What Makes People Tick?

Never Again... What does that actually mean in today's world? This What Makes People Tick? blog post looks at what I learnt about the Holocaust as a child, as a teenager and as an adult; it examines my current views on Judaism and it explains why I believe that it is still vital to educate everyone about the horrors of the Holocaust. Writing a post earlier this month about The non-Jewish Nanny who educates the world about Judaism , I realised that I also wanted to write about my own history of learning about Judaism. As writing about a sensitive topic like the Holocaust doesn't feel appropriate when also gushing about a young woman's social media pages, I figured that a separate post was in order. I was born in the early eighties and growing up in Europe, much of what I learnt about Jews and Judaism had to do with the Second World War. Back when I was in primary school in the nineties, we learnt a lot about the War. And back then, my grandparents and many others of their g...

 I'm quite certain that I'm not the only one who's recently learnt about Adriana Rosie's social media channels where she writes about being a non-Jewish nanny for Jewish families in Florida in the US. It was an article from the Times of Israel ( ‘Non-Jewish Nanny’ to Orthodox kids gains TikTok fame with cute culture-shock videos ) that got me reading about what she does. And honestly, I've really enjoyed going through this young woman's Every Single Instagram Post. Check it out for yourself:  Adriana Rosie @nonjewishnanny .  While I usually prefer using Instagram to check out photos as opposed to videos (one of the reasons I'm not on TikTok...), I have to admit that I've just been eating up the content, and have really enjoyed learning about all her experiences. This is someone who's respectful of a community with many customs, rules and regulations that may not make sense to, or seem strange to outsiders, and opens up that community to the wider wor...

"For the dead and the living,  we must bear witness."  --  Elie Wiesel Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. May we never forget; may Never Again be tattooed on our hearts.

Yom HaShoah How do you remember a tragedy some seventy years ago when you see it happening all over again, all around you and all around the world? How do you tell your children that those bad and evil people who murdered so many last century are not dead and gone as we once thought but still here, just wearing different faces, shouting different slogans? How do you honour your family members, the ones still here who lived through it and the ones long gone, murdered or gassed or shot or simply left to rot, how do you remember them without the promise, always, of Never Again? How do you tell your children, your neighbours, your ancestors and future generations? How do you explain to them that despite the horror and the knowledge and the pain, it is happening again? In Brussels (Belgium) where three innocents were murdered at a museum. In Paris (France) where four were murdered at a kosher store. In Copenhagen (Denmark) where a man was killed outside a party. In Amsterdam (Nethe...

In a 26 March 2015 article, The Jewish Press writes that "Rhetoric plays a major role in the demonization of Israel. The dissemination of false arguments is prevalent among the major demonization techniques. It is thus important that those who publicly defend Israel be trained to see through such tactics. One technique used against Israel is false moral equivalence. It is based on the deceitful claim that there is no difference between two greatly dissimilar actions. Examples abound and only some of the most frequent ones can be mentioned here. A prominent one is the perverse claim that Israel’s behavior is equivalent to that of the Nazis. This example of false moral equivalence is widespread throughout Europe. Five studies covering nine European countries show that about 40 percent of Europeans think Israel is a Nazi state." Source: Demonizing Israel With False Moral Equivalence | The Jewish Press http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/demonizing-israel-with-fa...

Recently read an article entitled "Freedom Under Attack" in the Op-Ed section of The Jewish Press. The writer, Ron Prosor, is Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Read the article at: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/freedom-under-attack/2015/03/05/ A lot of what Ambassador Prosor says has me nodding, not just today but in the past as well and from what I read, I find that he makes a lot of sense to me. Which is why I'm sharing some quotes from the article. The quotes are in bold text, my own words are in plain text. Ambassador Prosor starts by looking at 1945, the year World War Two ended in Europe. The year 2015 marks seventy years since the closing of Auschwitz - Birkenau and other Nazi camps, the death of Anne Frank, the liberation of Europe from the claws of Nazi Germany and the eventual end of World War Two. My grandparents lived through that War and growing up, it was not uncommon that they and other grown-ups, those old enough to remember ...

The world today is a mess. By that I mean that humans have made it into a mess. War and disease in Africa, rape and murder in the Middle East, social and economic upheavals in the west. People hate, murder, rape, abuse, lie to, threaten, torture and mistreat others. When it comes to looking at the world as a whole (not on a local or community level), I believe it is fair to say that we don't help each other, we don't think of the whole world as one family of humanity and we often treat other people as if they were less than us or beneath us. Even though we have thousands of years of history to learn from, it seems we just keep repeating the same mistakes. Even though we can do a quick online search to read works by authors such as Homer and Hippocrates, it seems we can't learn from them. Even though we can read about campaigns of Roman leaders who lived more than 2000 years ago, it seems we can't learn from them. Events in the past few months have shown me that we ...

Yale University's Avalon Project has a copy of the Hamas Covenant 1988  in their archives. The following is a direct quote. I encourage all readers to read the entire Covenant and to form your own opinion based on your personal interpretation of the document. Article Twenty-two:   For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard a...

The Wire reported yesterday that rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands are disturbing the dead as well as the living. According to the article, Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, recently announced that 26 skeletons of World War Two soldiers have washed up. Rising sea levels have caused the graves to become exposed. The bodies are believed to be those of Japanese soldiers. The Marshall Islands are particularly precarious in their perch; the nation, made up of 29 atolls, is roughly just six feet above sea level. With sea levels predicted to rise by three-to-six feet by the end of the century, the alarm is obviously growing.  Source: Rising Sea Levels Are Exposing Bodies of Buried WWII Soldiers , The Wire The Marshall Islands are a prime example of the damages global warming can cause. As our world becomes warmer, ice caps melt and sea levels rise, causing extreme damage to low-lying countries such as the Marshall Islands. In the same article, Marsh...

Many years have passed since 1948 and whether one likes it or not (I'm looking at you, Hamas!), the State of Israel is an established fact. The only way to remove the State of Israel is to wipe every last bit of it off the map entirely, which would equate to the mass genocide of millions of innocent people. Seeing the world already tried that 'solution' some seventy-odd years ago, let's try building bridges this time instead of fences. Just as the State of Israel is an established fact, so are the Palestinian people in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and their aspirations for a united Palestinian state. Just as the horrors of the Holocaust must always be remembered so that we will never repeat such crimes against humanity, so too must the Palestinian people find a way to live without feeling like refugees, safe and secure, in a place they can call their own, in a land that they call their own. It is time that Israelis and Palestinians realise that they can keep fight...

The Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis during World War Two. The country lost over 102,000 people to the War. Unlike in many other countries, there is no monument where the names of all those who died and were murdered are listed. An initiative is in the works now to build just such a monument in Amsterdam. It is possible to 'adopt' or 'sponsor' the name of family members, friends, loved ones, people who once lived in your street before being deported or going into hiding... Or even total strangers. By giving a small donation, someone who did not deserve to die will be remembered, their name will be known and their memory will be honoured. We at What Makes People Tick? very much applaud this initiative. A short explanation, from the website: "102.000 Nederlandse slachtoffers van de Holocaust verdienen een plek om hen te gedenken. In Amsterdam komt een monument met de namen van 102.000 mensen die nooit een graf kregen. Eindelijk een plek waar nabestaanden...

In The Netherlands, the fourth and the fifth of May are special national days.  The fourth of May is Liberation Day while the fifth is Remembrance Day. "People experienced the Second World War in very different ways, depending on who they were, what they stood for, what they did or where they lived. All those different experiences are reflected in the different commemoration ceremonies throughout the years. During the national commemoration of Remembrance Day on 4 May, those various experiences come together and the dead are jointly remembered." (1) "On the 5th of May we celebrate that we in The Netherlands live in freedom. We celebrate that we were liberated in 1945 from German occupation in Europe and Japanese occupation in Asia and that since then we've been free from war and repression in the Kingdom of The Netherlands." (2)

According to Tablet Magazine's article entitled "New Shoah Book Is Hit Among Non-Jewish Iranians", the first-ever book about the holocaust in Farsi is becoming a hit in Iran. Read more about the four-part book by Iranian author Ari Babaknia at Tablet Magazine or over at the   Amazon website where it is available for $200. According to Persian community Jaam-va-Jaan magazine , "The academic honesty with which [Babaknia] writes will give readers an unbiased and detailed understanding of not only the events of the Holocaust but the subsequent impact. The amount of research that has gone into this book is incredible."