Tonight, we mark Yom HaShoah and remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust alongside the millions of Roma, Sinti, queer people, disabled people, political dissidents, and others massacred by the Nazi regime. We mourn and remember them. May their memories be a blessing.

We remember, too, the victims of Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Many of us have ancestors who were persecuted, murdered, or ethnically cleansed during the Holocaust, when the Nazis wiped out two thirds of European Jews and forced most other Jewish Europeans to flee.

Many of us who descend from survivors of the Holocaust, or who grew up steeped in the memory of it, recognize those ancestors in all oppressed peoples. With fascism, militarism, white Christian nationalism, and antisemitism surging, we see the rhymes between the injustices of today and the injustices many of our ancestors faced.

When federal agents abduct people off the streets, detain and deport them without charges, and even kill with impunity, we remember ancestors hunted and thrown in prisons and concentration camps or expelled for their identities and beliefs. We see our ancestors who arrived as refugees in the faces of asylum seekers and migrants and in those whom the Trump regime has disappeared to concentration camps. We see those ancestors in the entire families wiped out in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran by U.S. bombs. And we recognize the pogroms many of our ancestors faced when we see Israeli settlers torch homes and murder Palestinians in West Bank villages with U.S. rifles.

For decades, right-wing politicians and institutions like Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the ADL have claimed that the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews can only find safety by bolstering Israeli military strength and subjugating Palestinians and those who advocate alongside them. These leaders evoke our collective trauma to promote fear, militarism, and division. They shamefully act in the name of Jews while they inflict atrocities similar to those our own ancestors suffered.

We know that Jewish safety depends on the safety of all of us. The only true safety is shared safety, and the only true freedom is freedom for all. Now more than ever, the legacy of the Holocaust drives us to stand with all who face oppression. This is the only path forward: shared safety through solidarity—not through dropping bombs, building walls, or isolating ourselves from others.

May we honor the memory of ancestors who fled, survived, and perished in the horrors of the Holocaust by ensuring that it never again happens for others. May we reject antisemitism and all forms of bigotry and oppression. May we honor the memory of these ancestors by fighting for a future where our people—and all people—are safe and free. When we say Never Again, we mean Never Again for Anyone. May their memories be a blessing, and a call to action.

@IfNotNowOrg "Shared safety" is the road to hell paved with "good intentions." I prefer the safety embraced by Rabbi Kahane zt'l!