The Holocaust, understanding it, its memory and Yad Vashem

Research about the causes and reasons for the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, based on documentation has gone on for dozens of years, and has ascertained a variety of long-range processes that coalesced in certain historical circumstances. Yet Dr. Hanan Shai, in the article that was published this week under the auspices of the BESA center (Jan. 15, “A serious moral failure at Yad Vashem”) instructs us, without a flutter of an eyelid, that there were “two central reasons.”

The first reason: “that in contrast to the scientific revolution, whose founders replaced the narratives and delusions o...