Another Yom HaShoah has come and gone, now 67 years since the end of World War II. Not that in all those years we’ve gotten it just right when it comes to marking these most overwhelming events in all the 4,000 years of the Jewish people. I think about this a lot, as a synagogue rabbi trying to program something moving and intelligent each spring.
How should a synagogue community mark Yom HaShoah?
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s *Zakhor* made us pay attention to the uneasy alignment of Jewish “history” – empirical, critical research into the past – and “memory” – emotionally and culturally laden bonds we share with people who lived long ago, who are dead but never really gone, whose lives we carry forward. Contemporary Jews marking the Shoah almost always stumble as we weave history & memory. Too much historical analysis, and we’re really just examining cadavers. But it is so easy to slide into manipulative sentimentality, and our nostalgic veneration of a supposedly authentic, saintly Eastern Europe. No thank you.
Then there are the problems of theology, politics and ethics. Bringing God into the conversation is totally necessary and totally impossible. As R. Eliezer Berkovits said in *Faith After the Holocaust*, it is blasphemy against the God of Israel to fail to ask where He was while His children were being slaughtered. Yet no religious answer makes more than fragmentary sense of the extreme bestiality of the Nazis and their friends. Certainly no answer can be compelling enough for our communities to davven it together as a faith statement. Politically, too often the Shoah becomes a spade to dig with, merely a pretext to talk about Iran or the Palestinians or Pat Buchanan. On the ethical front, you cannot cede either the Jewish meaning of these events or the universal ones. It is bizarrely deracinated to mark the obliteration of European Jewish civilization by talking about Darfur. Yet it is bizarrely self-assertive to talk about *einsatzgruppen*without considering the moral imperative to fight further mass murders. As Ruth Messinger of AJWS likes to say: “*Never Again* cannot mean *Never again should Germans kill Jews in the 1940s*.” All true. All difficult.
How should we mark it? The old stand-by – a survivor sharing his or her story – is in its final act. There are about 200,000 survivors in Israel and about 125,000 in America (according to various newspaper accounts). The youngest camp survivors would be in their 80s, and hidden children would have to be 70. About 12,000 survivors died in Israel last year, or an average of one every 44 minutes. We are the last generation that will hear from them in person.
At Ansche Chesed last year (2011) we had an exceptional presentation from the historian Sam Kassow about his book “Who Will Write Our History“ on the Oyneg Shabbos archives, the efforts by Warsaw Ghetto residents to document the misery going on around them, and the efforts at spiritual survival.
This year we followed up by showing *A Film Unfinished”, an amazing edition of Nazi propaganda footage taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in May, 1942, interleaved with contemporary interviews and additional material. The Nazi film aims to portray rich Jews ignoring the starvation of their poor brothers and sisters as they lived in luxury. The Nazis abandoned the project, apparently because the real cause of all the misery – the sidewalks full of corpses, the courtyards full of human feces, the people in dressed in rags – was all too obvious. Ghetto survivors, now in their 70s and 80s are shown here watching the film, pointing out individuals they recognize among the footage, fearing they will see images of their own parents. People have posted the whole film on Youtube, but I recommend you buy it. Here is a trailer.
Most haunting for me were two things: First, the Nazi camera’s focus on so many *faces* of the Ghetto residents. When you say the number *6 million, *how difficult it is to think of individuals. But staring into these faces – a mix of rich, well-fed faces, and gaunt, starving, scarred, grotesquely suffering faces – is a harrowing experience. As I looked at those faces, I thought to myself – this film is shot in May 1942. Within four months, by September of that year, most of you will have been gassed at Treblinka. You and you and you and you and you are all headed for the *brausebad* and then it will be over. This visual experience was helpful for absorbing the Shoah not as a pile of 6 million dead bodies, but as a passing parade of 6 million living people.
That is the same reason I find very moving the all-night reading of names, as we do here on the Upper West Side every Yom HaShoah. Reading the long list of names, I try to imagine something about these people. I try to imagine the person that goes with this name … let’s say Mordecai Goldberg, Sarah Cohen … attending school, playing childhood games, getting married, giving birth, mourning a loved one.
The other intensely moving part of the film had to do with food and hunger. One scene of the film, apparently a propaganda trope, shows a ghetto resident arranging flowers in a vase. To which one of the survivors comments: “Flowers? When were there ever flowers? If we had one, we would have eaten that flower.” You see scenes in this film that you never see in the worst urban poverty in America. True starvation and people too weak to move. At one point a man takes out a spoon and scrapes something off the pavement to eat it. (Similarly, you see what it looks like when people are literally dressed in rags – literally bags of rags – something you never see even among the saddest NYC street people.) When the film was being shot there were 4,000-5,000 people dying per month in the ghetto, dozens every day, their corpses left in the streets overnight for circulating burial squads to pick them up and lay them into mass graves (also shown in the film).
I came away from these images with a renewed sense of gratitude for the mind-bogglingly abundant food that we have in this country, a renewed desire to recite blessings for every morsel of food I enjoy, and a renewed desire to feed this country’s poor. As I like to, I gave to two of my favorite food organizations, the West Side Campaign Against Hunger in New York and Meir Panim in Israel.
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