The Holocaust Ended in 1945—Antisemitism Didn't

The ovens went cold. The camps were liberated. The Nazis were defeated. But if you think the hatred died with them, you haven’t been paying attention.

OSWIECIM, POLAND: Holocaust Remembrance Day next generation of people from the all the world meets on the March of the Living in German death camp in Auschwitz Birkenau, in Poland, Shutterstock

Tonight, as Jews around the world gather to light a candle for Yom HaShoah—the Israeli Day of Holocaust Remembrance—we do more than mourn the six million. We testify. We shake the world awake again. Because the Holocaust ended in 1945, but antisemitism didn’t. It just changed form.

It didn’t die. It adapted.

Auschwitz wasn’t a horror story written by madmen. It was the climax of a long, calculated indoctrination. A Europe that had accused Jews of killing Jesus, poisoning wells, and baking matzah with Christian blood was more than ready for Hitler. He didn’t invent antisemitism. He harvested it with force.

It wasn’t just SS officers carrying out orders. It was lawyers, professors, scientists, teachers. It was janitors who gave up addresses. It was bankers who stole property. It was priests who looked away. And yes, it was neighbors—friends who turned on friends. Europe, the so-called cradle of Western civilization, collapsed into barbarism with terrifying ease.

And even after the war, the sickness lingered. Survivors who returned to their hometowns were greeted not with hugs but with fists and bullets. In Kielce, Poland, in 1946—one year after the camps were freed—a mob murdered 42 Jews in cold blood. Why? Because they dared come back.

A display of Holocaust inmates' clothing at the Auschwitz Museum, Shutterstock

That wasn’t the past. That was the beginning of the present.

Today, we don’t have yellow stars, but we do have armed guards outside synagogues in most parts of the world. We have Jewish students being assaulted on campus for being Jewish (but of course the excuse is always "Free Palestine"). We have mobs waving Palestinian flags and screaming in support of Hamas, the terror organization that brought the darkest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. They don't need to chant “Gas the Jews”, because chanting "Free Palestine" includes all the Nazi ideology in one phrase. The Nazis wanted to remove Jews starting with Europe, and the Palestinian acticists want to remove Jews from their ancestral homeland Israel. And we have a media and academic elite that calls this “freedom of expression.”

It’s not freedom of expression. It’s Jew-hatred—plain and simple.

The language is different. Instead of “Christ-killer,” we hear “colonizer.” Instead of “racial impurity,” we hear “Zionist oppressor.” It’s the same lie in a new accent, they use Israel as an excuse to continue hating the Jews. When someone says, “I’m not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist,” ask them: do you oppose any other country’s existence? Do you chant “From the river to the sea” about anyone else?

Of course not.

The only democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish state on Earth, and somehow it's the one nation the “enlightened” crowd wants dismantled. It’s not about land. It’s not about politics. It’s about Jews having power—and that makes people uncomfortable. Jews as victims? That’s palatable. Jews with an army, a flag, and a homeland? That’s unforgivable.

But we are done apologizing.

A group of Jewish students covered with flags of Israel standing together at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, Shutterstock

As the prophet Isaiah said: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet.”(Isaiah 62:1)

We won’t be silent. Not when Jewish students are told to hide their mezuzahs. Not when teachers excuse hate as “resistance.” Not when Western feminists stay silent as Israeli women are raped and mutilated. Not when the international community shrugs at Hamas while calling Israel “genocidal.”

This is the same antisemitism in new packaging. The same cold hatred that gassed babies in Auschwitz now celebrates murdered Bibas family.

And yet, we survive. That’s the part they can’t stand.

They thought the gas chambers would end us. They thought we’d crawl into the shadows. Instead, we rose. We built. We came home. Israel was born not in peace, but in fire. Not out of sympathy, but out of necessity. The world showed us we couldn’t rely on anyone else. And we learned.

That’s why antisemitism today is met with something new—resistance. A Jewish state means we are never helpless again. That’s not just military. It’s spiritual. It’s generational. When Jewish kids grow up singing in Hebrew, dancing on Yom Ha’atzmaut, and learning that they have a homeland—it’s a living victory over every pharaoh, czar, and Nazi who tried to eliminate us.

And here’s the hope:

Antisemitism may be the oldest hatred, but the Jewish people are the oldest survivors. We outlasted Rome. We outlasted the Inquisition. We outlasted Hitler. And we will outlast this too.

The Holocaust ended in 1945. Antisemitism didn’t. But neither did we.

Am Yisrael Chai.