The magnitude of the destruction of European…
December 1945 CE
The magnitude of the destruction of European Jewry casts a deep gloom over the Jewish people and torments the spirit of Judaism.
The faith of observant Jews is shaken, and the hope of the assimilationists smashed.
Not only have more than a million Jews perished, but also the Allies, who by 1944 could have easily disrupted the operation of the camps, had done nothing.
In this spiritual vacuum, Zionism alone emerges as a viable Jewish response to this demonic anti-Semitism.
Zionist thinkers since the days of Pinsker had made dire predictions concerning the fate of European Jewry.
For much of world Jewry that had suffered centuries of persecution, Zionism and its call for a Jewish national home and for the radical transformation of the Jew from passive victim to self-sufficient citizen residing in his own homeland becomes the only possible positive response to the recent catastrophe.
Zionism has unified the Jewish people, entered deeply into the Jewish spirit, and become an integral part of Jewish identity and religious experience.