The murder of people and culture

The Holocaust began long before the concentration and death camps. Before they murdered Jews, they murdered their culture. Kristallnacht, when books and synagogues were burned, is one of the Jewish people's worst memories. In their precise say, the Nazis managed to erase nearly 1,000 years of Jewish culture, culminating in the genocide of 6 million Jews.

From the Middle Ages through the Golden Age in Spain and up until the beginning of the 20th century, Jews created a strong culture that included philosophy, Hebrew language study, sports, poetry, art, music, song, humor, and theater. Jews used their rich inner spiritual life to compensate themselves for the external difficulties they faced. Every generation of the Diaspora had its own philosophers, rabbinical authorities and kabbalists, as well as researchers, historians, poets, and writers. All this was almost completely wiped out in the Holocaust. More than anything else, the Yiddish language -- a rich composite of Old German and Hebrew words spoken by millions of Jews throughout Europe -- was lost. A language that for hundreds of years symbolized an entire culture went up in flames along with millions of Jews. Even the scraps of Yiddish that remain are disappearing.

The Nazis obliterated not only Yiddish; but also the Ladino culture. Just as rich as Yiddish and based on Old Spanish, Ladino was the spoken language of millions of Jewish in Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans. The epicenter of the Ladino culture was in Thessaloniki, a city where Jews were the majority. When the Nazis murdered 90% of the Jews of Greece, they murdered that wonderful language, too. Like Yiddish, fewer and fewer people still speak it.

The sad truth is that even the reborn State of Israel doesn't do enough to preserve or develop the rich legacy of the Jewish people and hand it down to the next generation. How much time does the school curriculum devote to studying people like Spinoza, the father of modern philosophy; philologist and poet Judah Ibn Kuraish; writers I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem? Yes, a handful of Israelis are devoted to the Yiddishpiel Theater and the Ladino Festival. But they are a minority.

We must not be satisfied with ceremonies and memorials, important as they are. They commemorate what happened. Their function is not to preserve culture. When the Diaspora Museum was founded, it was intended to preserve Jewish culture. Unfortunately, the institution isn't really fulfilling its role as a cultural guardian: Other than a collection of models of old synagogues and its genealogy service, the museum mainly hosts exhibitions of contemporary art. We need more study material, books, television series, and films that tell the story of the culture that once was and the attempt to destroy it. Only by using such tools will we be able to preserve our rich cultures.

The challenge facing us as a people, a society, and a state is to not only commemorate and honor the dead (which we are of course obliged to do), but also to take care what message and legacy we are handing down to the next generation. In days like these, it's important that the legacy we inculcate in our children respects different cultures, first and foremost our own. It's time we all gave respect to Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Moroccan; to the eastern, Ashkenazi, and North African Jewish cultures, and to the heritage of those who brought them to Israel. It is unthinkable that we do to ourselves what others tried to do to us.

Colette Avital is chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel and a former MK.