The memory of the Holocaust is a major issue among Jews who are of age today. Those who actually lived through it, or through that time, are passing out of this world. For many of the Jews of that generation, telling the story of the Holocaust was a critical part their Jewish identity. Exposing the truth both helped them to cope with the Holocaust's reality and to prevent it from happening again.
More than half of a century later, however, the role the Holocaust plays in a Jew's identity comes into question.
As harrowing and monstrous a nightmare as the Holocaust was, we introduce our own brand of nihilism by celebrating it as the central event of modern Judaism. ... It is futile to deplore the lack of Jewish continuity without providing an answer to the fundamental question: why be Jewish? The Holocaust is hardly the answer to that question. (Knobel et al., 1996)
Adding to this difficulty is the conflict which the Holocaust brings with others. Muslims who reject the Jewish state feel that they were forced to move from their homes due to Jews taking advantage of world guilt about the Holocaust. Since Christians were the majority religion in Germany they are sometimes blamed unfairly for the Holocaust, even though Nazism rejected all forms religion. Preventing racial mass-murder comes from building bridges to other faiths, not angering them.
A major issue in Christianity is whether or not the Bible is the only source of information about God's will for his people. Fundamentalist Christians rely on the bible alone, while Catholicism argues that tradition and the writings of certain saints can give lesser insight into God's relationship with us. Many Protestant religions are falling somewhere between these stance of these two faiths.
Modern Muslims have perhaps the most difficult issue of the three faiths. Islam does not support the materialist life that is led in the West. Yet some radical Islamic ...