Holocaust

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Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies

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Holocaust

(in Hebrew, sho'ah), the name used in English to refer to the systematic

destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word holokauston, which is a

translation of the Hebrew word olah. During Biblical times, an olah was a type

of sacrifice to God that was totally consumed or burnt by fire. Over time, the

word holocaust came to be used with reference to large-scale slaughter or

destruction.

The Hebrew word sho'ah, which has the connotation of a whirlwind of

destruction, was first used in 1940 to refer to the extermination of the Jews of

Europe, in a booklet published in Jerusalem by the United Aid Committee for

the Jews in Poland. The booklet was titled Sho'at Yehudei Polin (The

Holocaust of the Jews of Poland). It included articles and eyewitness reports

on the persecution of Eastern European Jewry that began when World War II

broke out in September 1939. The reports were written or dictated by Jews

who had seen what was going on and escaped, including some prominent

Polish Jewish leaders. However, the term sho'ah was hardly used until the

spring of 1942. Instead, many Yiddish-speaking Jews used the term churban,

which also means destruction or catastrophe, and historically refers to the

destruction of the ancient Holy Temples in Jerusalem, both in 586 BCE and in

70 CE.

In the spring of 1942 a historian in Jerusalem, Ben-Zion Dinur, used the

word sho'ah with reference to the extermination of European Jewry, and

called it a "catastrophe" that showed how different and unique the Jewish

people were from the rest of the world. Other Jews in Palestine soon began

using the term sho'ah to describe the destruction of the European Jewish

community. By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed

as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the

term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the

Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the

Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six

million victims of the Holocaust.