Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the holocaust called by Jewish people?
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th-century "Holocaust" as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes ""The" Holocaust". It may be spelled "Ha-Shoah" or "HaShoah", as in Yom HaShoah, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day".
The earliest use of the word "holocaust" to denote a massacre recorded by the "Oxford English Dictionary" dates from 1833 when the journalist Leitch Ritchie, describing the wars of the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church", a massacre by fire of the inhabitants of Vitry-le-François in 1142. As this occurred in a church, it could be seen as a religious offering. The English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem "Samson Agonistes," in which the massacre was clearly divinely dedicated. The word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon, taking on a secular connotation.
Some Jewish leaders have called Jewish intermarriage a "Silent Holocaust," particularly in 20th-21st century America where as many as 47% of American Jews have intermarried with non-Jews in past two decades. Such cultural and religious assimilation is said to represent a slow destruction of the Jewish people. Others have expressed a different view, accepting or tolerating such marriages, instead focusing their attention towards the concept that the children of a Jewish parent be raised Jewish, with some sense of their identity rooted in Judaism and in Jewish culture. However, some children of a Jewish parent were raised in the non-Jewish parent's religion while maintaining a sense of Jewish ethnicity and identity.
At the time of its founding, the ghetto imprisoned 34,000 Polish Jews, and an unknown number of Roma people. Virtually all of them were dead by the war's end. Most of the victims, about 30,000 were deported to the Belzec extermination camp (some of them through the Piaski ghetto) between 17 March and 11 April 1942 by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Orpo helped by "Schutzpolizei". The Germans set a daily quota of 1,400 inmates to be deported to their deaths. The other 4,000 people were first moved to the Majdan Tatarski ghetto – a small ghetto established in the suburb of Lublin – and then either killed there during roundups or sent to the nearby KL Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. 
The last of the Ghetto's former residents still in German captivity were executed at Majdanek and Trawniki camps in the Operation Harvest Festival (German: "Aktion Erntefest") on 3 November 1943. At the time of the liquidation of the ghetto, the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, "The procedure is pretty barbaric, and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews."
The next stage of the anti-Semitic policy of the occupier was ghettoisation of the Jewish population, officially justified by economic, sanitary or political reasons. As an excuse to isolate Jews in closed districts, among other things, Germans used the "Easter pogrom" of March 1940, arranged from German inspiration by Polish extreme nationalists. The first Jewish ghetto was established in October 1939 in Piotrków Trybunalski. Over the next few months several more ghettos were created in the General Government and Warta Country, including the ghetto in Łódź (February 1940). Beginning in September 1940, the ghettoisation process became more organized. In October of this same year, it was decided to establish a "Jewish quarter in Warsaw". In March 1941 the ghettos in Kraków and Lublin were established. The process of ghettoisation in the Radom district of the General Government was rather at the latest in December 1941. After the outbreak of the German-Soviet War, the organizing of ghettos on Polish lands previously annexed by the USSR took place. The creation of closed Jewish communities was accompanied by a progressive reduction in the number of smaller ghettos. The concentration and isolation of the Jewish population was also to be served by an unrealized project of creating a great "reservation" for Jews in the Lublin region.
The term "Jewish question" was first used in Great Britain around 1750 when the expression "Jewish question" appeared during the Jew Bill of 1753 debates in England. According to Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz, the term "Jewish Question," as introduced in western Europe, was a neutral expression for the negative attitude toward the apparent and persistent singularity of the Jews as a people against the background of the rising political nationalisms and new nation-states. Dawidowicz writes that "the histories of Jewish emancipation and of European antisemitism are replete with proffered 'solutions to the Jewish question.'"
Rosensaft has also struggled with the theological implications of the Holocaust. "Where was God when the fires of Auschwitz failed to ignite the universe," he asked at a 1995 commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As reported in the New York Times, he "posed the question of how God could be praised if he did not stop the killing. Then he suggested an answer: 'What if God was not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted Auschwitz on humanity?'" He explained that, "To me, the incredible element of the Holocaust is not the behavior of the murderers, because that is pure evil. It is the behavior of the victims and how they remained human and in many ways behaved in a superhuman manner. ... So the God I choose to pray to was at Auschwitz, but it was not in the manner of the victims' deaths, it was in the way in which they lived." Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City, Rosensaft elaborated on his belief that evil is perpetrated by human beings, not by God:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believes that "The Nazi terror was, in scholar Norman Davies's words, "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Reliable statistics for the total number of Poles who died as a result of Nazi German policies do not exist. Many others were victims of the 1939-1941 Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and Siberia. Records are incomplete, and the Soviet control of Poland for 50 years after the war impeded independent scholarship.The changing borders and ethnic composition of Poland as well as vast population movements during and after the war also complicated the task of calculating losses In the past, many estimates of losses were based on a Polish report of 1947 requesting reparations from the Germans; this often cited document tallied population losses of 6 million for all Polish "nationals" (Poles, Jews, and other minorities). Subtracting 3 million Polish Jewish victims, the report claimed 3 million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi terror, including civilian and military casualties of war.'Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) were victims of German Occupation policies and the war."
Before the September 1939 Nazi German–Soviet Invasion of Poland, the concentration camps built in the Third Reich held mainly German Jews and political enemies of the Nazi regime. Everything changed dramatically with the onset of World War II. The Nazi concentration camps ("Konzentrationslager", KL or KZ) set up across the entire German-occupied Europe were redesigned to exploit the labor of foreign captives and prisoners of war at high mortality rate for maximum profit. Millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the German war effort. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of camps reached 15,000 eventually, using civilians arrested and ambushed at random in occupied countries. According to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conducted more recently, Nazi Germany created some 42,500 camps and ghettos in which an estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned and often pressed into slavery. All types of confinement were used as source of labour supply.
In Judaism, Heaven is sometimes described as a place where God debates Talmudic law with the angels, and where Jews spend eternity studying the Written and Oral Torah. Jews do not believe in "Hell" as a place of eternal torment. Gehenna is a place or condition of purgatory where Jews spend up to twelve months purifying to get into heaven, depending on how sinful they have been, although some suggest that certain types of sinners can never be purified enough to go to heaven and rather than facing eternal torment, simply cease to exist. Therefore, some violations like suicide would be punished by separation from the community, such as not being buried in a Jewish cemetery (in practice, rabbis often rule suicides to be mentally incompetent and thus not responsible for their actions). Judaism also does not have a notion of hell as a place ruled by Satan since God's dominion is total and Satan is only one of God's angels.
Jehovah's Witnesses or "Bible Researchers" (Bibelforschers) as they were known in Germany, comprised 25,000 members and they were among those persecuted by the Nazi government. All incarcerated members were identified by a unique purple triangle. Some members of the religious group refused to serve in the German military or give allegiance to the Nazi government, for which 250 were executed. An estimated 10,000 were arrested for various crimes, and 2,000 were sent to Nazi concentration camps, where approximately 1,200 were killed. Jehovah's Witnesses were among the few who could leave the concentration camps simply by signing a document renouncing their religious beliefs.
Among one million Polish soldiers fighting the Germans in September 1939, 13 percent (130,000) were Polish citizens of Jewish background, who fought in all branches of Polish Armed Forces. It is estimated that during the entirety of World War II as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians. Germans killed about 20 000 civilians in September 1939, a number of them Jewish. For example, in Częstochowa 227 civilians were murdered on September the 4th, 22 of them Jewish.
The first ghetto of World War II was established on 8 October 1939 at Piotrków Trybunalski (38 days after the invasion), with the Tuliszków ghetto established in December 1939. The first large metropolitan ghetto known as the Łódź Ghetto ("Litzmannstadt") followed them in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October. Most Jewish ghettos were established in 1940 and 1941. Subsequently, many ghettos were sealed from the outside, walled off with brickwork, or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew found leaving there could be shot. The Warsaw Ghetto, located in the heart of the city, was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of . The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 people. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, there were at least 1,000 such ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone.
Annelies Marie Frank (; ; 12 June 1929 – February or March 1945) was a German-born diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of "The Diary of a Young Girl" (originally "Het Achterhuis" in Dutch; ), in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
Inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced Jews to live. These World War II ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. The first ghetto was established in October 1939 at Piotrków. Initially the ghettos were open but on 1 May the Łódź ghetto was closed by Germans sealing the Jews inside. The Warsaw Ghetto was closed in November 1940. The Germans started a reservation for Jews near Lublin.
The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) published on 2015 the "ADL Global 100", an international survey conducted in 2013-2014 to measure antisemitic opinions in 100 countries around the world. The survey revealed that 28% of the adult population in Austria harbor antisemitic opinions, as reflected through the DATA: More than 50% of the population expressed agreement with the phrase "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", and more than 40% of the population agreed with "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country" and "Jews have too much power in international financial markets".
This genocide that occurred during World War II is one of the biggest examples of bystander effect on a mass scale. We sometimes think of bystander effect as applying to only one individual where one individual needs assistance and bystanders expect another bystander to help; however, this can apply on a bigger scale too with multiple victims. When Nazi officers were on trial they pleaded that if the Holocaust was as terrible as everyone said, then someone else must have known about it. Near the concentration camps, villages such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbruck, knew about what was going on inside the camp. When the Allies got to the camps they accused the villages nearby of making no attempt to save those in the camps. The Allies were angered that these nearby villages were waiting for someone else to come in and save the people in these camps. As a result, they forced these populations to clean up the corpses from the camps and bury them in mass graves as punishment for falling victim to this bystander effect.
There is no unilateral agreement among the different denominations of Judaism concerning truth. In Orthodox Judaism, truth is the revealed word of God, as found in the Hebrew Bible, and to a lesser extent, in the words of the sages of the Talmud. For Hasidic Jews truth is also found in the pronouncements of their rebbe, or spiritual leader, who is believed to possess divine inspiration. Kotzk, a Polish Hasidic sect, was known for their obsession with truth.
Zionism ( "Tsiyyonut" after "Zion") is the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine). Modern Zionism emerged in the late 19th century in Central and Eastern Europe as a national revival movement, both in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and as an imitative response to other nationalist movements. Soon after this, most leaders of the movement associated the main goal with creating the desired state in Palestine, then an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
Most Jews do not believe in the existence of a supernatural omnimalevolent figure. Traditionalists and philosophers in medieval Judaism adhered to rational theology, rejecting any belief in rebel or fallen angels, and viewing evil as abstract. The Rabbis usually interpreted the word "satan" as it is used in the Tanakh as referring strictly to "human" adversaries and rejected all of the Enochian writings mentioning Satan as a literal, heavenly figure from the Biblical canon, making every attempt to root them out. Nonetheless, the word "satan" has occasionally been metaphorically applied to evil influences, such as the Jewish exegesis of the "yetzer hara" ("evil inclination") mentioned in . Rabbinical scholarship on the Book of Job generally follows the Talmud and Maimonides in identifying "the satan" from the prologue as a metaphor for the "yetzer hara" and not an actual entity. Satan is rarely mentioned in Tannaitic literature, but is found in Babylonian aggadah. According to a narration, the sound of the shofar, which is primarily intended to remind Jews of the importance of "teshuva", is also intended symbolically to "confuse the accuser" (Satan) and prevent him from rendering any litigation to God against the Jews. In Hasidic Judaism, the Kabbalah presents Satan as an agent of God whose function is to tempt humans into sinning so that he may accuse them in the heavenly court. The Hasidic Jews of the 18th century associated ha-Satan with "Baal Davar".
Brzesko Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto during World War II in occupied Poland. The ghetto was created by the Germans in 1940 in the Polish town of Brzesko located in the Kraków District about 40 miles from Kraków. Brzesko was originally occupied in 1939. The ghetto was open when it was first created, meaning there were no barriers preventing people from leaving, but Jews were not able to leave. The ghetto was only marked using signage at this time. In 1942 walls were put up and the ghetto became a closed ghetto which physically prevented people from escaping. An estimated 4,000 Jewish people lived within the Brzesko ghetto when it was first established, but another 2,000 moved there by 1942, many arriving from Kraków and the surrounding area. The Jewish people living within Brzesko were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp and Auschwitz extermination camp. After the exterminations, the camp was closed in 1943.
British historian Michael Burleigh and German historian Wolfgang Wippermann maintain that although all Jews were victims, the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community – other people shared the tragic fate of victimhood. Hungarian former Minister for Roma Affairs László Teleki applies the term "Holocaust" to both the murder of Jews and Romani peoples by the Nazis. In "The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust", American historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia use the term to include Jews, Gypsies and the disabled. American historian Dennis Reinhartz has claimed that Gypsies were the main victims of genocide in Croatia and Serbia during the Second World War, and has called this "the Balkan Holocaust 1941-1945".
In a rare view that has not been adopted by any sizable element of the Jewish or Christian community, Ignaz Maybaum has proposed that the Holocaust is the ultimate form of vicarious atonement. The Jewish people become in fact the "suffering servant" of Isaiah. The Jewish people suffer for the sins of the world. In his view: "In Auschwitz Jews suffered vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind."
Radio Islam denies the view of leading historians relating to the Holocaust, claiming that most of those who died were non-Jewish victims of typhus, and that many fewer people died than what mainstream scholars say. Their website claims that "[m]ost people in the West generally accept the last Jewish/Zionist claim about the so-called "holocaust" without any challenge as if it were a "divine truth". This holocaust hoax has been bought and sold by educated and uneducated Westerners alike, whether they are from the far right (such as Christian fundamentalists), or from the so-called "moderates", or even from the far left (such as socialists and communists)."
Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: … Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe." He also contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.
Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem, an Israeli state institution in Jerusalem established in 1953 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis. Nobel laureate and Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, does consider other groups, besides the Jews, as Holocaust victims, declaring to President Jimmy Carter, "Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims," when he asked his support for a national Holocaust museum in Washington.