Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, is a solemn assembly designed to remember the merciless slaughter of approximately 6 Million European Jews (and a host of millions of others too). Each year we subject ourselves to recalling incomprehensible evils: disparaging rhetoric, deceitful tactics, brutal aggression, and outright murder, theft and torture. We have seen the worn bodies of Jews left to die like animals in concentration camps. We relive the deaths with the telling and re-telling of horror after horror. And today we continue to see rallying cries against the Jews that sound a lot like the 1930's from places ranging from UC Irvine to Iran.

But should we recognize a day to remember such an event? After all, should we not be joyful on Shabbat? There isn't a Biblical mandate to remember the holocaust per se (which of course happened after the historical events recorded in Scripture). So why bother?