Holocaust Memory in Israel

Here is a wonderful article about Yom Ha Shoah, written by our NFTY Sheliach.

 The Evolving Narrative of the Holocaust Memory in Israel
By Roey Schiff
 

Holocaust  Remembrance Day, which comes upon us soon, is a time to reflect on the darkest  tragedy of the Jewish people in the modern age (and some would say in all of  history). The importance of having such a day is indisputable, but personally,  I must say I find myself pondering the events of the Holocaust quite  frequently. Whenever the temperature is freezing outside and, despite my  multiple layers and warm clothing, I still feel cold, I can't help but wonder  how in the name of God people could survive the harsh European winter with only  a thin piece of cloth covering their bodies. Or when I feel hungry after not  eating for a few hours, I wonder how one can endure this distressing sensation  for weeks, months, or even years.

These  experiences that were so common in the concentration camps are so hard for us  to grasp that it's understandable (though still not acceptable) why in its  early years Israel did not exhibit a receptive attitude toward Holocaust  victims or even toward the historiography of the events of the Holocaust.  Survivors' stories sounded so horrifying that their audience thought they were  exaggerated. I remember once hearing a survivor's testimony: he said that in  the beginning, even his family didn't believe him, and thought his suffering  caused him to confuse reality and imagination. This kind of reception generated  reluctance among survivors to tell what they had been through. Many felt  ashamed and guilty of "being led like sheep for slaughter" instead of resisting  more forcefully. Therefore, they refused to talk about their experiences and  preferred to leave the past behind them, as if it belonged to another life; a  life that had no place in their present circumstances in Israel.

The  turning point occurred fifty years ago and one of its more recognizable  milestones was the Eichmann trial. Adolf Eichmann was a senior Nazi officer who fled to  Argentina and lived there under a fake identity until May 1960, when the  Israeli Mossad  captured him and took him to Jerusalem to face trial in an Israeli court.  The charges against him were numerous, including crimes against humanity, such  as his coordination of many deportations of Jews to ghettos and extermination  camps. For those and other charges, he was found guilty and sentenced to death  (the first and only time a death sentence was enacted in Israel). However, it  wasn't the verdict, but the trial itself that changed Israel's (and the entire  Jewish world's) approach toward the Holocaust. The trial aroused international interest,  bringing Nazi atrocities to the forefront of world news, and it was the first  time the survivors were given such a public stage. One survivor after another  testified in court, and the nation listened to the voices of the witnesses,  feeling their agony. It prompted a new openness in Israel, as the country  confronted this traumatic chapter in Jewish history.

The  impact of Eichmann's trial is felt to this day in the way Israel promotes  Holocaust education and encourages survivors-who are aging-to share their  experiences with others. Holocaust Remembrance Day is the culmination of our  efforts to honor survivors and remember the fallen. In Israel, at one point  during the day, a siren sounds, traffic stops, and the entire country observes  two minutes of silent memorial. There is no public entertainment, as theaters,  cinemas, pubs, and other public venues are closed. Radio, television, and even  music programs are all adapted to recognize the serious atmosphere of this  special day.
In  Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called   (יום השואה והגבורה) Yom HaShoah  V'Hag'vurah, which means, Day of the Holocaust and Heroism. The rationale  for this name arises from Israel's past approach that preferred to focus on how  Jews heroically resisted their Nazi tormentors through fighting them in the  ghettos and joining underground partisans who fought the Third Reich in its  occupied countries. For the same reason, the original proposal was to hold Yom  HaShoah on 14 Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Due to its proximity to Passover on 15 Nisan, the commemoration was postponed  to take place on 27 Nisan-after the holiday but still close to the anniversary  of the ghetto uprising.

Today,  Holocaust Remembrance Day helps us gain a broader understanding of the concept  of a hero: It's not just someone who bears arms and fights in the name of a  higher purpose. A hero is also someone who chooses to live and retain his human  dignity in the most unbearable conditions. I'm proud to call all those who  experienced the Holocaust my heroes, as they prove to the entire world that the  human spirit is stronger than can ever be imagined. Let us always remember this  message together with the memory of those who perished and the heroism of the survivors.

Roey  Schiff is  the NFTY and Israel Programs Shaliach  at the Union for Reform Judaism.

Prague and Poland

                                                                                                             November 2000


Dear G.U.C.I. Staff:

     
It's unusual for me to find myself in our Beit T'fillah (outdoor chapel) at 10 p.m. on a Friday night in October, all by my lonesome.  But, as I returned, last month, from a UAHC Camp Directors' trip to the Czech Republic and Poland, I didn't feel I had reached my destination until I arrived at our Beit T'fillah.  

We took off on a grueling, six-day, experience, stepping back into the distant and cerebral past of the middle ages, and to the not so distant, emotional past of our Eastern European Jewish history.  It was quite a personal voyage for me.  You see, three of my grandparents came to America in the early 1900's from Prague, Czechoslovakia.  Czech was spoken at our family get-togethers around tables filled with Bohemian foods.  It just wasn't Thanksgiving if we weren't all at my Aunt Lill's on Chicago's West side, digging into the goose, dumplings, and cabbage along with the newer traditions, turkey, stuffing, and cranberries.  The beer was Pilsner Urquell.  We belonged to B’nai Jehoshua, a synagogue made up of mostly Czech families.  Enough said.  I knew I was a Czech Jew.

At several stops along the way that week, the realities of our Jewish past stepped up to splash their ice water in my face.  The first was in a small synagogue in Prague where the living had honored the names of all Czech Jews deported by the Nazis, by listing them on the synagogue walls and ceilings.  I stood there under the names of my Mother's family, the Steiners, who I would never meet or know.  These were the relatives after which my Aunts and even my Grandfather were named.  Until that moment I had never felt so related to our enemy's victims.  I felt a deep connection to that family I would never know but eternally miss.  The names on that ceiling drew me right into the horrors of that time.      

We left the Technicolor Prague for a black and white Warsaw and Krakow.  Warsaw is a gray, cement block city where most of our Jewish presence has been erased.  But, I did stand on Mila Street to honor the well-known Mordachai Anielewicz, leader of the ghetto revolt against the Nazi monsters.  Standing on that street also gave me the opportunity to honor the not-so-well-known Moshe Pashtan, z"l, who, born on that street, escaped the ghetto as a child to Germany (of all places) and then to Israel, only to wind up sharing a tent with me for a summer as my Assistant Tzofim Unit Head at Olin-Sang-Ruby in 1969.  Moshe and I took a bus to New York after camp that summer.  I was leaving for a year (due mostly to Moshe's summer-long prodding) on my first pilgrimage to Israel.  For me, Mila was Pashtan's street.  It was one of the many spots I stopped to whisper the Kaddish.

I prayed again at the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw.  It's overwhelming to stand amid the 250,000 Jewish graves, to read the Hebrew on the tombstones, to understand the poetry of their old words.  It's another strong connection.  This is where the enormity of our loss starts to become real.  Kaddish seemed inadequate to me.  But it was all I knew to say, a way to thank God for giving me life, to remember and to continue.  In retrospect, Kaddish was the perfect Jewish memorial. 

After a " From Russia With Love" style train ride to Krakow, thirty miles or so from my Father's family's hometown (The Klotz's came from Tarnov), we bused to the emotional apex of our trip, Auschwitz and Birkenau, Nazi work and death camps.  Passing under that wrought iron sign "Arbact Macht Frei" (work will make you free), walking through a gas chamber, seeing the ovens, strips away the distance and protection the filters of film, printed word, even personal testimony of survivors affords.  Being there makes it real. Very real.  The impact is so deep it takes the breath away. 

Finally, it's Birkinau.  This is where the train tracks end; the camp built solely for the purpose of killing Jews.  A million and a half of our grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins stepped out of their cattle cars and departed this world at that wrenched place.  Men to the left, women and children to the right.  Being there brings the inescapable thought that it could have been me.  It could have been you.  Then the reality, it was me and it was you.  To the left and to the right; stripped, gassed, cremated, ashes dumped into two small pools of water.  All that remains are those pools.  We were numb standing by the water.  We neither cried nor screamed.  Just numb.  Rabbi Allan Smith, our guide that day began our ascent from those depths with a worship service in the area adjacent to the water pools filled with ashes.  We shared some of our thoughts along with the prayers.  Then he led us in the opposite direction the 800,000 women and children took as they marched to their deaths down a half-mile brick path.  They are in the pools.  We rise from the place of the ashes to carry on and do our work and live as Jews.  I stopped and dug up a few pieces of brick from that path.  So many children had stepped there.  I needed something in my pocket to hold on to.  When my group talked a bit about the experience I told my colleagues that, after the sadness and the anger, I felt an intense sense of pride and confirmation.  Pride in carrying on our Jewish heritage.  Pride in my ethnicity, my faith, my membership in Am Yisrael.  This was an experience that confirmed all of the above and even more, the work we do, not only here at camp and in NFTY, but in every synagogue, and in every home where our kids learn to sing the Shabbat blessings and light the Chanukiot.  I've always maintained that it is sacred work, teaching kids to love Judaism and strengthening their Jewish identities.  But now, after having been in this place, I felt I was carrying home the blessings of those who walked that brick path.  I'm honored to carry the torch into the future.
 
So, I returned late on a Friday night, exhausted after over thirty hours of travel.  On the way home from the airport I took a left instead of a right and wound up at camp (just a minute out of the way).  Closed and dark, it's still GUCI.  I took ten minutes to sit in our Beit T'fillah imagining and remembering the voices of our campers and staff, singing our prayers, fanning away the heat with prayer cards.  That's how I completed this extraordinary trip.

And so, I headed home, my pockets lumpy with pieces of brick.

AM YISRAEL CHAI!

Ron

Reminder of Tarnov

                                                                                                            March 1997


Dear G.U.C.I. Staff:


At the recently held NFTY National Convention I had several reasons to be proud.  First of all the mere fact that the convention brought together 850 NFTY high school students was inspiring.  Singing, praying, just feeling their energy and spirit was great.  I had the opportunity to lead a few workshops during the convention.  One was on the Torah portion of the week and one was on the idea of spirituality.  In each, the kids knocked me for a loop with the depth and sincerity of many of their comments.  We compared the Israelites building the tabernacle with our own attempts to bring God into our lives.  We discussed how and where we feel holy, and what prayers bring out a sense of uplifted spirit in us.  These were personal revelations, no wrong answers here.  I found the groups to be eager to share their feelings, and anxious to encounter what the rabbi (that would be me) said Judaism said about X, Y, or Z.  I think, Jewishly speaking, I turned a few kids on.  I know that I myself walked away from the convention encouraged. 

I went on the bus with our Ohio Valley region kids to the Holocaust Museum.  Two dramatic things happened there.  As we entered the building our group was loud and happy, making the typical teenage tumult one would expect of them.  But, the instant we started on the tour of the exhibits the kids snapped into a serious and quiet demeanor.  I saw several helping each other at difficult times during the experience.  I most definitely felt the spirit of Goldman Camp working here.  Our NFTYites were full of “Ruach” one minute, then appropriately serious and even comforting to each other the next.  I was proud of them.

At one point in the Holocaust exhibit I saw something I had missed on my last visit to the museum.  It was a wrought iron gate standing behind a glass enclosure.  I read the explanation card, kind of amazed to see that it was the front gate from the synagogue/cemetery in what used to be the Jewish shtetle of Tarnow (pronounced Tarnov) Poland.  You see, my Grandfather, Max Klotz came to this country in 1906 from Tarnow, Poland.  And what’s more, it’s told in our family that his grandfather was a rabbi.  I looked at that gate and realized that it is certainly possible that  my great, great grandparents, their son, and grandson (my Grandpa Klotz) may very well have walked through that gate going to shul.  In my minds eye, I saw my great, great grandfather’s hand on the iron latch, opening that very gate so a small boy, my grandpa could enter the synagogue.  Talk about feeling connected!

I felt proud that America housed this unique tribute to our people, proud that our kids respected it so, and proud to find my great, great grandfather’s gate in the middle of it all.

Ron