Holocaust as entertainment

 https://mishpacha.com/a-fraught-legacy/#:~:text=Yoni’s%20Adventures%20on,more%20than%20that

Yoni’s Adventures on October the 7th by Ricky Boles

A comic series about a boy named Yoni. The story opens on Simchas Torah morning. Yoni is still asleep when Hamas terrorists infiltrate his kibbutz. In a heart-pounding sequence of panels, he hatches a daring plan to rescue his baby sister before he’s taken hostage to Gaza. Through a mix of brilliance, bravery, and sheer mazel, Yoni escapes his captors, saves other children from the tunnels along the way, and returns to Eretz Yisrael as a hero.

Of course no such comic exists.

That would be outrageous.

And yet, in the car on my way to Brooklyn last week, I found myself sitting through a different outrageous tale — one that is in circulation, is widely consumed, and is proudly marketed as frum entertainment.

This story was about a clever boy outwitting KGB agents with a series of tricks and deceptions. My kids were cackling at the slapstick dialogue and exaggerated villains, while I sat there thinking: What would those who lived through this say? So many Yidden spent years, terrified, under Communist rule. Would they smile as they listened to this story? Or would they marvel at how far removed we are from the actual fear, brutality, and helplessness that defined those years?

The storytellers, the publishers, the creative directors are shaping our children’s historical knowledge — and in some cases, they’re distorting it. When we hand our kids a beautifully illustrated comic book, or CDs with suspenseful music, and illiterate-sounding Nazis, we rob them of the truth.

We blunt their sense of empathy. And we risk raising a generation that confuses gezeiros Shamayim with entertainment.

We owe our children, and our grandparents, more than that.