Each year on January 27, the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We gather to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the millions of others targeted by Nazi persecution. We recommit to memory, education, and vigilance against antisemitism.
Yet remembrance is not meant to comfort us. It is meant to discipline us.
“Never Again” was never intended as a ceremonial phrase, recited once a year and then set aside. It was meant as a warning. Atrocity rarely announces itself politely. Denial often follows violence with alarming speed. Silence, especially when crimes prove politically inconvenient, carries consequences.
Those lessons are not abstract. They speak directly to this moment.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a coordinated assault against Israeli civilians. Families were murdered in their homes. Women were subjected to brutal sexual violence. Children were killed or taken hostage. These acts were not tragic byproducts of war. They were deliberate crimes, documented by survivors, first responders, and, in many cases, by the perpetrators themselves.
What followed was almost as troubling as the attack itself.
Almost immediately, the response took on a familiar and disturbing shape.
Some denied the atrocities outright. Others demanded impossible standards of proof. Still others spoke of “violence” in the abstract, while refusing to name its nature or its authors. Sexual violence, rightly condemned elsewhere without hesitation, met equivocation and delay when the victims were Israeli and Jewish.
This pattern should unsettle anyone who claims fidelity to the lessons of Holocaust history.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with disbelief, euphemism, and the failure of institutions to confront reality as it unfolded. Today, the facts of Auschwitz stand beyond dispute. That clarity came only after catastrophic loss. We should not require decades, archives, and posthumous apologies before moral clarity emerges again.
Nor does the erosion of memory occur only through outright denial.
Holocaust memory also degrades through more subtle means. As Yad Vashem has warned, distortion increasingly takes the form not only of denial, but of inversion and instrumentalization. The language of human rights is misused to blur responsibility, recast perpetrators as victims, and drain specific crimes of their moral meaning. In this way, remembrance is undermined not by erasing history, but by emptying it of consequence.
It is precisely this danger that has shaped the response to October 7.
Facing denial, preserving truth
In response to the denial and distortion surrounding that day, an independent body of legal scholars, human rights experts, forensic specialists, and trauma professionals established the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes Against Women and Children. Its mandate is not political. It is evidentiary. The commission exists to document crimes, preserve testimony, and ensure that these atrocities are neither forgotten nor denied.
This effort matters not because it competes with other suffering, but because truth does not fragment.
The same standard applies to the institutions that claim moral authority on the global stage.
International institutions, including the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, help shape global norms. Those norms lose their force when applied selectively. When institutions that speak loudly and rightly against sexual violence hesitate because the victims are Israeli or Jewish, neutrality is not the result. Credibility erodes.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us that memory carries obligations. To remember honestly means resisting denial while it is still unfolding. To name atrocities clearly, even when doing so proves uncomfortable or politically contested, is not partisanship. It is prevention.
This principle is universal. The lesson of the Holocaust does not belong to Jews alone. But universality demands consistency. We cannot commemorate past atrocities while softening present ones. We cannot insist that “Never Again” means something while applying it conditionally.
Time only raises the stakes.
The number of Holocaust survivors continues to shrink. Soon, there will be no living witnesses left to correct distortions in real time. What will remain are the records we preserve, the institutions we build, and the moral clarity we demonstrate when new atrocities test our resolve.
October 7 is such a test.
To remember the Holocaust while minimizing, relativizing, or excusing contemporary atrocities against Jews, especially against women and children, is not remembrance. It is abdication.
“Never Again” does not promise that history will not challenge us again. It demands that we confront evil when it appears, defend truth when it is contested, and insist that human rights do not depend on politics or identity.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we honor the victims of the past. We also affirm a responsibility in the present: that atrocities will be named, victims will be believed, and silence will not pass for moral seriousness.
That is what remembrance demands.
The writer is the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the recognized central coordinating body representing 50 national Jewish organizations on issues of national and international concern. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the positions of all member organizations. Follow him @Daroff.