What is the meaning of the word Holocaust?
The Holocaust is the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and millions of other people by the Germans and their collaborators during World War II. The word “Holocaust” is derived from the Greek word holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word “Olah,” meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole onto the Lord. It was the name given to what Winston Churchill once called “a crime without a name” because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program the death camps — Jews were murdered in gas chambers and their bodies were consumed whole crematoria and open fires. The Germans called the murder of the Jews euphemistically but all too accurately “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” Defining the Jews as a problem invited a solution and annihilation of men, women and children is all too final. Immediately after the war, the survivors called the murders, the churban, a word that evokes the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in the years 5
