Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in early May this year, reminds me that my generation needs not only to honor victims of the Nazis, but to do its part to prevent genocide from recurring. But as the years pass, it becomes more and more difficult for young people to maintain a connection with the Jews who perished long before we were born.

The widely acclaimed film Paper Clips documents how one tiny school in Whitwell, Tenn., taught its students about diversity and prejudice. As the students of Whitwell discover the horrors of the Holocaust, they find themselves struggling to comprehend the magnitude of a number like 6 million. The students collect 6 million paper clips, a Holocaust-era symbol of resistance and remembrance, through letter-writing campaigns in their town and across the nation. Each paper clip reinforces the promise that we, as human beings and as Jews, have made never to let it happen again.

I remember trips to Daniel's Story at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with my elementary school, trips to the adult section with my Union for Reform Judaism camp. Each time, the horrors shock, frighten, chill me, as they do anyone who visits the museum. My own maternal grand- mother was forced to leave her home in Karlsruhe, Germany, as a teenager and barely escaped Holland in 1939. I've devoured Holocaust novels.

Still, what does the promise to never forget mean to me, to my generation? What is the personal relevance? How can I help prevent further genocide?

My peers and I are two generations removed from the terrors of World War II. And sometimes, in the insular environment of a suburb like Bethesda, I grow a little too comfortable. I feel like the persecution that drove my family out of Europe could never follow me here.

When suicide bombings erupt in Israel, I sometimes find myself asking why a piece of land nearly 6,000 miles away is worth so many lives. My mother always reminds me: Jews will never be completely safe unless there exists a distinctly Jewish state, a Jewish haven. And while, right now, there doesn't seem to be any significant threat to lives of millions of Jews in America and around the world, Israel exists as a way to ensure the Holocaust never happens again. Israel needs our support.

But what about Darfur? We must take the lessons of the Holocaust and make them dynamic. We must not merely learn about the Holocaust, but we should use it as an impetus to fight genocide everywhere, to make the lessons of the Holocaust applicable in our own lives.

Rabbi Zemel, Micah education director Debra Beland and high school teacher Rinat Manhoff recently met to discuss the high school curriculum for the next school year. Rabbi Zemel says he would like to reinstate an intense course of study of the Holocaust last taught five years ago, and to repeat it every four years so that each student experiences it once before graduation. The course will include several trips to the Holocaust Museum to study not only the atrocities, but a Jewish framework to help us make sense of them. Students will study the rise of Nazism and the conditions that permitted it to grow - with an eye toward preventing another Holocaust, whether the victims are Jews, Rwandans, Sudanese or anybody else.

And so we embark on an educational journey, seeking not only lessons for ourselves, but lessons for our children, so that we may heed the words of Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. counsel at the Nuremberg trials: "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated."