Before Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

Sticky Post By admin On January 24, 2025

To these images I cling in these hopeful, hopeless times: Romi Gonen embracing her mother after 471 days as a hostage; Emily Damari telling her beloved Spurs, and the world, to ‘rock on’; Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of Washington, pleading with President Trump: ‘In the name of our God, I asked you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared;’ and, on a much smaller scale, to the sight of fifteen of our community planting an orchard near the entrance to our cemetery as an enduring commitment to life.

I pray there will be more such pictures of hostages returning, joyful embraces, deep relief, courage and the vindication of goodness.

For there are other images: families of hostages who haven’t come back alive; Palestinian people returning to homes where nothing remains but rubble; Los Angeles in flames while the President says ‘drill, baby, drill’; Elon Musk making his quasi-Nazi salute.

In these perilous times, as humanity crawls across a narrow ridge with the precipices of cruelty and ruin on either side, I hold hard to our faith, not just in God, for God will always be, but in the triumph of hope, life and love. For that is why we are here on earth, to fight for hope, life and love.

Monday, 27 January, marks eighty years since the first outriders of the Red Army reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. King Charles III, long a compassionate listener to survivors of the Holocaust, will participate in the commemorations.

I saw the preparations when I was there with my son and nephew two weeks ago, the huge marquees, soon to be buzzing, in strange contrast to the broken concrete of the crematoria, sunk in a silence beneath which, if one listens hard, there echo the voices of the murdered, with their hopes, longings and asphyxiated farewells.

This weekend and on Monday billions will be attentive.

But attentive to what? Rabbi Rodney Mariner, of blessed memory, spoke not of the liberation but of the revelation of Auschwitz. ‘And when the gates of Auschwitz were opened,’ wrote his colleague Rabbi Hugo Gryn, ‘and the world was able to take in and to react to what [the Nazis] could perpetrate and to the pain of the remnant of my people… both the image of God and the image of men and women were desecrated and besmirched.’

No event in the history of brutality has made it more blatant that we inherit that choice: to desecrate or hold sacred, to besmirch or help heal. Judaism defines this as the decision either to follow the mitzvah of Kiddush Hashem, thesanctification of God’s name, or to commit the sin of Hillul Hashem, voiding that name, treating the world as if everything is godless and it simply doesn’t matter how cruel, vindictive and exploitative we are.

This commemoration sets that choice starkly before all humanity once again.

We stand commanded, by God, Torah, history and present experience to care for each other, for all human – and non-human – life. Whatever our talents, capacities and opportunities, we exist to help each other, practise kindness and forbearance and treat this earth with respect. There is no such thing as neutrality. We aren’t here to be bystanders; we are not entitled to indifference.

The crueller the world, the more determined, proactive, faithful and compassionate we must dare to be. There is no other way to live.

There is a very great prayer in very small print in the daily section of my favourite siddur: ‘For the sake of God’s name, I commit, in deed, word and thought, from now until precisely this time tomorrow, to motivating myself, all the Children of Israel and the whole world to do what is just and good.’

Therefore, in the words of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, ‘May God grant us the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being’ and to care for all life.

17 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Interfaith, Israel, Refugees Permalink

On the Ceasefire and Hostages Deal

Sticky Post By admin On January 17, 2025

I sent Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held hostage, a message of prayer the moment I heard about the ceasefire deal. She sent back an emoji of a butterfly. We hold our breath. May this hell for Israel and Gaza end. May the killing and dying stop. May the slow, tough work of healing start. Dear God, let nothing prevent this deal!

A Message to the World from Glasgow

Meanwhile, something very different moved me this week. Actually, I nearly missed it; I almost said no. But my wife changed my mind: ‘Seeing we’re in Scotland the day before anyway, why not go? After all, it’s where you were born.’ That’s how Nicky and I found ourselves heading for Glasgow Cathedral last Sunday night for an interfaith celebration of the 850^th year since King William I of Scotland granted ‘the privilege of having a Burgh at Glasgow’.

On our way there I was startled to notice that we passed the Royal Infirmary. That’s where Raphael’s and my mother Lore died in December ’62. Thirty years ago, I went in to ask if they still held patient records from that time. The chaplain, who happened to be passing, overheard and took the trouble to check. ‘Sadly no,’ he reported back, ‘Records are only kept for twenty-five years.’ Like many who were very young when things happened, I’ve wanted to know, to have something to fill in the gaps.

In the cathedral were Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Druids, and others. The spirit of the service was ‘to show the world how communities can come together, live together and flourish together for generations.’

The date was 15 January, the Feast Day of St Mungo, the city’s patron saint. ‘Mungo’, the minister explained, means ‘Dear One’ in Scots. According to Wikipedia it may derive ‘from the Cumbric equivalent of the Welsh: fy nghu.’ But for me, it evoked my great-grandmother greeting in all her letters during the terrible years of 1938 – 43: ‘Meine Lieben, My Dear Ones.’

Representatives from every faith had warm words for this ‘city of hope and love.’ Rabbi Rubin spoke beautifully of the four symbols of Glasgow, a tree, a bird, a fish and a bell: the bird was to show how diverse kinds can co-exist, the bell was ‘to alert us to those in need.’ Contributions were collected for Glasgow’s club for refugees, ‘an interfaith response to intersecting disadvantages, including poverty, language barriers, discrimination and trauma.’

My mother was a refugee here in 1939 when she came to study, far from the home she knew. My father had it tough when he attended night school at Strathclyde University for seven years, to make up for the education stolen from him by the Nazis.

The Brahma Kumaris prayed for ‘Dear Glasgow to open our minds to silence and peace.’ The Buddhist prayer was simply: ‘May all beings flourish.’ If only the world were thus.

It was this lead-in, as well as her wonderful singing, that made Brodie Crawford’s rendition of Robert Burns’ A Man’s A Man For ‘A That so utterly moving. Written in 1795, the song reflects the ideals of the French Revolution. The language isn’t exactly egalitarian, but the point is that not wealth or station, but character, makes the person and we’re all brothers and sisters in the end:

For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Glasgow hasn’t always been a city of hope and love. I recall our doctor friend Maurice Gaba telling me, ‘My surgery after Saturday night was broken bones and blood.’

But this hour of togetherness touched our hearts and left us all with the aspiration to do better.

10 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Holocaust Permalink

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

Sticky Post By admin On January 10, 2025

‘Why is this important?’ my nephew Danny asks me. We’re standing at the ruins of crematorium three in Birkenau, recording for the BBC for which Danny works, in preparation for the 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. My son Mossy is here too. We’re aware that this may be the exact place where my great-, their great-great-, grandmother took her final breaths.

Late the previous night we visited the 16^th century Shach Synagogue in Holesov. Here my great-grandfather Rabbi Dr Yakov Freimann taught for twenty years. Half-hidden down steps below the street, it survived the Holocaust, unlike the New Synagogue which was burnt and smashed to pieces by the Nazis and the Vlajka.

It’s here that my great-grandmother Regina prayed on the New Year of 1941. On 29 September she wrote to her son in New York: ‘The solemn spirit of the service in the 800-year-old synagogue was especially dignified and in accord with our mood.’

Beautiful murals adorn the walls with the words of communal prayers: ‘Yitgadal veyitkaddash; Magnified and sanctified be Your holy name…’ Mossy sang Adam yesodo me’afar: ‘Humankind is made from dust and unto dust shall return.’ We were not just moved, but transfixed.

‘And what difference will it make when the last living survivors are gone?’ Danny continues.

Standing where they stood in their last moments, we felt close to the dead, trying in the icy rain to catch the echoes of their last words, mental farewells to mothers, children, loved ones, final prayers. As the last survivors go, it’s on us to testify about the lives of those, mostly fellow Jews, also Roma, homosexuals, socialists, who were murdered. And it’s our responsibility to affirm the courage of those who survived, creating new lives, so often without bitterness or hate. In so doing, we bear witness not just to the past, but to the irreducible value of every life.

Yet there’s something further, something critical at this dangerous juncture in today’s world: we must testify to the truth of what happened here for the sake of truth itself. Our western civilisation is in danger of leaving behind the age of empiricism, where fact and evidence matter, and entering the age of untethered myth, when all that counts is who tells the best-selling story. Powerful figures want to promulgate a post-fact, why-check-facts, facts-don’t matter culture. Empowered by many who live more in virtual than in physical reality, they seek to peddle manipulative falsehoods, appealing to the fears and bigotry which, if we’re honest, most of us harbour deep down. Their aim is not the suppression of truths. I fear it’s worse than that: true and false are not even relevant categories for them. All that matter is that their story sticks.

Therefore, our duty to testify is all the more essential. Judaism requires us to speak truth in the heart, bear honest witness, and know that God is not the God of our favourite prejudices but the God of all truth. We are commanded to pursue truth, whether or not it suits us. Inconvenient truths must also be acknowledged.

‘And what about the perpetrators, who also stood here?’ Danny asks.

I could have said: ‘They were nazis; our families were the victims.’ That’s true. But there’s a further, more difficult truth: ordinary people, some with doctorates and religious convictions, groups, parties, national governments, both through acting and through failing to act, became complicit in mass murder. What made that possible? What were the steps on those individual and collective paths? Societies that won’t ask that question may find that they’re already on it.

My answer to Danny is: We’re here to testify: to honour the lives of those murdered, to appreciate the lives of those who survived, and for the sake of truth, to protect all life in the future.

HEART AND MIND

Month: January 2025

Before Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

On the Ceasefire and Hostages Deal

A Message to the World from Glasgow

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

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