Silent Holocaust (Judaism)

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The Silent Holocaust may refer to several unrelated items. Certain Jewish communal and religious leaders have used this term to describe Jewish assimilation (cultural assimilation, religious assimilation) and interfaith marriages between Jews and gentiles.^[1][2]

Silent Holocaust or silent holocaust (Hebrew: שואה שקטה, sometimes called "another Holocaust" or a "second Holocaust"), is a phrase which is used by certain Jewish communal and religious leaders when they seek to contrast the demographic effects (the loss of Jews) due to present-day assimilation and intermarriages between Jews and gentiles (non-Jews) (who do not convert to Judaism) with the Holocaust of Europe's Jews during World war II when six million Jews perished.

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, instead, it is meant to evoke a state of shock due to the fact that millions of Jews are abandoning Judaism and their fellow Jews albeit of their own free will. However, the loss of millions of Jewish co-religionists is deemed serious enough to be called a holocaust (meaning a "wholesale sacrifice or destruction" [Concise Oxford Dictionary].)

Assimilation^[3] is the leading cause of the shrinkage of almost all Jewish populations in Western countries since World War II, and it has been called the Silent Holocaust^[4] by communal leaders such as Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach Program, perhaps the best-known popularizer of the phrase.

The use of silent holocaust in reference to intermarriage/s is actually quite common, both among scholars and lay people, as can be seen in 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..."^[5]
• "...Unlike the persecution that the Jewish people have endured at the hands of others for over 3,000 years, Jews on this continent are currently facing a "silent holocaust" which is stemming from within their very own communities and their very own households..."^[6]
• "There have been many other arguments which have been offered against intermarriage...Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, 12 million Jews were left afterwards. Today, there are only 13 million Jews in the world. Where are the rest that should number close to 20 million by natural increase? The answer is that the silent holocaust of assimilation has caused them to disappear as Jews."^[7]
• "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..."^[8]
• Even Anti-Semites such as 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.).^[9]
• 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.^[4]

Many Orthodox Jewish rabbis refer to assimilation as a type of "Holocaust". Orthodox Rabbis also refer to abortion as the "Silent Holocaust",^[10] and to conversion to Christianity as the "Silent Holocaust".^[11] Intermarriage, assimilation, apostasy (i.e. converting to Messianic Judaism or Buddhism), and abortions of Jewish babies are all described in terms of a "silent holocaust".

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. See [1] for an opposing view.

Referring to the assimilation of Jews[]

Concerned Jewish people sometimes refer to assimilation as a type of Holocaust. This is because assimilation is the leading cause of the shrinkage of almost all Jewish populations in Western countries since World War II. This shrinkage has been called the Silent Holocaust (in contrast to the genocide which was committed against the Jews during World War II) by communal leaders such as Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach Program.^[12] Buchwald said in 1992 that the Jewish community would not be recognizable in 25 to 30 years.^[13] According to the 2000—2001 National Jewish Population Survey, from 1996, 47% of American Jews married a non-Jew. The NJPS survey said that higher levels of education are associated with lower levels of intermarriage.^[14]

See also[]

• Black genocide – the notion that African Americans have been subjected to genocide
• White Genocide – a descriptive term for the threat of assimilation which is used in the Armenian diaspora, especially in the Western world]]
• White genocide conspiracy theory – a white supremacist conspiracy theory which states that there is a deliberate plot, often blamed on Jews, to promote miscegenation, interracial marriage, mass non-white immigration, racial integration, low fertility rates, abortion, governmental land-confiscation from whites, organized violence, and eliminationism in white-founded countries in order to cause the extinction of whites through forced assimilation, mass immigration, and violent genocide
• Guatemalan genocide
• Holocaust trivialization
• Cultural genocide
• Golus nationalism
• Slow genocide
• Baal teshuva movement
• To anti-abortion activists, the "silent holocaust" refers to the estimated 60,000,000 fetuses that have been aborted in the United States since 1973.^[15] One activist group, known as the "Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust," feels that everyone has been directly affected by this holocaust because all people have been denied the company of aborted individuals. The members of this group believes that it is their job to "defend the right to life of future generations and end America's genocide."^[15]

References[]