The Israeli Knesset’s recent passage of its heinous “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law on March 30 has effectively defiled this year’s observance of Yom HaShoah, the consummate Holocaust commemoration for Israel and Jews worldwide that begins the night of April 13. Anyone who questions the veracity of this statement should remember the warnings of passionate death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel (1928-2016). Wiesel, the acclaimed author of the 1956 Holocaust memoir Night and multiple other volumes, became arguably one of the most recognizable and renowned Holocaust survivors for Jews and non-Jews across the world. Yom HaShoah is a time when millions of Jewish hearts and minds reflect on Wiesel’s writings, with some even enshrining their reading as a new form of ritual observance on that day.

As the thousands of members of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty across Israel and the world are keenly aware, Wiesel drew directly upon his Holocaust experience to become an ardent death penalty abolitionist. Near the end of his life, Wiesel famously said of capital punishment that “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” Wiesel’s firm stance on this human rights violation serves as an anthem for L’chaim. I am a co-founder of that group, as well as a Jewish prison chaplain who has communicated with several dozen Jews and non-Jews condemned to death. Like many L’chaim members, I am also a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors. We, together with all L’chaim members, firmly maintain that Wiesel, who poignantly referred to the death penalty as a manmade Angel of Death, would join us now in condemning this disastrous law. Its passage in the Knesset is nothing short of an abject defilement of Wiesel’s legacy, and of the inherent message of Yom HaShoah that the world never forget what happens when any state violates that most basic human right of life itself.

The Yom HaShoah Siren and the Clarion Call for Human Rights

The full name of the day commemorating the victims of the Holocaust is “Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah” — literally the “Day of (Remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” Established this day on April 12, 1951, it is a day that is marked on the 27th day in the Hebrew month of Nisan — a week after the seventh day of Passover, and a week before Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers). Although the Israeli government established the date, it has become a day commemorated by Jewish communities and individuals worldwide.

Since the early 1960s, the sounding of a siren on Yom HaShoah stops traffic and pedestrians throughout the State of Israel for two minutes of silent devotion. The siren will blow again this year at sundown as the holiday begins on Monday night, April 13, and once again at 11 a.m. the following morning. It is a sound that reminds all who hear it to remember our six million Jewish ancestors and millions more who were victims of state-sponsored killing. Its call serves as a warning of what can happen when a society tethers itself to any proverbial “Angel of Death.” As in previous years, radio and television programs during this day will be connected in one way or another with the Jewish destiny in World War II, including personal interviews with survivors. Even the musical programs will be adapted to the somber atmosphere of the day. There will be no public entertainment on Yom HaShoah, as theaters, cinemas, pubs, and other public venues are closed throughout Israel. It is a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution. And yet, in Israel this year, it is also a day that will come on the heels of a sadistic, champagne-infused celebration by death penalty proponents after they successfully passed their law through the Knesset. Just as their danse macabre desecrated Passover two days later, so too does its echo now defile Yom HaShoah.

L’chaim members are accustomed to the United States defaming Holocaust memorial days. In the past five years alone, states have marked either Yom HaShoah or International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th by torturously gassing a human being to death in Alabama, scheduling the killing of innocent men and women in Texas, signing a bill to expand the death penalty to non-lethal crimes in Florida, and even one year carrying out two gruesome executions on one of these memorial days in Alabama and Oklahoma. L’chaim members have been in touch with each of the individuals facing death on this date in these states. That Israel now joins these deplorable ranks by violating the sanctity of this day – and of life itself – strains all credulity, stains any ethical credibility, and constitutes a detestable busha  (shame). It is a veritable abomination of the highest order.

There is always a danger in invoking the death penalty in the context of Holocaust remembrance. First and foremost, one must contend with the often-cited counterexamples of the execution of Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and Eichmann, no matter the ultimate futility of invoking those instances as part of the death penalty debate. More insidious is the claim that reducing Holocaust memory to a discussion of the death penalty discredits the memories of Holocaust victims and survivors. L’chaim members know all too well that the reality is the diametric opposite. On the contrary, capital punishment in any form inherently disgraces and degrades the memories of Holocaust victims like our own kin. It is nothing short of a slap in the face of countless descendants of Shoah victims.

“But what about Nuremberg and Eichmann?”

Image: Headlines of the June 5, 1962, New York Times article about Martin Buber’s objections to the execution of Nazi perpetrator Adolph Eichmann.

 In the shadow of the Holocaust, many death penalty debates in Jewish circles eventually arrive at the question: “But what about Nuremberg and Eichmann?” The thousands of members of L’chaim often encounter individuals who cite these two cases as evidence that there are times when the death penalty is an appropriate response to monstrous actions. Now, as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s death penalty law has passed, many conversations throughout Israel and the Jewish world conjure these potent memories. Death penalty debates for individuals like the perpetrators of the October 7, 2023, massacre – the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust – naturally strike this nerve,  triggering individual, collective, and intergenerational trauma.

The heated dialogue between death penalty bill proponents and detractors usually begins with supporters parroting the debunked myth of deterrence – that killing captured Hamas terrorists will save Israeli lives. This, of course, is patently false. Opponents of the bill respond to this lie by citing one of the manifold studies that proliferate disproving the deterrence fallacy, adding that executing convicted terrorists would only create more shaheeds (“martyrs”) among Israel’s enemies. Death penalty advocates then often brush aside these facts. There are, however, those who can acknowledge this reality. Those individuals, in turn, inevitably pose the fateful question above about Nuremberg and Eichmann.

“Nuremberg,” of course, refers to the main Nuremberg Trial (International Military Tribunal), where death sentences led to the hangings of 10 high-ranking Nazis on October 16, 1946, with another scheduled (Hermann Göring) committing suicide. While the court sentenced 12 to death in total, Göring avoided execution by taking his own life, and the tribunal tried Martin Bormann in absentia, enabling him to escape hanging. The second popular reference is to Israel’s 1962 hanging of Nazi officer Otto Adolf Eichmann for his role as one of the primary architects of the Final Solution. Hannah Arendt covered Eichmann’s trial, during which she famously employed the term “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann. (Of note, Israel also passed a death sentence in 1988 against former Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, but its Supreme Court overturned it in 1993.) Advocates for Israel’s death penalty law attempt to justify their position by equating perpetrators of the October 7, 2023, massacre with Eichmann and the Nazi mass murderers sentenced to death at Nuremberg. If we could rationalize it for the Third Reich, they argue, surely we can do so for Hamas terrorists, as well. The implication is that such “evil” demands execution, and that there are instances when revenge through state killing feels entirely appropriate.

For many L’chaim members, this argument strikes a chord. Indeed, it is the very example of the Holocaust that undergirds much of the L’chaim members’ passion for death penalty abolition. I personally know how difficult it is to transcend the overwhelming longing for violent retaliation. I grew up as an ardent supporter of the death penalty, gripped in the spell of the same vengeful bloodlust that has plagued so many of my species. I therefore strive never to judge others who harbor such feelings, especially not when horrific antisemitic acts of terror, such as the mass murder and violence of October 7th, have victimized them. Alongside my experiences as a Jewish prison chaplain, my discovery of the indisputable Nazi legacies of various execution methods helped solidify my Holocaust-informed opposition to the death penalty.

Nazi Execution Methods and Legacies

Image: Adolf Hitler’s authorization for the euthanasia program (Aktion/Operation T4) was signed in October 1939, but dated September 1, 1939. The Nazis were the first to implement lethal injection. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, public domain)

Many rightfully condemn the brutal, murderous actions of the October 7th terrorists to the Nazi atrocities of the Shoah. Paradoxically, upon closer examination of execution methods, it is precisely the legacy and shadow of the Holocaust that punctuates the need to oppose the death penalty. Lethal injection – the primary form of execution used in the US – is a direct Nazi legacy. The Third Reich first implemented this execution method as part of their infamous Aktion T4 protocol, using lethal injection to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, developed that protocol. It is an unconscionable Nazi legacy.

Similarly, the use of firing squads for executions inescapably evokes the widespread Nazi use of the same abomination during the Shoah to murder countless Jews and others. Finally, the existential horror that millions of Holocaust descendants experience when hearing about the gassing to death of prisoners with gas masks and gas chambers, including the notion of using Zyklon B, of Auschwitz infamy, requires no explanation. The members of Louisiana’s Jews Against Gassing Coalition know this all too well. The fact that Israel’s new death penalty law calls for hanging changes nothing about the incalculable collective trauma that the spectre of state-sponsored killings evokes for so many Holocaust victims and descendants.

Elie Wiesel: “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” 

There is a long list of celebrated Jewish death penalty abolitionists who recognized this direct connection to the Shoah. As stated above, foremost among them is Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), who viscerally grasped the danger of giving the state the power to kill its prisoners long before I was born. Wiesel would no doubt reiterate his inflamed opposition to the death penalty in all forms if he were alive today and asked on this Yom HaShoah about Israel’s proposed death penalty law. His torch is one that L’chaim members carry in our hearts and souls. His warning should echo throughout the collective consciousness of all humanity. It should resonate particularly in the hearts and souls of all Israelis now that their nation has raised the barbaric sceptre of a return to capital punishment.

Wiesel expounded further upon the subject of the death penalty for a 1989 recording he made with other death penalty abolitionists entitled Lighting the Torch of Conscience, in which he stated the following:

“Death should be opposed, not served. I have seen too much death in my life. I have met too many people who served death in my life…There is no reason in the world why death should be imposed by people of good will, of intelligence, of kindness –  people in the name of justice – on other people. Those who sinned – those who committed crimes – can be punished in other ways, but not with death. When we impose death on others, we are doing something to ourselves…With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory, I oppose the death penalty in all forms…I belong to a tradition – a Jewish tradition – that says that when a Sanhedrin in ancient times pronounced one death sentence in its entire tenure, that Sanhedrin – that Supreme Court – was called murderous.”

It is not difficult to discern from Wiesel’s stated position how he would respond to the notion that the modern Israeli government might execute not one, but potentially hundreds of convicted terrorists.

Some critics have argued that Wiesel was on record stating, as late as 1989, that he made an exception for convicted Nazis like Adolph Eichmann. Like Wiesel, I, too, once supported the death penalty for those who murdered my family members in the Holocaust. Just as my mind shifted on this point, so, it seems, did Wiesel’s by the end of his life. A public statement that Wiesel made six years before his death reflects this apparent change of heart.

As late as Oct. 27, 2010, Wiesel spoke out against the death penalty during a lecture on capital punishment at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Earlier that day at a press conference, he was asked about his feelings on the possible execution of the perpetrators of a horrific home invasion that had taken place in nearby Cheshire, CT, in 2007. As a Connecticut native myself, I shall never forget that case, which all the local news stations carried at the time. On July 23, 2007, Linda Hayes (born Steven Hayes) and Joshua Komisarjevsky invaded the residence of the Petit family in the small town of Cheshire. Though initially planning only to rob the house, Hayes and Komisarjevsky horrifically raped, attacked, and murdered Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, 17-year-old Hayley Petit and 11-year-old Michaela Petit. They mercilessly burned young Hayley and Michaela alive. Their father, Dr. William Petit, escaped with severe injuries. The Hartford Courant cited this case as “possibly the most widely publicized crime in the state’s history.”

When asked for his opinion on the death penalty for the perpetrators, Wiesel focused his remarks on people like Dr. Petit and himself, both of whom were family members of murder victims. (Wiesel lost both parents and a sister in the Nazi death camps.) He indicated that society should punish such murderers more harshly than other prisoners and encouraged the criminal justice system to focus efforts on the survivors of violent crimes “so that families will not feel cheated by the law.” “But,” he said, “death is not the answer.” He emphasized that he might change his stance if the death penalty could bring back victims, which, of course, it could not. “I know the pain of those who survive,” Wiesel said. “Believe me, I know… Your wound is open. It will remain. You are mourning, and how can I not feel the pain of your mourning? But death is not the answer. He concluded: “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” 

Wiesel’s words, like the Yom HaShoah siren, are a clarion call. They reveal that by the end of his life, he likely would have joined the pantheon of Jewish and non-Jewish human rights luminaries who fully aligned with death penalty abolition, and the massive scale of Jewish and rabbinic voices  – like that of IKAR’s Rabbi Sharon Brous and countless others – protesting vehemently against Israel’s new law. The Supreme Court of Israel now has the opportunity to repeal this monstrosity. On this Yom HaShoah, Israelis and Jews everywhere must therefore call upon the justices of that court to heed Wiesel’s words and vote “no” to the legality of the death penalty law, and “yes” to civilized humanity, once and for all. Those same justices would do well also to heed the words of their predecessor, the former Israeli Supreme Court Justice and death penalty abolitionist Haim Herman Cohen (1911-2002). Cohen famously stated of capital punishment: “We cannot uproot evil by recycling it through us.” Indeed, unconditional repeal is the only step forward now to begin to unveil the trauma-laden, insidious revenge impulse that fuels this law, releasing it at last from behind its mask of false notions of deterrence. Only then will the cycle of violence and killing truly have a chance at ending. Only then can true restorative justice and reconciliation begin.

Cantor Michael J. Zoosman, MSM, BCC

Co-Founder: L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty

Advisory Committee Member: Death Penalty Action

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