The Book of Names at the U.N.

The United Nations, so intensely and relentlessly hostile to Israel for almost as long as I can remember, is the living embodiment of the argument set forth in Dara Horn’s 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews, a book I reviewed favorably in this space just a year and a half ago. (To revisit my comments, click here.) Israeli Jews fighting vigorously and strenuously for the security of their nation, uninterested in acting contrary to their own best interests to suit the agenda of their foes and those foes’ supporters in Turtle Bay, and imbued with patriotism born of pride in the might of their military—those people, the United Nations can’t stomach. (For a brief survey of the U.N.’s latest anti-Israel outrages, click here.) But dead Jews, especially in enormous numbers—those Jewish people, the U.N. can’t get enough of.

In 2005, for example, the U.N. took some time off its busy schedule of Israel-bashing to approve General Assembly resolution 607, proposed by (of all nations) Israel itself, recognizing January 27, the day in 1945 that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The fact that Jews the world over—including especially in Israel itself—observe Yom Hashoah annually on the 27^th of Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, makes the observance of the U.N.-sanctioned day feel confusing, or at least superfluous, for most of us. And yet it’s hard to disparage any attempt to memorialize the martyrs who died during the Shoah. And I don’t. But I also don’t know quite what to do with it.

At Shelter Rock, the day comes and goes each year without us doing anything at all to take note of it. Partially, that has to do with my personal disinclination to do anything at all that could possibly appear to be supportive of the U.N. And partially, I suppose, it has to do with the fact that the importance of marking the specific day the Russians arrived at Auschwitz is diminished, at least somewhat, by the fact that the Shelter Rockers themselves who had been prisoners in Auschwitz were all liberated at Buchenwald by the U.S. Third Army. But most of all we are disinclined to make much of International Holocaust Remembrance Day because we are already firmly committed to observing the annual anniversary of Kristallnacht in the fall and Yom Hashoah in the spring.

Nonetheless, I was prompted to rethink the issue after listening to the address delivered to the U.N. General Assembly by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on “their” Holocaust Memorial Day last week. Choosing his words carefully, the Secretary-General spoke directly and specifically about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world. “We now know the terrifying depths of the abyss into which Germany would plunge,” he said unambiguously, “but the alarm bells were already ringing in 1933. Too few bothered to listen, and fewer still spoke out. Today, we can hear echoes of those same siren songs to hate.” I was impressed—both by the sentiment and by the man’s willingness to say it out loud and unequivocally. And then he went on to observe that the rise of Nazism itself was not an unavoidable natural catastrophe like a tsunami or an earthquake, but rather a fully avoidable nightmare that was specifically made possible by “the indifference, if not the connivance, of so many millions.” Hearing him say that reminded me instantly of the many, many times I heard the late Irving Roth, himself a former Auschwitz prisoners liberated at Buchenwald and one of the truly great Holocaust educators of our time, say precisely the same thing. It was, for me personally at least, a striking moment.

And then Gutteres went on to discuss anti-Semitism in the world today. He was sharp and unequivocal, describing as a “painful truth” the fact that “anti-Semitism is everywhere” and is, in fact, “increasing in intensity.” Nor, of course, is anti-Semitism an isolated phenomenon: “Survey after survey,” he went on to observe, “arrives at the same conclusion: anti-Semitism is at record highs. And what is true for anti-Semitism is true for other forms of hate. Racism. Anti-Muslim bigotry. Xenophobia. Homophobia. Misogyny. Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movements are becoming more dangerous by the day.”

As regular readers surely know, I generally find it irritating—to say the least—when the kind of almost unimaginable barbarism that led to the Shoah is served up as just the Jewish version of some other kind of prejudice. And yet, listening to the man speak, I thought I heard a certain cogency in the man’s remarks. The tide of hatred, including violent hatred, is rising. And, although it once would have, it no longer strikes me as inherently absurd or reductionist to see all of its manifestations as part of the same terrifying phenomenon. And Gutteres also highlighted a fully cogent reason for seeing things in that light in his remarks: “The threat is global, and it is growing. And a leading accelerant of this growth is the online world…Many parts of the internet are becoming toxic waste dumps for hate and vicious lies. They are profit-driven catalysts for moving extremism from the margins to the mainstream. By using algorithms that amplify hate to keep users glued to their screens, social media platforms are complicit, and so are the advertisers subsidizing this business model.” I myself am absent from most social media platforms. I don’t have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account but haven’t ever tweeted anything out to my non-existent followers, choosing silently to follow American, European and Israeli politicians and read their tweets. I don’t have an Instagram account. I’m sure I’ve never even visited TikTok, whatever that is exactly. So I’m insulated from the kind of material Guterres was describing. But I know it’s out there. And his words sounded a kind of clarion call to me to speak out about an phenomenon I had until recently mostly managed blithely to ignore.

And then, after speaking, Guterres went personally to see the Book of Names exhibit.

This project, undertaken by Yad Vashem and soon to be on permanent exhibit in Jerusalem, is the result of decades of work undertaken by researchers at Yad Vashem to collect the actual names of all the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah. So far, they have collected an amazing 4.8 million names. There are, historians posit, at least a million names missing. Probably, there are far more than that. When the Einsatzgruppen massacred the entire Jewish population of towns in Ukraine and Belarus, they did not pause to collect the names of their victims. Even those murdered in the camps were not all listed by name: children sent to their deaths, which was basically all of them, were generally not listed in the Nazis’ record books at all. The book itself—a real book, at least of sorts—is gigantic: six feet tall and twenty-six feet wide. And, almost prosaically, the names are neatly arranged alphabetically, each one followed by the decedent’s hometown, year of birth, and place and date of death.

The work has been tedious, but continuous: just last year, 40,000 names were added to the Yad Vashem data base and then included in the Book of Names. The hope is to reach the 5 million mark sometime this year. But the work will become harder and harder as the years pass because so many of the names, and particularly of children, were simply not recorded and are therefore not recoverable.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. I want to see the book. I want to have that experience personally. But I can’t imagine myself setting foot in the United Nations building, a place synonymous in my mind with the most vile kind of anti-Israel prejudice. For me personally, the problem has an easy solution: I can go and see the Book of Names this summer at Yad Vashem itself. But that only solves the logistical problem, leaving me to grapple with a different problem entirely.

Is there some chance that Israel’s enemies at the U.N.—and they are legion—will be moved by the Book of Names to consider their attitudes? Will they see an exhibit and suddenly understand why Israel needs to exist…and why Israelis feel the need to defend themselves vigorously and not just to trust the rest of the world to look after their interests? Will they see the names of these millions of innocent victims and understand why Jews today cannot imagine a future without a strong Israel defending itself against enemies like Iran, a nation whose leaders regularly use Holocaust imagery to describe the slaughter of Jews it hopes one day successfully to accomplish in the Near East? Or will contemplating the Book of Names just be another task for U.N. personnel to tick off on their already over-packed to-do lists: condemn Israel, get coffee, censure Israel, email Mom, promote violence against Israel, tear up yet another parking ticket I don’t have to pay, encourage anti-Israel terrorism, drop by Book of Names, pick up dry cleaning….

I don’t expect much. In fact, I don’t expect anything. But the presence of the Book of Names in the U.N. Lobby combined with Antonio Guterres’s remarks in the General Assembly gives me some smidgen of hope that the U.N. might someday turn back into the force for good it was expected to become and which it briefly was. I suppose we’ll have to see. But Antonio Guterres has done the impossible by making me think that such a thing even could happen.