My grandfather Nahum z”l spoke. That matters. He spoke. He did not remain silent, as so many did.

He spoke about Hislavichi. About a small Jewish town in western Russia where even non-Jews spoke Yiddish, where life was so intertwined that your neighbor’s language became your own. He spoke about his family: large, vibrant, where Yiddish was the language of the home, and life itself was imbued with Yiddishkeit, full of plans. And about what remained of them after the war: a single grave.

He was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. He fought in a reconnaissance unit and was severely wounded in 1944. A year and a half later, discharged from the hospital, he learned there was nothing to return to. His family had been murdered. All of them. Fifty-three of our closest relatives from Hislavichi appear on the lists of those killed.

On the mass grave, it was forbidden to write “Jews.” Only “Soviet citizens.” A marker was erected by a group of survivors on their own initiative. The state had no interest in the matter.

This was not an exception. It was policy.

I grew up knowing this, not as a historical fact, but as family memory: sparse in words, dense with meaning. I believed I understood what memory was.

The state that silenced

While researching my book on the history of Soviet Jewry, I encountered documents that cast new light on what I had already known from home. In hushed family conversations during the Soviet years, I had heard about the Black Book, documentary materials on the genocide of the Jews, compiled by Soviet writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg at the initiative of Albert Einstein.

The book was ready. It was never published. More than that, the very act of collecting testimonies about the mass murder of Jews was cited in the indictment against the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as evidence of “criminal activity.” Stalin’s investigators argued that focusing attention on Jewish victims meant setting them apart from other Soviet peoples.

The logic was simple and horrifying. Acknowledging the singular nature of the Jewish tragedy was deemed politically impermissible.

The names of the dead were erased twice, first by Nazi violence, then by Soviet silence.

Yuval. October 7, 2023

I write these words during the days of the Jewish calendar that fall between Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, and Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers.

These are days when personal and historical memory converge. The past ceases to be only history. The present ceases to be only politics. Memory becomes a form of responsibility.

My son, Yuval Ben Yakov z”l, a staff sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces, fell in combat at the Yiftach outpost on October 7, 2023, defending a country whose very right to exist is denied by those who killed him.

This year, he would have turned 24. His birthday falls in this very interval, between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day. He will be 21 forever.

There is no right way to write about such a loss. Any attempt risks either cold formality or something unbearably raw.

I will not draw parallels. The Holocaust is a singular event in human history. Any direct comparison would be both historically wrong and morally inadmissible.

But I can say what changed in me. What had once been family history can no longer be held at a distance. The vulnerability I had assigned to the past returned, not as a metaphor, but as reality.

This personal experience coincided with something I have begun to observe in the world around me.

When memory becomes a bargaining chip

In recent years, across Europe and the former Soviet space, the Holocaust has increasingly been reframed as “one tragedy among many.” Its uniqueness is being eroded, sometimes deliberately, sometimes through indifference or exhaustion.

This is not accidental. It is a tool.

The relativization of the Holocaust is an old political technique that has found new life. It appears not only in the rhetoric of outright deniers, but in academic discourse, on social media, and in the speeches of politicians adept at exploiting what I would call compassion fatigue, the growing reluctance to bear witness to someone else’s pain.

Antisemitism dressed in political language is no less dangerous than antisemitism in its overt form. It may be more dangerous, because it is harder to recognize.

My grandfather Nahum died in Israel, but he had time to tell his story. We stood together at the mass grave in Hislavichi.

I think about that today, as antisemitism rises not only across Europe but throughout the post-Soviet world. Hatred changes its form. Its logic does not.

Memory is not only ritual. It is a stance. To remember the victims of the Holocaust means refusing to allow their names to be erased. It means calling genocide, terrorism, and antisemitism by their names. It means rejecting the comfortable silence that societies and governments have long offered Jews in exchange for invisibility.

On my grandfather’s family grave, it was written: “Soviet citizens.”

They were Jews from Hislavichi. They lived, worked, raised children, and dreamed of giving them an education broader than what the local school could offer. Ordinary people from a small town. They were killed for who they were, Jews.

In the days ahead, memory ceases to be only the past. It becomes an obligation: to speak, to research, and not to remain silent.

In memory of Yuval, the book Reference Point was written together with Andy Fim (Chaim Ben Yakov & Andy Fim, Reference Point).

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)