This blog was originally published by The Friends of Israel.

Two years ago I was in Israel on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day). Our team of young adults, a delegation from California and Nevada taking part in the March of the Living, sat in a park amphitheater together. We each shared what we had learned about the Holocaust during our two weeks in Poland and Israel.

Not long after we began, the wail of a siren broke the calm of the still, spring morning. For two minutes, the haunting blare rang out in remembrance of the 6 million Jews and 5 million Gentiles who died as victims of the Holocaust.

Yom HaShoah is, by its very nature, relatively modern, established by an act of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in 1951. This means, of course, that, unlike Passover, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, and the other feasts of Israel, Yom HaShoah is not a biblical holy day. Rather, it is a solemn observance—and a very painful one at that—in which the Jewish community collectively memorializes victims of the Holocaust.

The fact that it was not instituted by God, however, does not mean that Yom HaShoah is not theological. On the contrary, questions about God, His relationship with Israel, and His character are inherent to discussions about the Holocaust. I discovered this several years ago when talking with a Holocaust survivor. He said, “If we are God’s Chosen People, why did He allow 6 million of us to perish? I find it very hard to believe in such a God.” 

Since then, I have heard similar sentiments repeated countless times by Jewish friends. We must acknowledge, however, that questions of God’s presence during the Holocaust are distinct from questioning God’s existence in light of evil in general. My Jewish friends are not necessarily questioning God’s existence; they are questioning why their God would allow such evil to befall His special people.

The Bible has the answers to such questions. Let’s address just a few.

1. GOD WAS NOT SLEEPING.
Recently I was at coffee with a Jewish friend. We were talking about God’s protection of the Jewish people throughout the ages when she said, “I guess God was asleep at the wheel during the Holocaust.”

Certainly, from a human perspective that seems plausible. After all, surely God must not have been alert to or aware of the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. God tells us, however, that He was not sleeping. Far from it, in fact.

Consider past persecutions of the Jewish people. Remember the account of Esther? Although God’s name is never once mentioned in the book of Esther, His hand behind the scenes is evident as He raises a young Jewish woman to a place of authority in the Persian king’s court. He uses Esther to save Persian Jewry from annihilation (Esther 4:14).

And who can forget the Exodus out of Egypt? Oppressed for 400 years by the Egyptians, God used Moses to lead Israel out of bondage and eventually into the land He promised them (although their sin added four decades to the journey!). 

The Lord was not distant from His people during these times—He went through the trials with them.
God was not sleeping or unaware of Israel’s suffering during these painful periods. In fact, the psalmist writes, “Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). And the prophet Isaiah declares that “[i]n all their affliction He was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). 

The Lord was not distant from His people during these times—He went through the trials with them.

2. GOD FORETOLD OF JEWISH PERSECUTION.
If God was not sleeping during the Holocaust, then He must have allowed the Holocaust to take place. How does that square with a just and good God?

The answer to this question is found in Deuteronomy 28, where we read that because God has a unique relationship with and love for Israel, He will chasten them when they are disobedient. Among the curses of chastening listed there, we find the following:

Then the Lᴏʀᴅ will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known—wood and stone. And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lᴏʀᴅ will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, “Oh, that it were evening!”And at evening you shall say, “Oh, that it were morning!” because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see (vv. 64–67).

The parallels between this description and the experience of many during the Holocaust are unavoidable. Centuries before Hitler was born, God foretold future dispersion of the Jewish people and subsequent persecution of them on the part of the nations.

We must remember, though, the purpose of these curses. They are not merely punitive measures, taken to show God’s displeasure. These curses are acts of God’s chastening of His beloved Chosen People. Indeed, the Scripture records that “whom the Lᴏʀᴅ loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights” (Prov. 3:12).

3. RESTORATION AND JUDGMENT WILL COME.
The thing about punishment is that it is usually an end in itself, the consequence of bad behavior. Chastening, on the other hand, has as its end goal repentance and restoration, not pain. The pain of punishment is the catalyst God uses to get His people’s attention and to show them where they went wrong.

Shortly after listing the cursings that will come upon Israel for disobedience, God promises restoration, conditioned on repentance. 

Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lᴏʀᴅ your God drives you, and you return to the Lᴏʀᴅ your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, that the Lᴏʀᴅ your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lᴏʀᴅ your God has scattered you (Deuteronomy 30:1–3).

Interestingly, eight days after Yom HaShoah, Israel and the Jewish community worldwide celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day. It is a joyous celebration of the rebirth of Israel as a sovereign nation. But to the believer, it is more than that—it is a recognition of God’s faithfulness to His Chosen People, and it looks forward to the day when ultimate national repentance and restoration will take place (Zechariah 12:10; 14:9–11).

The Holocaust was an incredibly painful event, one that continues to haunt not only the dwindling number of people who experienced it firsthand, but their children and grandchildren too. The Holocaust, though, was not the end. Indeed, as the psalmist writes, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). God promised that national restoration will come, and that restoration precedes the judgment of all who have sinned and not placed their trust for salvation in Israel’s Messiah, Nazis included (Revelation 20:11–15).

CONCLUSION
Sitting in that amphitheatre, the lone Gentile among a dozen or so young Jewish people, my heart hurt. Many, if not all of those sitting with me, lost a relative in the Holocaust. 

But as the siren’s scream came to a close, I found myself thanking God. Despite centuries of persecution and satanic attempts to destroy God’s Chosen People, and despite being scattered around the world, sitting with me were members of a new generation of Jewish young people, visiting the historic Jewish homeland. God has been faithful to His promises and He always will be.

This article was originally published by RebelFolio, a publication of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas's Hank Greenspun School of Journalism & Media Studies.

​It’s a warm summer day in Las Vegas, but the heat in the house is set at 80. Clad in light blue button-down pajamas, a gold Torah scroll on a chain hanging from his neck, 90-year-old Marton Ackerman sits back on his deep, black leather sofa.

On the coffee table in front of him is a glass of Coke, a landline phone, cell phone, medications, and a calendar marked with dates with doctors. He carefully lifts the Coke from the table and takes a sip through his bendy straw. He prepares to go back in time.

“We were very poor, and luckily I had a loving family,” he says. “We never went to bed without getting a kiss from my mother. And that’s what I remember from early days.”

Ackerman was born in Mexico to Hungarian Jewish parents in 1929. His parents split up when he was very young, his father staying in Mexico while his mother took the three children and went back to Hungary. 

When Hitler invaded Hungary in March 1944, Marton was 14 years old, living on Kiraly Street 6 with his mother, older brother, younger sister, maternal grandmother, and two aunts.

“The place was a huge building with apartments in it,” he says. “We were on the second floor. On the first floor was the temple, a Jewish shul. We lived in 3-bedroom house, 3-½, I think. … It was a tenement. My mother and all of my aunts worked for a textile factory repairing the bad parts of the whole sheet of material. They would bring it to us, and I remember that the living room was almost up in the ceiling with textiles, and we kids used to go up on a top and—” 

Marton makes a sliding sound with his mouth, as he demonstrates with his hand how they would slide down the stack of cloth. He stares down at the coffee table in front of him, looking through it to a distant time and place.

 “I had a happy childhood for a while,” he says with a smile that doesn’t quite make it from one side of his mouth to the other.

Indeed, Marton’s childhood years were marbled with moments of beauty and tragedy. He played in the streets of Pest, the poorer half of Budapest. He sang in a choir at the synagogue with his boyhood friend, Tibi. He fished from the banks of the Danube River and brought his catches home for his mother to fry. 

“The non-Jewish friends that I had way back, I never went to school with them, but we gathered together in the park and we played together ... football or climbing the hills of Buda,” he tells me, smiling as he talks. “And they were okay with me, you know. But when this started, I think it was...well, antisemitism always was there, but it got worse.”

For Marton, rumblings of the persecution Hungarian Jewry would eventually experience began years before the Nazis occupied his homeland. In the 1930s, the Arrow Cross Party, which shared the anti-Semitic and nationalistic ideologies of their German counterparts, formed in Hungary. The hatred they spewed permeated Hungarian culture, including that of young people.

“[Young people] were trying to spying on us when we were getting out of our school,” he says. “I remember the stores in Budapest had metal curtains they would pull down over the windows. The only reason I remember them is because the … young people would shove me into them and my head would hit the metal.”

Marton endured these beatings, while the young people, students of a local Catholic school, threw racial and religious slurs at him, calling him “dirty Jew” and other names. 

Although Marton cannot remember the exact year when these things happened, he does know that it was shortly after these beatings that he dropped out of the 8th grade, due to the family’s financial difficulties. 

“I went as an apprentice to a furrier, where they made fur coats and all that,” he says. “It was at that time that they started to deport the older Jews. They sent them to work camps and some of them to concentration camps. But my family, we were okay for another year.”

On April 5, 1944, the decree was made that all Hungarian Jews were to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. Marton remembers that time. 

“We had to wear yellow stars,” he says. “We were restricted on what time we could go out and when we couldn’t. But in the building there were quite a few Jewish kids, and—stupid us—we decided to take off our yellow stars and go to the movies. We sneaked in, because no one had money. But there were always ways for kids to get into the movies.”

Life for the Ackerman family changed drastically in the fall of 1944. On November 29, the Royal Hungarian Government ordered all Jews to leave their homes and to move into the newly formed ghetto.

“Well, they just came in, you know,” he tells me of the morning Nazi officials came to his family’s apartment. He stares at the fireplace across the room from where he is sitting. “They didn’t ask us permission. And not just our [apartment], but everybody who was Jewish there. And evidently they knew who was [Jewish], because there were other people [living there], too; not just Jews.” 

Before moving into the ghetto, the Ackerman family was first taken to a horse-racing track, where the men and women were divided into two groups. 

“My brother and I went to one side and the other part of my family went on the other side,” he says. “This was the first time I was away from my mother.”

At the race track, 15-year-old Marton encountered the complexities of human nature and of the war, in particular. After being ordered to hand over his wallet by a member of the Arrow Cross Party, something strange happened.

“I gave him my wallet that had only my Mexican birth certificate and a picture of the Belzy Rebbe that my grandmother gave me,” Marton tells me. “I told him it was my grandfather. He gave me back my wallet with the birth certificate and the picture. Surprisingly, this man gave me 100 pengő. It was a big sum at that time for me, at least. I never seen a 100 pengő. He said, ‘Good health. Good luck.' To this day, I do not know why he did that, but it helped me survive the war. I later used it to buy apples and potatoes from the farmers.”

Marton and his brother, Gene, along with many of the other Jewish males, were moved from the race track to a brick yard, and then eventually from the brickyard to the ghetto. In the ghetto, they were put to work doing hard manual labor.

“Incredibly, we were once out working on a house, demolishing it, getting the dangerous things off of the top,” he says as he lifts his glass of Coke off of the coffee table and takes a drink. “When we finished that work, we came down and we could hear the sirens, meaning it was an air raid. You won’t believe this, a bomb fell down just a short distance from where I was.”

When the bomb hit the ground, he saw it bounce into the air. When it came back down, it detonated upon impact with the cobblestone street, sending his brother flying through the air and through the display window of a nearby store. 

The explosion forced Marton violently to the ground. Metal shrapnel hurtled through the dust-laden air, one piece embedding itself into the back of his scalp, another piece lodged in his earlobe, where it remains to this day.

“It was chaos,” he says. “I don’t know where the guard was, but ... lots of people died there, and when I woke up from the blast, first thing I saw was a man’s leg away from his body. And the guy pleading, ‘Everybody, please help me!’”

Miraculously, Gene was unharmed by his crash through the display window, but Marton was injured by the shrapnel.

“A young Nazi grabbed me and took me someplace where they couldn’t see us,” he says. “And he had a satchel on, I don’t know what you call it, and he took out a bottle of liquor. And gave me a shot. He felt sorry for me, I guess.”

Surprised by the kindness of the Nazi, Marton and his brother began searching the streets for someone to help stop the bleeding from Marton’s head.

“So we went to the Red Cross,” he says, “and believe it or not, the Red Cross refused to tend to me because I was Jewish. The Red Cross center was supposed to be an international place, but they would not accept this Jewish kid.” He slowly shakes his head. “They never did apologize for not taking in the Jews during the war.” (The International Committee of the Red Cross has made belated statements acknowledging and regretting its broad wartime failure to assist Jews and other persecuted peoples.) 

With the Red Cross refusing to help Marton, the brothers began their search for someone who would.  “[We] walked the streets until we found another doctor who accepted me,” he says. “I was bleeding profusely. He cleaned me up and put a clamp on my skull. He said, ‘I’m going to make you a turban. You don’t need it, but maybe it’ll save you from going to work up on the buildings, and maybe they’ll start treating you right.’”

News of the advancing Russian Army motivated the Arrow Cross to march their prisoners to Germany, where they would be used as forced labor to help the rapidly declining war effort for the Nazis.

“We walked and walked,” Marton tells me. “And if you couldn’t walk anymore, you were shot. I saw it with my own eyes. They shot an old man. He didn't fall down. He just slumped to his knees. He was dead. I don’t know how many they killed that time, but the march went on.”

This “death march”, as it was called, continued its bloody and merciless journey, until one day a motorcycle pulled up alongside the ragged band of marching prisoners.

“A messenger on a motorcycle stopped the column,” Marton says. “Then he asked if there was any foreign-born in the column, or something to that effect.”

Marton and Gene, as Mexican citizens, made the decision to step forward. 

“We were in shock, and we didn’t know if they picked us to kill us right there,” he says. “But the situation was bad, and many times you wanted to die. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but as I told you, it didn’t make any sense to live like that.”

It turned out that the Ackerman brothers’ decision to step forward probably saved their lives from almost certain death, either on the march or in Germany. Those who had foreign passports were sent back to the ghetto, where they were put to work again.

Unbeknownst to Marton and Gene, while they were working in the ghetto, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was working to establish more than 30 safe houses in the ghetto for Jews with certificates of protection from neutral nations.

“In December,” Marton tells me, “somebody came to the ghetto and told me that my Aunt Lenke was taken to Auschwitz, and my Aunt Malvin, Grandmother, Mother, and sister Piroska were living in a safe house. If I wanted, he would help me and my brother to escape from the ghetto and take us to the safe house.” 

The brothers readily agreed.

Living in the ghetto was a young man—Marton refers to him as “this smart kid”—who advised the brothers that an escape from the ghetto would require them to clean themselves up, so as not to appear like prisoners.

“That day,” he says, “my brother, this guy, and I walked straight, like we knew what we were doing. We just went ‘Heil Hitler!’, while looking stern, and they let us out.”

Marton and Gene were reunited with their family at the safe house, where they lived for the duration of the war. Budapest was liberated by the Soviets on February 13, 1945.

Although the traumatic events of the Holocaust Marton endured are nearly eight decades in the past, the memories of those days are fresh in his mind. 

“I still have nightmares about it. I wake up screaming,” he says. He adjusts his position on the couch and looks at me. He sighs. “So I don’t know. It was bad times, and I don’t like to think about it, you know. It hurts, even after so many years.”

Despite these haunting memories, Marton carries with him an indomitable happiness. “Always smile,” he says. “I survived the Holocaust, and yet I smile.”

​

This article was originally published by The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

During one of my trips to Israel, as I was looking around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I noticed a peculiar mural on one of the walls. Though dimly lit, I could just make out the ancient image of Jesus stretched out on the cross, the man who crucified him sitting by His head.

The scene itself was not unusual, considering its location. What was shocking to me was that the man with hammer and spike in hand was not a Roman soldier, as the Scriptures record, but a Jewish man.

Such a depiction in such a place serves as a stark reminder of the often subtle, yet strong animosity that has pervaded the church’s history and its theology throughout the ages, the present-day included.

When talking to those who hold to Replacement Theology, however, we are often accused of creating a strawman, a false argument set up to be defeated. We are told that Replacement Theology is not anti-Semitic and that the term Replacement Theology is a misnomer that does not accurately represent their views. Fulfillment Theology or Supersessionism are more accurate terms, we are told.

While it should be admitted that many of those who hold to Replacement Theology today are not anti-Semites, history proves that anti-Semitism was indeed a major motivation in the formation of Replacement Theology as a system of thought.

Many of the early Gentile church fathers, such as Dionysius, thought that the literal understanding of Scripture, especially concerning the Messianic Kingdom, was “too Jewish,” so they began interpreting Scripture allegorically, denying the traditional literal interpretation that Old Testament Jewish believers and the early church had held to for centuries.

For example, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, in his Testimonies Against the Jews, wrote that he “endeavored to show that the Jews, according to what had before been foretold, had departed from God, and had lost God’s favour, which had been given them in past time, and had been promised them for the future; while the Christians had succeeded to their place, deserving well of the Lord by faith, and coming out of all nations and from the whole world” (emphasis mine).

Armed with this new way of interpreting Scripture and the deep-seated anti-Semitism many of its leaders held to, the church soon began pushing the nation of Israel off of is divinely-ordained “seat,” and started viewing itself as the “True Israel,” which took the place of “ethnic Israel” of the Old Testament, the majority of whom had rejected Jesus as their Messiah.

In his work, Dialogue of Justin, Philosopher & Martyr, with Trypho, the early church father Justin Martyr wrote “We, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic race.”

While many such men contributed to the unseating of Jacob, it can be argued that personal and theological views of no single person caused so much destruction for the Jewish people as did those of Martin Luther.

​Luther originally looked upon the Jewish people kindly. In 1523, he penned That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, a tract in which he criticizes some within the Roman Catholic Church for their anti-Semitic views and for trying to force Jewish people to convert to Christianity. “If I had been a Jew,” he wrote, “and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian.”

His views devolved, however, after unsuccessful attempts to gently share the gospel with the Jewish people over a 20-year period. By 1543, his rather benevolent attitude toward Israel had turned downright anti-Semitic. In his pamphlet, The Jews and Their Lies, Luther made caustic remarks about the Chosen People of God:

“What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?” he wrote. “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.”

Luther went on to advocate the destruction of Jewish homes and of Talmuds, forbidding their rabbis to teach anymore, limiting their travel, and forcing them into hard labor.

Such scathing remarks sound eerily similar to those of another German anti-Semite of a more recent age. Indeed, Adolf Hitler frequently quoted the revered Luther’s comments on the Jewish people, paving the haunting road to Holocaust.

With the sun setting on the last remaining survivors of Hitler’s so-called “Final Solution,” and as another generation of Jewish people is facing the rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout the world, may the phrase “Never Again” be the declaration not only of opposition to another Jewish genocide, but also of the church’s resolve never again to turn on those the Messiah calls His “brethren.”