Leaning on insight alone, one might be inclined to make the presupposition that the word 'shoah' finds its' root in 'schwa'(see:http://www.balashon.com/search/label/
punctuation) With the idea, perhaps, that European Jewry was brought to vanity and emptiness by the Nazi's. Hence the Wise reason that the Yad Vashem Memorial was established (an Idea based upon Shemot 3:15 & Yeshiyahu ha Navi 56:5).
"khurbm" is not a yiddish translation of "shoah". it's a loshn-koydesh term used in yiddish. see khurbm-bays-rishn/khurbm-bays-sheyni/khurbm galistye (sh. z. an-ski) and "khurbm" for the nazi genocide of jews.
For several sources on the establishment of Yom Hashoah ve-Ha-Gevurah, see James E. Young, "When A Day Remembers: A Performative History of Yom Hashoah," The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 263-281 (chapter ten); and, quite recently, Roni Stauber, "Heroism or Uprising? The Debate in the Late 1950s on Determining the Name of the Memorial Day," in The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology and Memory (London and Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 97-115 (chapter six); and Dina Porat, "Attitude of the Young State of Israel Toward the Holocaust and its Survivors: A Debate over Identity and Values," in Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors (London and Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 345, 347, passim; among many many other sources.
I was under the understanding that Elie Wiesel had popularized this use of the word "holocaust".
He later regretted it because the word tended to de-humanize what had happened and stories of the countless individuals were lost.
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