The profound Yom HaShoah lesson we desperately need to remember under Trump

Tamar Manasseh
April 23, 2025

The horrific recent pictures of deportees from the United States packed into El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison instantly reminded me of images of slaves being inhumanely crowded into the hulls of ships transporting them from their homes in Africa across the Atlantic.

When I posted two such images side-by-side on social media — one of the detainees in CECOT, one of the enslaved Africans — many Jewish friends responded with photos of concentration camps in the comments, writing that the CECOT photos reminded them of the Nazi camps. And as I looked at them, I realized: The reason I feel such empathy for the 238 men whom the U.S. deported to El Salvador, despite almost no evidence of criminality, is Yom HaShoah.

When I think back, observing Yom HaShoah as a child in first grade is the first time I can remember feeling sad for someone else. I had a childhood marred with tragedy. I saw too many family members and neighbors whose lives were altered by violence.

But it was at Jewish day school, on an annual day set aside for commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, that I learned that suffering wasn’t reserved entirely for one group of people — Black, white, Jewish, or any other.

I remember watching the blue-haired ladies who made my lunch on Wednesdays tearfully light yahrzeit candles. I remember standing by as my friends read out loud the names of their family members who were murdered.

And I remember the old man who came and showed my third-grade class a tattoo he was given on his inner arm when he was about our age. Right after he received it, he said, he smelled his parents’ burning flesh.

I cried for him: for the child he once was, left in a concentration camp with no parents, and for the old man he was now, who couldn’t forget. I didn’t lose any family in the Holocaust, but I still felt his pain, and that of my classmates, and the lunch ladies. It was familiar to me.

After all, I had grown up with my own stories of horrific crimes in my family history. I knew about slavery — how it happened and who was responsible for it. I knew the personal histories of my ancestors who survived slavery and Jim Crow. And of course, I knew about my uncles, who died from gunshot wounds before I was even born.

The crimes of the Holocaust were different crimes. But I could feel for those who had survived them and were haunted by them, because I knew what that kind of survival felt like.

That Yom HaShoah, my tears were for everyone, including my own ancestors.

But just as I learned that day that suffering has no color, no race and no gender, I know now that empathy should also belong to all of us.

So why are there those who seemed unaffected by the images from CECOT, of these men who have been taken away from their families and friends over a political campaign that refutes their individuality? When I posted the side–by-side photos from CECOT and a slave ship, one Black Orthodox rabbi I know replied to my post that “anytime they want to manipulate African Americans for a political cause or sentiment. They always bring slavery, segregation, or Jim Crow.”

And this is why the state of our society has me frightened. Do we still have empathy anymore? Or have our political divisions become so deep as to make it easy for us to ignore it? Caring for others should never be labeled as political manipulation; it is neither Democratic nor Republican to feel other peoples’ misery in your own soul. Treating a call to empathy as just another political gesture makes a mockery out of being a decent human being. Making the world a better place for all people doesn’t come with an ulterior motive.

Decades ago, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs about a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

I wish more people could see what I see, what I learned to see on that long ago Yom HaShoah. I believe that the understanding I found that day is invaluable.

President Donald Trump’s flirtation with authoritarianism, and his administration’s disregard for the norms of our democracy, have put us on the precipice. The prisoners in CECOT are the canaries in America’s coal mine. How we respond to this crisis could very well determine the fate of our country’s future as “the land of the free.”

So as we commemorate this Yom HaShoah, we must remember those who were murdered by the Nazis, and not close our eyes to the suffering of others, no matter who they are.

And for Blacks and Jews, particularly, each with our own unique histories of persecution, the need has never been greater for us to see that we have more in common than we have separating us. Learning about each other’s tragedies will allow us to unite in mutual empathy.

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