Silent Holocaust
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Silent Holocaust or silent holocaust, (sometimes called "another Holocaust" or a "second Holocaust"), is a phrase used by certain Jewish communal and religious leaders when they seek to compare the demographic effects (the loss of Jews) due to present-day assimilation and intermarriage of Jews with gentiles (non-Jews) (who do not convert to Judaism) to the Holocaust of Europe's Jews during World War II when six million Jews perished.
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A phrase not meant literally
The word silent implies that it is not meant to be a comparison in terms of the murders that took place during the original European Holocaust, but rather, it is meant to evoke a state of shock that millions of Jews are abandoning Judaism and their fellow Jews albeit of their own free will. Yet, the loss of millions of Jewish co-religionists is deemed to be serious enough to be called a holocaust (meaning a "wholesale sacrifice or destruction" [Concise Oxford Dictionary].)
Jewish assimilationism
Assimilation [1] (http://www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=83913) is the leading cause for the shrinkage of almost all Jewish populations in Western countries since World War II, and it has been called the Silent Holocaust [2] (http://www.njop.org/html/Newsletters_and_articles.html#a1) by communal leaders such as Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach Program, perhaps the best-known popularizer of the phrase.
Referring to intermarriage
"Silent holocaust" as referring to intermarriage/s is actually quite common, both among scholars and lay people (even anti-Semites know about it!) as can be seen from the following sources:
- "More than 50% of the Jewish People today are intermarrying, in some places it is as high as 90%.....Intermarriage has created a silent holocaust in this generation..." [3] (http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/IntermarriageWhyNot.htm)
- "...Unlike the persecution that the Jewish people have endured by the hands of others for over 3,000 years, Jews on this continent now face a "silent holocaust" stemming from within their very own communities and their very own households..." [4] (http://www.whymarryjewish.com/j2k.html)
- "There have been many other arguments offered against intermarriage...Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, 12 million were left afterwards. Today there are only 13 million Jews in the world. Where are the rest that by natural increase should number close to 20 million? The answer is that the silent holocaust of assimilation has caused them to disappear as Jews." [5] (http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/191/Q1/)
- "What is Wrong with Intermarriage?...This is all the more true after the Holocaust. Intermarriage...instead of bringing new Jews into the world by marrying a Jewish wife, one would be contributing to the decimation of our people and the “Final Solution” that Hitler and his followers began and nearly accomplished. The horrific rates of intermarriage today constitute a silent annihilation of our people..." [6] (http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=108396)
- Even Anti-Semites such David Duke of the KKK know about it when he quotes Rabbi Norman Lamm of YU and the head of Hadassah: "In 1989 Carol Diament was the National Director of Jewish Education at Hadassah, the Woman's Zionist Organization of America...She was quoted as saying ". . . we are not imparting to our children the responsibility to marry Jews...the greatest threat of all to the future of Diaspora Jewry is intermarriage.' Norman Lamm, president of (Modern Orthodox) Yeshiva University has said that intermarriage between Jews and non- Jews will result in "another Holocaust."...With a diminishing birth rate, an intermarriage rate exceeding 40%, Jewish illiteracy gaining ascendance daily--who says that the Holocaust is over? . . . The monster has assumed a different and more benign form." 3. (Quoted in Peter Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), p.185.). [7] (http://www.duke.org/library/race/bobjones.html)
- Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of NJOP, a well-known rabbi (respected by all streams of Judaism for his outreach work to secular Jews) in the USA: "There is a Holocaust taking place in America right now. We can't hear it, because there are no barking dogs; we can't see it because there are no goose-stepping Nazi soldiers and no concentration camps; we can't smell it because there are no gas chambers. But the net result is exactly the same. If we fail to act now, if we fail to share with our young Jews the beauty and meaningfulness of Jewish life and Jewish heritage, there will be few Jews left in the next generation who will even know that there ever was a Holocaust of European Jews. The "silent Holocaust" will have done its job. Hitler will have emerged victorious. [8] (http://www.njop.org/html/Newsletters_and_articles.html#a1)
Usage by Orthodox rabbis
Many Orthodox Judaism rabbis refer to assimilation as a type of "Holocaust". Orthodox Rabbis also refer to abortion as the "Silent Holocaust" [9] (http://www.jewsformorality.org/israel_abortion.htm), and to conversion to Christianity as the "Silent Holocaust" [10] (http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/web/j4jlibrary/silent.html). Intermarriage, assimilation, apostasy (e.g. converting to Messianic Judaism or Buddhism), and abortions of Jewish babies are all described in terms of a "silent holocaust".
Controversy and dislike of the term
There are people who are offended by some of the above-mentioned approaches and views, which is understandable given the nature of the Kulturkampf that is exposed. Similarly, the associations such views have with notions of ethnic, cultural, or racial "purity" make it an especially vulnerable target for accusations of hypocrisy, given the many years in which such notions were used as justifications for oppression of Jews. See [11] (http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/toexist/ShiksaHome.html) for an opposing view.