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.

26 Jan 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Ethics, Holocaust, The Jewish Year Permalink

Between life and death, future and past

Sticky Post By admin On January 26, 2024

Here we are, caught between creation and destruction. Yesterday was Tu Bishevat, the New Year for Trees; tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tu Bishevat is a day of planting and celebration, when we’re partners with the God of creation who set the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden.

Many of us were out there yesterday in the bright afternoon, placing rich mulch round the young crab apples and field maples we’d just planted. Trees mean future, long-term thinking, life, hope and joy. ‘We’ve a two-hundred-year management plan,’ explained Craig Harrison, head of Forestry England south.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. I read compulsively about the Shoah and listen to the testament of survivors. I love their company. I admire how they have established new lives, brought up children and go into schools to speak against antisemitism and every form of prejudice. I find it remarkable how little bitterness so many of them bear, how much compassion they embody, how widely they spread warmth and hope.

But the most terrible testimony has no voice: that of the innumerable dead, across Europe, Rwanda, Cambodia, robbed of their homes, loved ones and lives; robbed of their voices which would tell us, if they could, of the sophisticated deceitfulness and cruel cunning of the murderers alongside their drunken brutality.

In the words of the searing Yom Kippur meditation, ‘Eleh Ezkerah – these things I bring to memory before God, who’s supposed to conduct the world in mercy, venaphshi alai eshpecha, and I pour out my soul, I don’t know what to do with myself.’

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. It could not be more apposite in this time of war in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, the Middle East. Whatever ‘side’ we’re on, whatever political views we hold, we must not harden our hearts to the horror faced by the hostages and their families after 115 days of cruel captivity, the fear of parents for the lives of their children on the front lines, the desperate suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians caught amidst the fighting.

To what pain will all this give birth, to what new fears and hatreds, to what hopes, longings and dreams? Beyond whatever particular loyalties we hold, say the Israeli and Palestinian parents of the Bereaved Families Forum, we need to remember that we should all ultimately be on the side of humanity.

So what do we do?

‘Choose life,’ teaches the Torah, be on the side of life!

These, then, are some of the questions which should preoccupy us: How can I find the courage to be truly human? What kindness can I do? Whose life can I make a bit better and not worse? What can I plant for our children’s children’s futures?

This sounds frail; it feels very small scale. But I put my hopes in a minor, often overlooked scene from the Torah. The Children of Israel are thirsty in the desert, but the waters before them are too bitter to drink. Therefore, God instructs Moses to throw into them the branches of a tree and when he does so the waters become sweet.

So let’s plant our trees, figurative trees of compassion, decency, humanity and hope, as well as real trees, maples, rowans, birch and oak. May they sweeten our own lives with a deep sense of purpose and bring a little sweetness to the future of the world.

05 Jan 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

They still speak to us, the dead we have loved

Sticky Post By admin On January 5, 2024

Sometimes a verse jumps out from the weekly Torah portion, chimes with what we’re living through, meets a spark in our own spirit. That’s how those words from the start of Exodus speak to me now: ‘And Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.’

They’re all gone now, my parent’s generation, all the relatives amidst whose conversations, half German, half English, half refugee, half British, but always deeply Jewish, I grew up. They lie at peace in Hoop Lane cemetery, or rest, like my father’s sisters, on the Mount of Olives.

But they’re not silent, at least not in this world. They speak to us, our dead, they talk inside us. ‘Live!’ they say, ‘Live!’ They put resilience in our bones; they set their playlist in our soul. There’s nothing morbid or spooky about it; the dead who were close to us in life stay near and dear when they’re gone. The loss of them hurts deeply. But they urge us on. ‘Have courage,’ they say, ‘We’re with you all the way. Love life; live it well.’

Two moments come to my mind whenever I say the prayer carved in stone in every Jewish cemetery, ‘Umekayyem emounato lisheinei afar – Keeping faith with those who sleep in the dust.’ Twice my father, deeply asleep in his last hours, raised himself from his pillows, spoke those words into the ether and collapsed back into the semi-consciousness of his final journey.

It never occurred to me otherwise than that he was speaking to God: ‘Be with me in this boundaryless time-space where you’re taking me.’ They were words of trust and fear in equal measure.

But now it strikes me that I was partly wrong; my father was also talking to me: ‘Keep faith,’ he was saying, ‘keep faith through everything.’

So here, at the beginning of 2024, I walk among them in my mind, the departed, who lived through the Holocaust and the war. I try to listen, to draw courage for this current time of troubles, when Israel, Judaism and so much else seem on the line.

Here by the pathway is Jacqueline du Pre. I played a recording of her Kol Nidrei to Isca, my second mother, in her last hour. Isca adored the cello. The melody descends into the soul, says without words like the Psalmist, ‘From the depths I have called unto you,’ then rises, declaring ‘Seek beauty, aspire; always aspire.’ That’s why Isca loved such music.

Here, in the same row as my mother and father, lies Leo Baeck, leader of German Jewry in the terrible years, teacher of Theresienstadt. Nothing crushed his spirit, his faith not just in God but in humanity. Not rarely, he recalled, even in Berlin under the Nazis in ’40 or ’41, there would be an egg or apple secretly left by his door. He taught that God is mystery become commandment: what we know from life’s depths must teach us how to act.

And, Adi, my father, who by the age of forty-one had lost his own father, oldest sister, first wife, and three of his favourite aunts and uncles? He still comes into my room late at night, unexpectedly, as he did when I was in my teens, saying ‘Remember: only what’s in your mind can never be taken from you.’ And, since he was a practical person, I hear him say when a chair creaks or a shelf breaks, ‘Repair it, don’t throw it away.’ And, seeing he lived through the cruel years of Israel’s struggle for independence, ‘Be loyal; always stand by your friends.’

These are the secret ingredients of their strength, which, like the unique recipes for cheesecakes and strudels that they refuse to disclose while they’re alive, our forebears bequeath to us after they’re gone.

With them, we turn with gritty faith, resilient hope, and love of life, to face the year ahead.

21 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Holocaust Permalink

Between Yom HaShoah and Yom Ha’Atzmaut

Sticky Post By admin On April 21, 2023

I never know what to write on this Shabbat between Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for the dead in Israel’s wars, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Seventy-five years have passed since the bitter battle for Jerusalem so vividly recalled by my father, whose Yahrzeit falls this week.

And this weekend also brings Earth Day, founded in 1970 to inspire love and protection for our planet, which will involve a billion people in thousands of local and global activities. I get notices about it from all around the world, from organisations Jewish, religious, secular and practical every day.

I’ve written my share of difficult things this week (links below). So instead, I’m going to write about love, – love of the earth and its beauty, but as felt by holocaust survivors, and those who’ve struggled for Israel’s land and soul, then and now.

These are novelist Aharon Appelfeld’s memories of his grandparents in rural Bukhovina, before all his family perished, and he, just a child, fled:

The walk to the synagogue is long and full of wonders. A horse stands in astonishment… Not far from them a foal is rolling on the grass. There is astonishment in the dozens of pairs of eyes of the horses, sheep, and goats who are all following the foal’s movements, happy that it’s back on its feet. Grandfather walks in silence, but his silence is not frightening. [In the synagogue] the prayers are conducted in whispers. This is the home of God and people come here in order to sense His presence… (The Story of a Life, p. 9 -10)

This is Gerda Weissman-Klein, writing of her hometown Bielitz in 1940, before she lost everything:

What a lovely sunny morning it was! The buttercups were out, and there were violets down in the moist part of the garden near the pond, along with lilies-of-the-valley. On the afternoon of my birthday a warm, scented rain, so typical of May, fell…(All But My Life, p. 43)

Meanwhile in Mandate Palestine my Great-Uncle Alfred, who would lose his life in ’48, wrote after a holiday in 1943:

We saw another part of our beautiful countryside, the whole strip of land along the coast is like one flowering, fertile garden. If they let us work in peace and quiet…we’d soon have one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Evidently the trees, lovingly planted by early pioneers as described in the famous poem by Rachel, had taken root and offered shade:

I have not sung to you, my land / or glorified your name

With deeds of valour, the spoils of battle.

There’s just a tree my hands have planted / by the Jordan’s quiet banks,

A path my feet have trod / across your fields. (El Artsi)

Then here, in 2006, is David Shulman, originally from the States and drawn to Israel through love of the country, after numerous vigils in the hills alongside Palestinian shepherds:

What is real is this moment, these people, the sliver of moon in the summer sky, the Passsiflora tree in the courtyard, the crimson wine, the inevitable sweetness of confusion, the musical murmur of the words, and the profound, ironic happiness of doing what is right in circumstances of rooted, inherent, unresolvable ambiguity…(Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, p. 212)

Whoever we are, whatever our views and allegiances, may we work for love of this world and love of life.

14 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust Permalink

Towards Yom Hashoah: faith’s unyielding determination

Sticky Post By admin On April 14, 2023

As we say farewell to the Pesach dishes and pack away for another year the memories they evoke, I try to carry with me the words of Isaiah with which the festival readings conclude:

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. (11:9)

It’s my favourite biblical verse. It concludes Isaiah’s vision of a time when nation no longer predates on nation and one sector of humanity no longer devours another, symbolised by the wolf lying down peacefully with the lamb. (But not, as my Bible teacher stressed, every night a different lamb).

If only the world were like that!

But Isaiah’s world wasn’t like that either. His vision is set in a city under siege; the all-powerful Assyrian armies have laid the land waste and are now so close to Jerusalem that he sees them shaking their fists at Zion from the tops of the surrounding mountains. Resistance is surely futile; logic dictates that defeat is imminent.

Yet it’s in precisely those circumstances that the prophet envisages a different reality. He doesn’t abandon hope; he doesn’t renege on the belief in a world governed by God’s spirit, with God-given wisdom, where the cause of the poor is upheld in righteousness.

‘You may say (he’s) a dreamer,’ but what motivates Isaiah is not phantasy but faith. His hope, moral courage and determination are utterly inspiring, and we need them desperately today.

And Isaiah’s ‘not the only one.’ Monday night brings Yom HaShoah, the date set by Israel’s parliament for remembering the Nazi Holocaust. Something made me reach for the writings of Etty Hillesum in preparation.

Born in Holland in 1914, she threw her last letter from a train to Auschwitz on September 7, 1943. She was cultured, perceptive, sensitive, sensuous, generous, life-loving, and, in her dairies, extraordinarily frank. I’d read many times her entry for 12 July 1942 entitled ‘Sunday morning prayer’, when she couldn’t sleep because she saw before her eyes ‘scene after scene of human suffering:’

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

What I hadn’t known was that Etty chose to go to Westerbork, the camp in northern Holland from where Jews were sent east, despite several offers to hide her. She refused to be parted from her people; she went willingly because she wanted ‘to give some of those parched thousands just one sip of water.’

‘I love people so much,’ she reflected at the close of one of her days there, telling her friend Jopie:

It all comes down to the same thing: life is beautiful. And I believe in God, And I want to be right there in the thick of what people call ‘horror’ and still be able to say: life is beautiful. (8 October 1942)

The horror was all too real, as her letters from Westerbork prove. But so was the humanity with which she refused to cede to the cruelty around her. So too was the kindness with which she affirmed the preciousness of life. If that counts as beauty, she achieved exactly what she intended.

She certainly lived out Isaiah’s creed of hope and faith, the very core of Judaism, even in what she couldn’t help but describe as ‘hell.’

Together she and he bequeath to us faith’s unyielding determination, the unceasing commitment to righteousness and compassion, the belief that the world should and can be different, and that you and I must help to make it so.

27 Jan 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust Permalink

For Holocaust Memorial Day: being ‘ordinary people’

Sticky Post By admin On January 27, 2023

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, established to correspond with the date when the first units of the Red Army reached Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. The horrors are unspeakable; many, including the second generation, feel more shocked, bewildered and bereft year by year. We live as Jews in solidarity with our own people and with victims everywhere.

This year’s theme is ‘Ordinary People.’ As the home page of the HMD website says:

Ordinary people turn a blind eye, believe propaganda, join murderous regimes. And those who are persecuted, oppressed and murdered in genocide aren’t persecuted because of crimes they’ve committed – they are persecuted simply because they are ordinary people who belong to a particular group (eg, Roma, Jewish community, Tutsi).

I don’t think the Bible has such concept as ‘ordinary people’. A ben adam, a human being, is, without exception, made in God’s image. The Mishnah (c. 200CE) elaborates: every person is yechidi, createdunique. I’ve stood by the broken concrete at Birkenau and wondered: who did each of these people love, for whom did they long, as they were forced toward those chambers?

Yet the words ‘ordinary people’ ring true. We are all other people’s ‘ordinary people’. In an excellent talk, Dr John Launer noted how so many ‘ordinary’ individuals allowed the Nazis to come to power. Then, speaking of bystanders in general, he said with brave frankness that the older he gets the less he feels like the judge, and the more he feels among the judged.

The Torah forbids us to be bystanders: ‘Don’t stand idly by your fellow human’s blood.’ (Vayikra 19:16) ‘If you know that someone intends to threaten another person’s life, you have to speak out,’ explained Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (1816 – 1893), head of the Volozhyn Yeshivah destroyed half a century later by the Nazis.

This is incomparably easier said than done. It leaves the discomforting question: whose bystander, whose ‘ordinary person’, am I?

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, was famed as a Torah educator. Who am I? he asked, before answering: I am those aspects of my potential self which my experiences have drawn out of me. That’s why it’s essential to live in environments which bring out the best and deepest within us.

He reminds me of when I was a guest of the church in Germany the 1990s. ‘Had the visit left me angry?’ I was asked on my return. In truth, something quite different had gripped me: relief that I lived in a country whose laws prevented me from doing the worst of which I might prove capable. How would I have behaved had I been an ‘ordinary’ Aryan under Nazi rule? How could I be sure? The consciences of so many people were so deeply infiltrated by the vicious yet alluring discourse around them that they failed to perceive they were doing evil.

But today? I’m less confident our society and world is helping prevent the worst in us.

I stress one hundredfold that there is no comparison with Nazi or other such evil regimes. But I fear the atrophy of conscience. Are we supposed to accept homelessness in our streets, the drowning of refugees in the Channel, the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, or mass food insecurity? What’s being done in the name of my own good country? What racism do some utter, profaning the name and true values of my beloved Judaism?

The Torah speaks not of ‘ordinary’ but of ‘holy people’, anshei kodesh. They aren’t priests or anyone special, but you and me. Anshei, from anoosh, indicates open-heartedness, empathy, humility. Holiness means being truly deeply human.

We can’t help sometimes being bystanders. There’s simply too much wrong. But we must never become inured to it, let alone make it worse. We must seek the courage to be, at least sometimes, not just ‘ordinary’ but ordinary holy people.

HEART AND MIND

Holocaust