Armistice Day on November 11, 1918, at the conclusion of World War I, the day served as a celebration of peace. By ending, “the war to end all wars,” many Americans believed that we were forever finished with war and that we had finally achieved what Jewish tradition calls shalom—an enduring assurance of safety, health, and happiness borne from living in a world when, “nation shall not take up sword against nation, nor shall they again study war.” (Isaiah 2:4)
Too quickly, European Jews discovered how wrong the Americans were.
Almost twenty years after the first Armistice Day, on the evening of November 9, the Jews of Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia were awakened by a nationwide pogrom led by members of the Nazi party’s paramilitary groups. Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested. Thousands were beaten. Nearly 100 were killed. Cemeteries, synagogues, businesses, and family homes fell prey to an evening that came to be known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, which became one of the first steps toward a second world war, as well as the Holocaust.
Nearly eighty-six years later, Jews in Europe again face uncertainty following the November 7 attacks upon Jewish civilians which followed the soccer match between Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Jews were hounded and chased through the streets of Amsterdam by violent mobs. Five were hospitalized, while another 20-30 suffered injuries.
Unlike Kristallnacht, however, which was orchestrated by the German government, Thursday night’s violence was categorically denounced by the Dutch government, which arrested 62 rioters by Friday afternoon. In addition, the Israeli government dispatched two planes to retrieve its soccer team and sent the foreign minister to meet with his Dutch counterpart to coordinate a more substantive response to emergent European antisemitism.
We lament the anti-Semitic attacks in Amsterdam, but we must remember that they and Kristallnacht are not one in the same. And we must not allow them to forsake our dream, a dream expressed by our Jewish ancestors thousands of years ago and echoed by our American forebears 106 years ago today—the dream of shalom.
—Rabbi Josh Knobel