What are the elements essential to the concept of bearing witness? What is transmitted memory? Is it biologic? Is it psychological? Is it neurochemical, electrophysiological or strictly conceptual? Those of you who have studied Second Generation literature know that it is all of those things. Being a witness, perceiving a legacy from your parents, is not merely a conceptual thing, it is a biological thing. For some, being a witness leads to an attempt to deal with transmitted trauma. Quite clearly, there are those among us who believe that their legacy is traumatic. Those members of Second Generation try to negotiate their way through life by considering this trauma, a trauma which has a legitimate biblical counterpart as well. After all, Second Generation is the generation of Yitzhak. The generation of Abraham, our parents, managed to leave their homeland, amidst great turbulence, to establish a new life and a new world. However traumatized they may have been, they left their countries of origin to establish a new existence. We, having sensed the fire, are dealt with somewhat more transitionally. Hopefully, we will usher in a generation more solid and more secure in who they are as Jews, as the recipients of this legacy, than we are.

Another major objective as Second Generation is to act as a public witness by being involved in Holocaust study, education and transmission of information, purely, not for academic purposes, not for financial purposes and not for political purposes, but because we bear a role as teachers. Along with that, we are compelled by our parents to remember publicly. We do not need to remember to raise money for Israel bonds or to keep afloat the Jewish Federation. We do not need to remember for the sake of motivating Congress to do something about Bosnia, good though that might be. We just need to remember, pure and simple. Many of us are motivated to our Judaism as a result of that obligation to remember. We fulfill Emil Fackenheim’s charge that we not grant Hitler a posthumous victory. We remain Jewish, and in part that Judaism is informed by our heritage of memory and our obligation for commemoration. In order to implement these objectives, we must contribute to our community’s Second Generation group. We should help lead the Second Generation advisory group sponsored by the US Holocaust Museum. There are other Second Generation groups in this country. Ours in Los Angeles, with 1000 members, is considered among the strongest. We should serve our community in terms of its psychosocial needs and remain active in our Yom HaShoah commemorations. We must get ourselves educated, so that we can teach children as well as adults. We must continue to make ourselves serious and recognizable by our Jewish Federation, and show the Jewish community that we are the ones who carry the torch of memory.

We are not really victims, we are actually beneficiaries of a legacy that informs our Jewish identity, and that can stimulate our revival and our purpose. This legacy is one of action, not of inaction. The most salient purpose for our continuity , as a group, is the purity of vision, the purity of transmitted memory from our parents, the survivors. That purity should be reason enough to stimulate our interest, our activism and our purpose. I come from a family where the idea of transmitted history is important. That transmitted history I value as a significant component in stimulating me to action. Most of our members are similarly motivated, and I trust that the purpose and the action handed down to us will give us the energy, determination and vision to be witnesses out there in the public as well.

Working on this mission has been deeply meaningful for me. I now go on to Chair the Los Angeles Museum of Holocaust, an organization with a similar charge: rememberence, commemoration, and education, to build a place of memory to study and honor our people's history.