19 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

Make Me a Sanctuary

Sticky Post By admin On February 19, 2026

I’m here in Berlin, leading a week of intensive study for rabbinical students on the subject of our environment, God’s world. But how, in this city, could I not be thinking about my grandparents and what they endured?

My mother’s father studied here for the rabbinate at the liberal Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, graduating in 1909. My father’s grandfather Jacob Freimann studied some decades earlier at the orthodox Hildesheimer Seminar. Both colleges stood on the same street, the Artilleriestrasse. Apparently, they were known respectively as ‘the light artillery’ and ‘the heavy artillery’. The institutions remained separate (though no shots were fired) until Hitler forced them to combine, before closing them both down and sending to his concentration and death camps all alumni unable to escape his murderous grasp.

My grandfather managed to flee Nazi Germany in April 1939. My great-grandfather died suddenly in 1937 on his way to celebrate his eldest daughter’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Holleschau. There he lies at peace in the town’s Jewish cemetery, mercifully untouched by the horrors that decimated his family, killing half and sending the others into exile.

But these are not the associations uppermost in my mind as I study the Torah I’m preparing to share. Rather, I find myself meditating on the deep resilience of Judaism, persistent survivor of exiles, wars, and the dragnets of numerous tyrannies.

Today’s rabbinical college, named after Abraham Joshua Heschel (who also studied here but hated the place), is situated in the nearby town of Potsdam, the military capital constructed for the Kaisers. As I walk past the stolid stately buildings and the huge grey archway, I see the stone footprints of power. Here the German army’s records were held, including the undisclosed results of the infamous 1916 Judenzaehlung, the census intended to prove that Jews were shirkers, avoiding service in the Kaiser’s front lines. The conclusions were never published because, it is widely presumed, they proved the opposite. The truth will never be known because the archives were destroyed by allied bombing in World War ll.

Throughout those violent decades years my grandparents in their rabbinates were trying to establish something very different, – less tangible, incomparably more fragile, yet ultimately more enduring: a Mikdash, a sacred tabernacle for the presence of God.

The Torah describes this structure in minute detail: acacia wood, curtains of scarlet and purple, clasps of gold and copper. But in truth it has no fixed footprint and occupies no single place. It is created and recreated, as it has been for millennia, wherever people come together to pray to God, care for each other, seek blessing and try to make the world more compassionate and less cruel. Any and every place where this is attempted is truly holy, not because the ground is sanctified but because space has been made for what transcends time and space: humility and service, kindness and blessing, and consciousness of the spirit that flows through all life, instructing us in our heart and soul not to hate, or hurt, or harm.

I look around me and see the huge stone contradiction of this ephemeral structure, this ideal, this idea. Yet which has proved the stronger, which has endured?

I discuss with my fellow students what it means to perceive the world as God’s creation and everything that breathes as precious, and to recognise that in this volatile and violent age we are here to try to protect and honour the holiness of fragile, vulnerable, transient life.

06 Feb 2026

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

In the week when we read the Ten Commandments in the Torah

Sticky Post By admin On February 6, 2026

In that moment when the words ‘I am your God’ were spoken, the whole world fell silent, all creation stood still and listened. Every living being felt: ‘These words are spoken to me.’ Everything in nature realised: ‘This is my inner essence; this is who I truly am.’

This beautiful explanation, by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, takes us far beyond the understanding of the first of the Ten Commandments as a statement of religious dogma. Rather, it is the truth at the heart of all life: whoever I am, in whatever way I frame my identity, – Jew, continental, American, Russian, gardener, teacher, parent, teen – there is a deeper reality to me. That truth flows through me and through all things constantly, almost always unrecognised and unnamed, but without it I would have no breath and my heart would not beat. That truth is the sacred vitality, the divine energy, which imparts life to all that is. In that moment when God spoke, not just down from Mount Sinai but upwards from the depths of all being, this truth surged to the fore and, for one inerasable moment, united all consciousness in the one awareness: this is my God, the ‘I’ which is the core of all being and is the deepest reality of all that exists.

That moment of revelation at Sinai may or may not be historical, but it certainly is eternal, universal and all-encompassing. Only, it flows deep down and concealed, well below the loud, unceasing, constantly chafing, frequently brutal, experience of our everyday world. Noise and violence drown it out. But they cannot negate it or render it untrue. We continue to hear it, if only rarely; we to intuit it in those moments when we fall silent and not just our mind but our heart comprehends: we belong to one life you and I, fellow traveller, fellow human, fellow being, bird, sheep, tree.

Yet, despite this teaching, I find myself thinking over and again of a very different commentary on the Ten Commandments, by my much-missed teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn. In Chasing Shadows he writes of his experience in concentration camps:

‘In the intervening years I have often thought how Auschwitz-Birkenau was the denial and the perversion of all the Ten Commandments. In that Nazi empire…it was clear that:

I. God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death.

II. They fashioned for themselves idols of silver and gold and filled their world with the sigh of swastikas, the sound of Heil Hitler and the smell of burning corpses.

VI. Murder was at the heart of that culture, and killers were promoted and honoured.’

This is what can happen when we forget the sacred ‘I’ which is the heart of all life and by virtue of which all life is precious and must, in all its individuality and diversity, be recognised and respected. How different that ‘I’ is from the ‘I, not you’; the ‘I have no place for you,’ the ‘ego-nationalism,’ exclusionism and racism at the core of the worst of populist politics. How different from those tyrannical ‘I’s’ in our current world, eager to take up weapons and kill.

I fear this rise of violence and contempt, whoever it is directed against: refugees, fellow Jews, Muslims, non-Brits, nature, life itself. That is why it is so important, essential beyond anything words can convey, to listen to that voice which speaks from Sinai and, as Rabbi Yehaudah Aryeh-Leib taught, to recognise it, be silent, and know.

28 Jan 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust Permalink

International Holocaust Memorial Day 2026

Sticky Post By admin On January 28, 2026

On Monday I attended the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with Joe Carlebach, representing Masorti Judaism at the Government’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony, co-hosted by the Embassy of Israel. The theme is Bridging the Generations. It is a deeply affecting ceremony.

After a robust speech, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper takes Mala Tribich’s hand and helps her to the platform. Mala, wonderful, eloquent and brave as ever in her mid-nineties, tells how she’s a hidden child before being taken to the Czestochowa ghetto where she’s made responsible for her five-year-old cousin Anna. After years of slave labour she’s sent to Ravensbrueck and finally Bergen-Belsen, where, sick with typhus, she is liberated by the British Army.

The El Malei Rachamim, sung by Jonny Turgel, penetrates deep into the heart.

But remembrance, Yvette Cooper stresses, is not enough. ‘Memory must be combined with resolve,’ the determination to remove antisemitism and all forms of religious and race hatred from across our society. Meg Davis, Young Ambassador for the Holocaust Education Trust, tells of the gross ‘so-called Holocaust jokes’ she faces on social media. Hatred and bigotry must be confronted with education and more education.

Poignant about the past, pertinent about the present, this is a profoundly affecting gathering.

Tonight I’m speaking about my own father’s relatives from my book My Dear Ones: One Family and The Final Solution.

International Holocaust Memorial day cuts deep for all of who live and love our Judaism, and, tragically, for many other peoples as well.

07 Nov 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust Permalink

Remembrance Sunday and the AJEX Parade

Sticky Post By admin On November 7, 2025

This message is dedicated to those to whom we owe more than anything we can ever say.

Remembrance Sunday falls in two days’ time, followed one week later by the AJEX parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

‘2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, a historic moment to reflect on the extraordinary service and sacrifice of Jewish men and women who fought for freedom. We are calling on the community to honour our pride in the significant British Jewish contribution to HM Armed Forces by stepping forward in Remembrance and solidarity.’ https://www.ajex.org.uk/ajex-annual-remembrance-parade-ceremony-2025-410

I am mindful, too, that this Sunday is November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when my grandfather was summoned by the Gestapo to Frankfurt’s Hauptsynagoge, which he had to watch burn. Days later he was sent to Dachau.

It is also exactly two years since I visited the Kaminka family as they prepared for the sheloshim of their son Yannai. He was one of seven soldiers, men and women, killed on October 7 as they courageously defended their army base at Zikim, saving their ninety new recruits from being murdered by Hamas. ‘He missed out on his life,’ said a friend.

So many ‘missed out on their lives.’ We owe them not just our freedom but our existence.

I watched, rivetted, the BBC 2 documentary: D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. These are recordings, made soon after the war, of Allied troops who survived D-Day and the slow, cruel Battle of Normandy. There are also tapes of German soldiers and members of the French resistance. Their words are spoken by actors, chosen to be the same age as those service personnel in June 1944. Interspersed are film clips and brief historical commentary.

One of the men was the major charged with capturing Pegasus Bridge. https://major-history.co.uk/2025/01/08/d-day-pegasus-bridge They landed at night just yards away in a glider. Like thousands of others, he lost his friend in the first minute: “All the years of training he’d put in to do a job … it only lasted 20 seconds.”

The tapes vividly communicate the fear and the courage, – and the slaughter of war. ‘They told us it would be hell,’ said a US quartermaster: ‘They didn’t lie about that.’

AJEX’s key line this year is ‘Carry them forward.’ This takes me to two locations. The first is the British war cemetery scarcely a mile inland from Sword Beach. The graves are carefully tended; there are Magen Davids among the Crosses. In the chapel, a book holds all the names. Next to the Jewish names is often a note, such as, ‘Changed from xxx.’ These soldiers were advised that, if taken prisoner, their chances were better as POWs than as Jews. On many graves the epitaph is simply: ‘Known unto God.’

The other place is a remote hilltop among the quiet Fairy Lochs near Gairloch in the Scottish Highlands. There, accessible only after a muddy climb, is a memorial where a USAAF Liberator carrying troops home from the war crashed into the rocks, killing everyone on board.

The wreckage, parts of motor, undercarriage, lie all around. A propeller sticks out of the shallow water among the lily leaves covering the loch. Those moments of fatal violence; this tranquil beauty all around.

We always read each name; try to imagine who these men were. Quietly, we say Kaddish.

25 Apr 2025

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

In memory of my father, who died on Israel’s Independence Day, 18 years ago

Sticky Post By admin On April 25, 2025

It was my brother, Raphael, who thought to move our father’s bed in his dying days so that, if he was able to lift his head from his pillow, he would be able to see his beloved garden. Twice I saw him raise himself up, semi-conscious, and say the words of the daily prayer ‘mekayyem emunato – God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,’ before slipping back into sleep. Perhaps he meant the restorative powers of nature, perhaps his hope in his maker.

I think of our father in these days between Yom haShaoh, the Hebrew date established by the Knesset for remembering the Holocaust, its horror and the valour of resistance, and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day with its longing for a different future. Aged just sixteen, our father fled Nazi Germany with his immediate family, fought in the British Army repairing tanks behind the lines at El Alamein, and served in the Hagganah during the siege of Jerusalem.

He had a tough life. By the time he was 42 he had lost two of his aunts and his grandmother, murdered by the Nazis, his sister Eva who suffered heart failure in Jerusalem in 1944, his favourite uncle Alfred, killed in 1948 in the convoy ambushed on its way to Mount Scopus, and his beloved first wife Lore, Raphael’s and my mother, who died of cancer in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Looked after by Isca, our second mother, our father lived to see the Bnei Mitzvah of his two eldest grandchildren, and died, aged 86, on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut 18 years ago.

I can’t speak about God’s side of the matter, but for his part our father definitely kept faith. I remember him coming up to our bedroom after Lore’s death to continue where she had been forced to leave off in teaching us the Shema: ‘If you’re good, I’ll tell you a few more words each night.’ I remember how, when I was sixteen, he came into my room and asked me, ‘Are you still saying the Shema every night?’ I fear my answer ‘Yes’ was less than a half-truth. But since then, I have never, unless overtaken suddenly by sleep, omitted to say those words, which define the Jewish faith.

I remember our father telling me one night, unexpectedly, out of nowhere it seemed to me, ‘Do your homework, because they can take away from you everything except what’s in your mind.’

Our father was a craftsperson, skilled with his hands; we did many house and garden jobs together. I recall how I was once rude to him; it was about some tool, perhaps a pair of pliers. I saw his face and realised: I must never speak like that to anyone, ever again.

I think of our father now when saying the words of the morning service: ‘For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, put it into our hearts to understand, listen, learn and practise all the words of your Torah and teaching in love.’ Our father loved his Judaism and felt especially close to Rabbi Louis Jacobs. They even both (under pressure from their wives) gave up cigars at the same time.

I think of our father in these cruel, uncertain and frightening times, his deep resilience, his love of gardens and nature, and the history about which, though a great raconteur when he got going, he rarely volunteered to speak: ‘We told aunt Sophie when she visited us in Jerusalem in 1938, “Don’t go back to Czechoslovakia,” but her husband was an ardent Czech patriot and she wouldn’t listen.’ I have Sophie’s last letter before deportation, written in January 1943 and smuggled to the family: ‘In this manner, we take our farewell.’

But our forebears don’t make their departure, at least not entirely. Our beloved dead stay with us in our hearts, and, through memories and stories and the places, foods, music and pursuits they enjoyed, continue to impart their love and strength.

24 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Israel Permalink

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.

08 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Holocaust, Refugees Permalink

Hope in dark times: the light shall not go out!

Sticky Post By admin On November 8, 2024

‘But the light has not gone out, and that is a sign from God:’ these are the words my grandfather, Rabbi Salzberger, overheard, when, summoned by the Gestapo to the burning wreckage of the great synagogue in Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz, he passed through the whispering crowds of German onlookers on the morning after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.Tomorrow is the eighty-sixth anniversary of that terrible date. Monday, Remembrance Day, Veteran’s Day in the States, reminds us of the terrible human costs of the war that preceded it and the war against evil which followed.

The light the onlookers in Frankfurter were referring to was the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Lamp, of the Westendsynagoge, where my grandfather served for thirty years until forced by the Nazis to flee the country he once loved. That Ner Tamid is the parent lamp from which a flame was kindled, and carefully carried for hundreds of miles, to light the Eternal Lamp of my community’s synagogue, here in London.

Thus the light still burns, through tough days and dark nights, embodying the truth that, however much the world assails our hopes, our hearts and our deep beliefs in justice and compassion, we must not let the lights of our faith go out.

‘Do I give up?’ people have been asking me, directly or by inference, this week. Do I despair of my fight for the environment, for the dignity, equality and rights of women, for refugees, for an end to race hate and hate speech? Of course, we already know the answer. But we must hear it from each other, because we need each other in the fight:

However many rings of pain
The night winds round me,
The opposing pull is stronger… (Boris Pasternak, the Zhivago poems)

During these challenging days, I’ve looked backward to last week’s Torah portion, Noach, in which God and humanity embark, as it were, on their second term. The first ended in disaster, ‘violence and corruption’, recrimination and destruction. (Genesis 8) But God determines not to give up and binds us, by the sign of the arching rainbow, in an everlasting bond: ‘We are bound together, you and I, you and all living beings, all the birds and all the animals, in a covenant of life.’ That contract still holds, obligating each and every one of us. The harder it is to honour it, the more compelling our obligation.

I look forward to this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, the start of Abraham’s journey: ‘Go,’ God tells him, ‘Go to the land I’ll show you,’ the land where My will for goodness, freedom and reverence for life shall be done. Go, and don’t ever stop going, because that’s how you become a blessing. Never give up.

In a brilliant Midrash Abraham sees God, Master of the World, calling out from a burning building. ‘Help me,’ God cries, ‘My world is on fire and I need you.’ God’s world needs our most urgent help.

That is the very same voice which my grandfather heard crying out from a burning synagogue eighty-six years ago on the Boerneplatz: ‘My light still shines despite the flames. Save it! Save my world!’

The fires of hatred may make threaten it, but they cannot extinguish God’s light, the inner light of humanity, the light within the soul. We must preserve it always. We must bear it with us and nurture its flame, wherever we may go.

03 May 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust Permalink

Seeing the Light

Sticky Post By admin On May 3, 2024

I write – somewhat in haste so as not to miss my train – from Frankfurt-am-Main, the city with which my grandfather, Dr Salzberger, fell in love when he came in 1910 to be interviewed for the post of rabbi. (It’s a relief to be in a town where the Israeli flag hangs among others from the city hall [on the Roemer, the square where the SA paraded 90 years ago])

I was invited by John Schlapobersky to speak about my family’s Frankfurt roots at a conference of group analysts. And, John adjoined me, address the question: ‘Where’s the light now?’

For it was from here, from my grandfather’s former community at the Westendsynagoge, that I had symbolically lit a flame from the Eternal Light, which all the devastation of Kristallnacht had not succeeded in extinguishing, and walked home with it to kindle the Ner Tamid at the dedication of our own new building, thirteen years ago.

I recalled, as I struggled what to say, how on some village street, somewhere on that 400k walk along the Rhine, an old man had stopped me, saying: ‘D’you realise the torch in your backpack is still on?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d explained, ‘I’m carrying the light.’

So, said John, tell us where that light is now. It’s an apposite question for the Shabbat before Yom Hashoah, the Hebrew date for remembering the Nazi Holocaust.

But first I must write about darkness, and those very different flames, of fire. ‘Quickly! Out of here!’ my great-aunt Jenny recalled; they’d been living in a flat in the great Boerneplatz Synagogue when it was torched on Kristallnacht. ‘I saw through an open door the burnt-out cupola, before it was quickly shut and I was whisked away.’To this day, she told me, she can’t bear railway stations; the anguish of being sent away from her family still pierces her heart.

On the same date my grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo. They’d been waiting for him in the family home. He was taken to a great hall where Jews were made to crawl across the floor, their ‘exercises’ strangely interrupted by a Mozart aria: ‘In diesen heiligen Hallen / kennt man die Rache nicht – In these sacred halls we know not revenge.’ A Jewish musician had, with that cruel and quirky absurdity which characterised certain Nazi behaviours, been offered his freedom if he could prove he was indeed an opera singer.

Reflecting back, I recall how, on entering the Westendsynagoge to light my torch and ‘take’ the light, I’d been struck to the heart by the verse which adorned it: ‘Lo amut ve’echyeh – I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of God.’

So here we were now, together in Frankfurt, German and British therapists, Israelis too, all dedicated to caring for that greatest abode of God’s light here on earth: the human heart.
Yet darkness was close about us. One of the conveners lost his son-in-law on October 7. All of us mourned the loss of life of Israelis, Palestinians caught between Hamas and the IDF. We all feared the antisemitism, the racism, and what horrors might come next.

I have no great answers, just two rabbinic sayings to guide me. The first is from Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century rabbi with the deepest heart: God’s light is with all who weep amidst oppression, God sees their tears. I believe God is with all those, too, who weep for others in their anguish, who weep with all who suffer.

The second consists of just four Hebrew words: ‘“Neri beyadecha, venerecha beyadi – My light is in your hands; your light is in mine,” say God.’ God’s light is within us, if only we can find it. Not only that, – the holy light of each other’s lives is in our hands too, if only we can see amidst the gloom, and cherish it despite the contagious hate that fills our streets.

HEART AND MIND

Holocaust