What is the historical process by which something becomes sacred? Is Auschwitz a sacred place?

In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb asks what is the historical process that leads to the creation of a religion, or changes in the practice of one that already exists.

Is it possible that events of modern history will someday take on religious significance, or are people today intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding their experience as “awesome” in the sense that the great religions mean the term?

Using sound from his personal archive Goldfarb builds a case that the catastrophe of the Holocaust, like the catastrophe of the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, should and will be incorporated into Jewish religious observance.