Guest piece by Shira Yoskovitch - Holocaust Memorial Day.
As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and the daughter of parents who fought for Israel’s
right to exist and protect, my Jewish identity has had 1 foundational refrain - Never Again.
But what does that mean? When I was younger, the answer was easy (well, easy-ish to be
honest):
Never Again let the Holocaust happen.
Never Again allow for us to become the center of a mission to eradicate our lineage.
Never Again find ourselves on the brink of extinction.
Never Again allow ourselves to be defenseless.
Never Again sit by while one person / party / community tries to harm another to the point of
utter desolation.
OK… but as a Jewish adult in a post-Oct 7 th 2023 world, I cannot help but ask – what do those
things ACTUALLY mean? What do they look like, feel like, act like, sound like?
My community has always taken great pride in our ‘yiddishkeit’, our inside voice that
commands us to live by our true-north. To stand up for others’ rights to live as they choose to.
To live (as my Rabbi puts it), “Jewishly”. As a community we don’t need to agree with what
others believe – we choose to allow it to be, so long as it doesn’t mean that we as Jews, cannot
be.
And therein lies the conflict with Never Again.
We are a population that makes up <0.2% of the world. For context – Drake has 33.8million
followers on X, more than double the number of Jews in the world. And yet for the last 2+
years there have been daily demonstrations around the world that that is too many. Even as I
write this in late Dec2025, I am watching video of a demonstration to ‘globalize the Intifada’
happening in one of downtown Toronto’s biggest shopping malls. The people chanting are old,
young, Caucasian and not, men and women. There are visible handheld signs calling to
exterminate the Jews. This as the world just finished marking Christmas, a holiday that has a
call for peace and love. And 1 week after the largest massacre in Australia’s recent history at
Bondi Beach that killed 15 people, all because they were attending a Hannukah celebration.
As I tend to say almost every day of my life – I have a lot of questions. First amongst them:
Why?
Why is it ok to chant about globalizing the Intifada? Why, in a world where not that long ago
the death of Black community members led to Black Lives Matter, does an attack on another
marginalized group beget further cries to eradicate them? Consider this - what if after 9/11 or
the killings of Breonna Taylor & George Floyd there had been calls for more? Would that have
been ok? Or, as I’m sure anyone reading this just did, would the world have erupted with
righteous moral outrage decrying how vile a call that is?
To be clear - I’m not suggesting by any means that one event is better or worse than another,
or more impactful vs. another. They’re all disgusting. They’re all against what it means to be
human. They’re all against the social contract that we all belong to.
But why is one group memorialized with a global movement to protect, and another the target
of a global movement to erase?
Does the world truly need to play out in a zero-sum game, where for one culture to ‘win’,
another must necessarily lose?
Don’t both groups – in fact all groups- have a right to coexist?
Let that be the learning of Never Again as we now start 2026.
Never Again isn’t a slogan even though it’s often bandied about that way. It’s an ethos. An
acknowledgement that disagreements are ok. A commitment to align vs. agree.
A social fabric that invites and celebrates different threads to make the overall more resilient.