This week, Kesher Israel held a beautiful Yom Hashoah commemoration. An energetic Holocaust survivor in her 90s spoke about her experiences, memorial candles were lit by children and grandchildren of survivors and victims, and I spoke about the need to remember so that it will never happen again.

“Never Again” is the Holocaust memorial refrain. But will remembering the destruction and murder, the martyrs who died al kiddush hashem, to sanctify God’s name, prevent it from happening again? Though we remember every year and erect Holocaust memorials, the world is filled with several genocides in Africa and Asia and rising rates of antisemitism. Perhaps there is a different way of guaranteeing, “Never Again”?

When my family and I were on sabbatical about 15 years ago, I experienced Yom Hashoah for the first time in Israel and was disoriented by it. Yom Hashoah in Israel was totally different from the Yom Hashoah I had always known—as if diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews were commemorating two entirely different holidays.

In the United States the name of the day is Yom HaShoah, literally, “The Day of Destruction.” I am used to the typical images and feelings of Yom Hashoah in America, the films of skeletal bodies piled up in the grainy black and white images of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the stories of painful loss and miraculous survival of elderly survivors at large gatherings, and the hushed atmosphere and solemn shiva-type ambience of community-wide mourning for our people.

In Israel, instead of Yom Hashoah, the Day of the Destruction, it is called Yom Hashoah V’Hagevurah, the Day of Destruction and Strength and, indeed, in Israel, the emphasis is palpably on the “strength part.” In my children’s Israeli schools, the presentations that day were mostly about ghetto uprisings and partisan survival. I wondered if they did not get the memo, because, to be honest, after the siren and moments of silence, the rest of the day seemed like a celebration of Jewish strength, not a day of mourning.

Visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and memorial, and you will see the Zyklon-B canisters, the shoes and torn talitot and the candle lights and names of the 6 million who were killed. But the museum is shaped like a long triangular tunnel in which there is only one way to walk—forward—and when you get to the end, it jarringly opens onto a beautiful view of the verdant forests of the Judean Hills of Jerusalem. We see the Shoah, the Destruction but it leads to Gevurah, to victory and strength.

Though I find the Israeli approach disconcerting, and slightly blind, perhaps theirs is the wiser one. The focus on Jewish power and victory may indeed be more effective than the diasporan hope that remembering the loss and martyrdom will beget “Never Again.”