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Years ago, when I belonged to a Reform synagogue in the U.S., I went to the rabbi’s weekly Torah study for adults on Sunday mornings. On one such morning, while waiting for the rabbi, the students began a conversation that eventually steered around to the Shoah (Holocaust). Never an easy phenomenon to contemplate or understand, one person in the room asked in frustration, “Where was God? Why didn’t He stop it?” A woman sitting across from him looked up from her text and fixed him with a very stern look. “God DID stop it,” she said emphatically.

I’ve never forgotten that conversation, and in fact I think about it almost whenever I think about the Shoah.

It’s commemoration season in the Jewish world. In a dizzying, emotional roller coaster ride, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) was last Thursday, and this week Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers) and Yom HaAtzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) fall on Wednesday and Thursday.

It’s not an easy schedule to stay atop. Soon after the conclusion of the festival of God’s deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, we’re remembering our wholesale destruction and the descent of European civilization into barbarism that marked the Shoah. The date for Yom HaShoah was chosen in proximity to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took place during April and May of 1943, and in Israel, the whole name for the day is Yom HaZikaron l’Shoah u’l’Gvurah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day). In this way, rather than focusing only on the terror and villainy, we recall our suffering in the context of Jewish resistance and heroism, and the brief period during which—before the eyes of the world—we gave as good as we got.

The contrast between observance of Yom HaZikaron in the Diaspora and Israel is dramatic. Whereas the Diaspora looks on Israel’s foundation as wondrous, and its founders and defenders (some of whom are scattered throughout the Diaspora) as heroic, Yom HaZikaron as a day to remember the fallen is rarely observed. Yet in Israel, when people freeze in their tracks during the two minute siren on Wednesday morning, most are remembering someone they loved, or at least knew personally. Brothers, sons, fiancés, and spouses who fell in wars or attempts to stop terror attacks, family members and friends who went to work, out for pizza, or to buy watermelon and never came back, children who went to school or on school field trips and stepped within fatal range of snipers—all of these fallen are remembered.

As the sun goes down on this Yom HaZikaron and our sadness begins to lift, Israel will begin the momentous celebration of its 60th birthday. There are newspaper pages filled with notices of events all over the country to celebrate, and foreign dignitaries will be flying in from all over the world (from President Bush to the Prime Minister of Mongolia) to attend the festivities. While some groups of anti-Zionist haredim in the neighborhoods adjoining mine will be donning their annual sackcloth and ashes, most Jews will be saying Hallel with a blessing, thanking God for the wonder of the establishment of the State, the culmination of 2000 years of longing and prayer.

Every year, I struggle with how to relate to these days. Although the libraries of books, plays, film and documentary (plus my grandmother’s diary kept during her year in Weimar Germany in 1929-1930) bring the period around the Shoah to life for me, I’m also sensible that the Jewish calendar is full of days and periods of mourning and semi-mourning, of half fasts and full fasts to mark the major calamities that have befallen us over the years. Sometimes having yet another day to contemplate the senseless persecution and murder of my people is a bit much for me. And as a still-new immigrant, Yom HaZikaron is not the same experience for me that it is for Israeli-born citizens and veteran immigrants. I’m grateful for this, though as the years pass—and my and my friends’ children grow older—I know this will change.

The one day of the three I truly relate to is Yom HaAtzma’ut. The bravery, moxie, and sheer chutzpah of the Jews (many of whom had just arrived from Europe with numbers tattooed on their arms), together with the unmistakable hand of God, are a joy to celebrate. (So much so, in fact, that my husband and I chose this as our wedding day.)

Yet perhaps the emotional roller coaster was put in place because of the relatedness of all of these events. The Shoah made world Jewry all the more determined to forge for itself a state, using every means (diplomacy, fundraising, trading, negotiating, concession-making, and finally, war) to ensure that Jews would never be left at the mercy of others again. Yom HaZikaron is to remember those who gave themselves entirely to the enterprise of establishing and maintaining a Jewish home for all of us. And Yom HaAtzma’ut celebrates the miraculous outcome of all of these efforts.

I do believe that God stopped the Shoah. (Perhaps not as soon as we would have liked, but then, man wasn’t much help, either.) And students of history know that in the end, to the aid of a handful of Jews actively resisting the Nazis and their accomplices, came hundreds of thousands of non-Jews.

May 31 is Memorial Day. While we may not all have family who died in the Shoah or who fought to defend Israel, many of us have family, friends, or neighbors who fought in World War II. I encourage everyone to get in touch with someone living who was a soldier, liberator, righteous Gentile, or witness, and hear their stories. (Often high schools or colleges have programs to which the public is invited.) This month I’m thinking about my Uncle Joe, who participated in the liberation of Italy, and my Great-uncle Sammy, who was killed during the landing at Normandy. These citizen-soldiers, and countless others, became God’s instrument to stop the killing, and enabled the Jews to live—and build—another day.

And that, my friends, is worth commemorating.

Israel Independence Day, Memorial Day, Yom HaShoah