Below is a transcript of Rabbi Adi Cohen’s address to the Gold Coast Yom HaShoah ceremony held on 12 January 2026 at the Gold Coast General Cemetery, next the Gold Coast’s Holocaust Memorial.

In the shadow of the Shoah, we remember a regime that demanded unison.

Unison is the sound of a single note played by many; it requires the silencing of every other frequency.

It is the “Gleichschaltung”, the forced coordination of a whole society where individuality was a crime.

When a group is in unison, they move as a monolith. But when the human spirit is forced into a monolith, it loses its soul.

The Holocaust was the ultimate, tragic expression of what happens when the world demands that all faces, all thoughts, and all lives look exactly the same.

Jewish tradition offers a radical alternative. There is a famous Midrash in the Talmud (Berakhot 58a) regarding the blessing one says when seeing a massive crowd of people. We say, “Blessed is the Wise Collector of Secrets.”

Why? The Midrash explains:

“Just as their faces are not alike, so their opinions are not alike.”

This is not a complaint; it is a sanctification.

The Sages are teaching us that the “Secret” of humanity is its diversity. To the Creator, the fact that we disagree and see the world through different lenses is a feature, not a bug.

In the eyes of tyranny, different “faces” are a threat. In the eyes of the Divine, they are a miracle.

We see this reflected in Halacha (Jewish Law).

True Unity (Achdut) is like a symphony. In a symphony, the violin does not try to be the cello.

If they all played the same note, the music would be flat and hollow.

Unity is the harmony created when different voices, different “opinions” and “faces”, work toward a common, moral goal while remaining themselves.

The Talmud teaches in Sanhedrin 37a: “A man strikes many coins from one mold and they are all identical. But the King of Kings… fashioned every man in the stamp of Adam, and yet not one of them is like his fellow.”

The Shoah was an attempt to turn humans back into “identical coins”—stamped with numbers, stripped of names.

Today, as we remember the six million, we mourn six million individual worlds.

Our tribute to them must be to reject the pressure of unison.

We honour the victims by building a world where we can stand together in Unity, bound by a shared commitment to dignity, while fiercely protecting each person’s right to have a different face and a different opinion.

Let us be a choir, not a single note. Let us find the strength to be “one” without requiring anyone to be “the same.”