Liskor velo Lishkoah, "remember and do not forget". This is the motto of Yad Vashem, the memorial on Mount Herzel in Jerusalem to the martyrs of the death camps. It is an invitation to future generations to keep the Shoah alive in their memories.
But this act of memory is essentially different from and more profound than the simple remembering of a past event. In this call to remember, Jewish consciousness appeals to that dimension of its being that could certainly be said to characterize its spiritual attitude: namely, memory. This people who rightly has been called "the builders of time" could just as well be called "the people of memory".
Here, however, we are concerned with something very different from the preservation and transmission of past events. At a deeper level than of the psychological or historical faculty of recalling, Israel's consciousness of itself lies at the permanent source of its identity and development. At every stage of its journey through time, on every page of the Bible, this call to remember is found: "Hear O Israel", "Remember Israel". All the mighty works of God were thus confided to the memory of this people. In the language of the Bible, Zachor, "remember", does not mean to preserve or reproduce an image, but to call forth, to re-present, to make present a hidden reality that is always operative, always present.
So the historical commemoration is the occasion and the sign of a deeper remembrance. When Israel recalls its past events, it encounters them as God sees them in the present and in eternity. It becomes aware of its identity as it appears in the revelation of God's choice.

      Liskor velo Lishkoah. This invitation of Yad Vashern must be understood at the level where Jewish memory and Jewish identity meet and merge.

      The Shoah is, in the first place, a unique event in the very destiny of Israel because it stands out as a tragedy unparalleled in the whole of its history, and for this reason, is beyond all possibility of comparison and measurement. At a much deeper level this event is unique because of its background, which is still more decisively unique: the Election of Israel.
Thus it was fundamentally the Election that made Israel experience what can truly be called the scandalous uniqueness of the Holocaust. The agreement implicit in the Covenant did not seem to have been honored. There was nobody to turn to because God himself was silent. Paradoxically, the Election helps us to make the Holocaust a sign of contradiction and a scandal for the Jewish consciousness.
Is it really possible to hear an echo of the voice of Sinai in the clamor that rise from the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Did not the silence of God defeat forever the remembrance of his word?

      The people of the camps, driven out of everywhere, and condemned to death, were the victims and witnesses of a tragedy that left humanity with an ineffaceable wound. This being so, they were endowed with a terrible responsibility: that of being the memory and conscience of a world that is in danger of forgetting the evil that it bears within itself. In this respect, their witness transcends their own history: it concerns not only the history of Israel, but also that of the entire world. It is a protestation on behalf of the justice and the honor of human kind.

      This testimony through remembrance is an obligation of conscience for those who have been through hell. As says Elie Wiesel through the voice of one of his characters: "Perhaps, it is not given to man to obliterate evil, but he can be the awareness of it. It is not given to him to forge the glory of the night, but it can attain it and give account of it". To tell the story is a victory, first of all over forgetfulness. In this respect, as says another of Elie Weisel's characters to justify his passion for the documents of the past: "The historian is a fighter, his weapon is memory, if he knows how to use it he will win". A victory over time, a victory over forgetfulness, a victory over death.

      Thus, the remembrance of the Holocaust is the precondition and the means for the survival of Israel in what might be called the memory of eternity. If that is true of historians, what is to be said about those guardians of living memory who are poets and artists, and especially painters? It is here that the vocation belongs which Joel Kass has taken upon himself and whose demands are recalled by his paintings.
Sometimes with a violence that his style succeeds in mastering with a rigorous technique, he makes us present at the reality of the event. All the faces and all the scenes that he paints seem to burst out of his memory. Nonetheless, even if it is true that his style is outstandingly personal, it is not only his own memories that he evokes. He expresses the memory of his people. The cry that he makes heard through the vehemence of his forms and colors is the long and heart-breaking outcry of the Jewish soul. It is an outcry, but also the silence of a questioning on the verge of despair.

      The characteristic of a great artist is that in his works the singular reaches to the universal. In this respect Joel Kass is a witness to the exempeariness of the Jewish destiny, in darkness as in light, in love as in heartbreak. The Shoah forces us to see the evil in the world in its most profound dimensions.
Starting from this tragically exemplary suffering of the Shoah, the work of Joel Kass offers a very special expression of what one might call a metaphysics of evil and human suffering. It is not a pessimistic or a bitter philosophy. On the contrary, one senses that by way of depicting the darkest and most painful reality, Joel Kass throbbingly expresses awaiting, a questioning, ultimately a hope.
If the remembrance or the Holocaust is always present to every Jew as an obsessive challenge, the victory of hope over the absurdity of evil henceforth provides him with the means of confronting it. Emil Fackenheim goes so far as to say that in the form of a tragic challenge the shoah has revealed a new commandment to the Jewish conscience: the commandment to survive. The manner in which Jews understand the threefold exigency of this commandment seems to resume the new condition or Jewish existence after the Holocaust: survive as a Jew, or the Jewish people will perish; remember the martyrs, or their memory will die; do not deny God, do not lose hope in Him, whatever struggle or revolt this may involve, or Judaism will cease to exist.