Last night, my nine-year-old son came home from school carrying a small candle. On it was a name: Yechiel Slutski. Born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1875. Murdered in 1940. He was 65 years old. He was married to a woman named Leah. His parents were Hannah and Ezra. I don’t know if he had children. I don’t know if he had grandchildren. But he was a man with a name, a face, a history, a family. And then he wasn’t. Last night, my son lit that candle, and for a few quiet minutes, Yechiel Slutski’s light burned in our home.
This is what Israeli schoolchildren do every year on the eve of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Thousands of children bring home thousands of candles, each one bearing the name of a real person who was murdered. The initiative is called Shem v’Ner, Name and Candle. Six million Jews were killed. Six million lights extinguished. No number of candles will fill that darkness. The global Jewish population today stands at 15.8 million, still below what it was before the Holocaust. The world has not recovered. And now, the last people who can say “I was there” are dying. Within a decade, there will be no living witnesses left.
And there are people, more every year, who say it didn’t happen.
So here is the question I found myself sitting with last night, watching that small flame flicker on my table: What does it mean to blot out a name? And what does God say about those who try?
The Torah does not leave this question unanswered.
There is a verse that Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, places at the center of its mission to recover the names of the murdered:
The context is a legal one, about a man who dies without children, and his brother’s obligation to carry on his name. But the principle cuts far deeper than family law. In the Hebrew Bible, to have your name blotted out is the ultimate erasure. It is not just death. It is the annihilation of memory. It is being unmade.
This is exactly what the Nazis attempted. They did not only murder Jews. They built a system designed to erase them, to reduce human beings to numbers tattooed on arms, to ash, to silence. They wanted Yechiel Slutski to disappear so completely that no one would ever say his name again. Holocaust denial is not a fringe conspiracy theory with no victims. It is the continuation of that project by other means. To say the Holocaust didn’t happen is to murder the six million a second time, to finish what the Nazis started, to blot out the names they tried to destroy.
The very name Yad Vashem comes from the prophet Isaiah:
God is speaking about those who feel forgotten, those who fear they will leave no trace. His answer is not a comfort. It is a promise. A permanent place. An indestructible name. The people who built Israel’s Holocaust memorial chose this verse because it captures exactly what they understood their mission to be: not charity toward the dead, but the fulfillment of a divine obligation. God does not allow names to be blotted out. And neither can we.
This is why the candle matters even more than it might appear.
The Hebrew word for candle, ner, carries enormous weight in Jewish tradition. The book of Proverbs says:
A candle is not just a memorial prop. It is a statement about what a human being is, a flame lit by God, carrying light and warmth, always reaching upward. When my son lit Yechiel Slutski’s candle, he was not performing a ritual. He was making a declaration: this man had a soul. This man was lit by God. This man cannot be unmade.
The survivors are almost gone. Soon there will be no one left to say: I saw it. I lived it. It was real. That is not a reason for despair. It is a transfer of responsibility. The witnesses are handing the candles to us. To our children. To nine-year-olds who come home from school carrying a small box with a stranger’s name on it, and who understand, in the way that children sometimes understand things more clearly than adults, that lighting it matters.
Yechiel Slutski was born in Bialystok in 1875. He was the son of Hannah and Ezra. He was the husband of Leah. He was murdered in 1940. He had a soul that God lit, and a name that men tried to destroy, and for 24 hours, that name was spoken aloud in my home, and a flame will burn for him on my table.
That is not nothing. That is everything.
His name shall not be blotted out. Not by the Nazis. Not by the deniers. Not by the passage of time. Not on our watch.
