That is why we try to do whatever we can to help us remember. For those who pray regularly or with a minyan, it’s no problem to remember. But for others, it is well to prepare something to remind you. Religious bookstores sell Sefirah counters, like calendars with movable parts to change the day. J.J. tacked up on the refrigerator door a replica of a Sefirah calendar that he received from one of his youth organizations. With a wide-tipped purple marker, he wrote all around it, “Count Count Count.” You can’t miss it. Otherwise, I probably would have.
CHAPTER · 22
YOM HASHOAH—HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
The destruction of European Jewry, like the enslavement in Egypt or the destruction of the Holy Temple, did not occur in a single day. Its unremitting horror ran the full course of a dozen years. Moreover, its effects were so total, so shattering, that in measures of cosmic time, the event goes on interminably. European Jewry, once the vital nerve center of world Jewry, will never spring to life again. What could have been will simply never be.
Nevertheless, though its magnitude may warrant it, we cannot mourn the event every day of our lives until eternity. We are a life-affirming people—and one of the ways that Jews of this generation have responded to the Holocaust is to build and protect Jewish life with special zeal. Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jewish learning, the increased Jewishness of Jews—a Holocaust consciousness that is deeply embedded in our psyche is what continually prods us, whether we speak of it or not.
On the other hand, not to actively mourn would not be true to our deep feelings of grief at the great loss and suffering of our people. So Jews of this generation have set aside a special day each year—to focus our memory and our mourning. That day is the twenty-seventh day of Nissan, which falls between Pesach and Shavuot, in the springtime of a Jew’s heart.
How is a date picked for immortality on the calendar? All of our ancient religious commemorative days are either Biblically ordained or enacted by rabbinic legislation. The date for Yom HaShoah is the product of a coalition: ghetto fighters, secular members of the Israeli Parliament, the traditionalist bloc in government, rabbinic sages, survivors. All had different ideas. Some preferred the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; others wanted to attach Yom HaShoah to a waning fast day, the tenth of Tevet, to give that event new meaning, and to revive its observance; still others wanted to graft Holocaust commemoration onto Tisha B’Av, destruction upon destruction; and there were those who felt the Holocaust and Israel are organically related and therefore wanted Yom HaShoah to be adjacent to Yom Ha’Atzmaut. In the end, a compromise was achieved. A thousand years from now it will not matter that human beings argued over the merits of this day over that one. It will be, even as it is beginning to be in our own time, a yom kadosh, a holy day set apart from every other day of the Jewish calendar.
THE EVENT
Unlike historical events of our ancient past, we know almost every detail. The Nazis kept records, the postwar trials produced evidence, Allied governments classified documents, and the survivors gave corroborative testimony. We know more horror than we can possibly assimilate.
The basic facts are these: Hitler came to power in 1933. From that moment on, until World War II was over in 1945, every single Jew in Europe was vulnerable. With intensified zeal and step-by-step methodical madness, Hitler put into effect his plan to make the world Judenrein, altogether clean of Jews.
At first there were restrictions to remove Jews from the mainstream of society, from politics, art, academic and economic life; to isolate them so that they became “the other”; to cause them economic hardship and physical and social degradation. The next step was to set them apart physically, in ghettos and with a Jew badge, thus further removing them from protective society. Now, they could be more easily targeted, more highly vulnerable. The third step was to incarcerate them in concentration camps, and to torture. Finally, when it seemed as if most of the world’s great powers didn’t really care, Hitler put into effect his Final Solution: the extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child.
Age, wealth, talent, health, connections—nothing mattered but race. Gas chambers, crematoria, medical “experiments,” mass shootings, open graves—these were his tools of power. By the end of the war, six million Jews—over one third of world Jewry—had been wiped out.
To give expression to an event of such magnitude seems almost an inhuman task. How can we possibly encapsulate a madness of such awesome proportions? And how can we experience it as part of our religious calendar?
The answer is: we really do not yet know. We are still too close to the event, still too numb to do the right thing, say the right words, feel secure in including this and leaving out that. From the moment in history at which we are now poised, we understand this is exactly how it happened at the time of the Churban: to those who did not actually live through the event fell the task of sacralizing it.
Nevertheless, it is a process that has begun to unfold before our very eyes. I remember how the day was marked five years ago, ten years ago, and fifteen years ago, and the signs are unmistakable. In 1965, the rabbi of our shul organized a Yom HaShoah program. It was the only such event of its kind in the area, which encompassed several synagogues, Hebrew schools, and yeshivot. The entire program consisted of one speaker—Elie Wiesel. Wiesel had kept the memory at center front for two decades when all other survivors were too paralyzed to speak, but in 1965, he was hardly well known. Forty people showed up. There were no prayers, no hymns, no Kaddish. And no children were present.
In 1982, Elie Wiesel commemorated Yom HaShoah in the White House, along with the president and other American leaders. Millions of American citizens remembered the victims along with Wiesel, American citizens who did not even know the word “Holocaust” five years ago. And this year in our community, every synagogue, every school, had its own commemorative program.
In our synagogue, hundreds of people came; the event was called a Yom HaShoah Family Service, and the synagogue bulletin and announcement made sure to add, BRING THE CHILDREN: DO NOT FORGET, with its double meanings perfectly clear. The service was held in the sanctuary, not in the social hall as of eighteen years ago. Interspersed throughout the program were several of the formal prayers taken from the traditional liturgy, the classic locus of Jewish sacredness. Survivors gave testimony, children participated formally in the program, remembering, asking questions, singing songs that evoked poignant feelings in the listeners. Fifteen years ago, there was one commonly used film on the Holocaust. Today, every synagogue and school showed a different film. Six candles were lit, each frail flame representing a million victims.
COMMEMORATION
There is no standard format as yet. But we live in modern times, with modern means of communication. Every aspect of life moves at a faster clip, including memorialization of events that are both history and of the immediate moment. And so we begin to see the basic outlines, simply by observing the similarities in unrelated and spontaneous commemorative programs throughout the country.
A Maariv (evening) service
The lighting of candles
Prayers from the standard prayer book, including the El Maleh Rachamim, and the Kaddish
Recitation of Holocaust poems and witness literature
Testimony of survivors
Films of the Holocaust
Songs of the Partisans (in Yiddish, the language whose heartland was destroyed in the Holocaust)
The Ani Ma’amin, the declaration of faith and hope that the victims sang on their way to the gas chambers, their final act of human dignity
Home celebration is less formalized and standardized, and, in fact, less ritualized. Some people light a yahrzeit candle; some people light six such candles. We light a candle and sit in the semidarkened living room for a few moments, either talking or just quietly reflecting. We don’t play the piano, nor music on the radio during Yom HaShoah; at dinner, each child talks about the Holocaust programs they experienced in school or in their youth gr
oups. While we have very little formal ritual at home, our lives in general become more subdued on that day.
Some schools have a full week of Holocaust commemoration. Films are shown, outside speakers are brought in, a special assembly is convened, and special prayers are said. Various organizations, such as Zachor, Holocaust Resource Center; the Anti-Defamation League; the various boards of Jewish education in different cities; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, have published Holocaust curricula that are available upon request. Ten years ago, the debate over whether to teach children about the Holocaust could still be heard. Today, it is part of the natural instruction of a Jewish child, beginning at a very young age.
It will take a generation or two—or perhaps even longer—until the liturgy becomes standardized and the features of the day structured, formalized, and uniformly observed.*
One can only project what the day might be like: a month before the memorial day, the yeshiva day schools will begin to prepare the children through intensive review of the historical facts. Perhaps Yom HaShoah will be declared a fast day, preceded by a meal of potato peels, watery soup, ashes, and something more bitter than maror. Perhaps our great-grandchildren will all wear yellow-starred armbands on that day, or a striped garment, or hard shoes made of mud and twigs. There will no longer be any survivors, but the grandchildren of survivors, who will surely have a special role in witnessing, will retell the story. Perhaps they will read from a parchment scroll, singed at the corners, to remind us of the thousands of Torah scrolls the Nazis burned, together with Jews sealed in flaming synagogues. Perhaps the Book of Job will be read in the synagogues, with or without its last chapter.
There are no neat theological categories into which future generations can fit the events of the Holocaust. True, there are meanings that Jews of this generation have begun to assimilate; and whatever form Yom HaShoah takes, it will incorporate some of those meanings: that to forget the victims is to fail them once more; that the fate of the Jews is unique; that the Jews stand alone; that modern universalist values are no guarantee of moral progress; that the response to unspeakable evil is to give love and new life—conflicting messages, each with its own truth.
One cannnot precisely call these theological categories. Yet, Jews of the future will somehow find a way to be faithful to the memory of the victims, to link themselves authentically to community and tradition, and perhaps even find a way to speak of God after the Holocaust.
CHAPTER · 23
YOM HA’ATZMAUT—ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY
For the last two thousand years, Jews have experienced very few miracles. To be sure, individual acts of miraculous saving have been many. They have been told and retold, and they warm the heart. But national miracles, great acts of deliverance equal to the Exodus, or the Maccabean conquest and return? None such have entered our Diaspora history books for the last two thousand years.
Until now. Until this very generation. Until the creation of the Third Commonwealth, the rebirth of the State of Israel, the return of Jews to sovereignty in the land of their ancestors.
The story of Yom Ha’Atzmaut is essentially three tales in one. It is the story of a love affair of the Jewish people for this land; it is also a messianic dream; it is also a desire for national and political status and security. All three themes are interwoven.
Some say the love affair begins with the last Churban, in the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Judeans by the Romans in 70 C.E. Some say it begins with the Churban before that, in 586 B.C.E. Some say it begins with the naming of the people and the land by the same name. Most contemporary Jews would probably begin the story with the covenant between God and Abraham, with God promising this land to Abraham and his descendants.
Wherever one begins, this much is true:
Israel has become the center of the universe for Jews of countless generations, and Jerusalem, the epicenter. There are a hundred ways we have kept this love affair fresh in our minds, and in our hearts. When a Jew died in the Diaspora, a bit of soil from the Holy Land was thrown into the grave. When Jews pray, they face Jerusalem. At every Jewish wedding, amidst our joy, we shatter a glass, a form of Zionist protest and messianic longing. When we build a home, we leave a small part unfinished, in memory of the destruction and our exile from our beloved land. Rabbinic and medieval Jewish literature is replete with statements of intense love. In the Talmud, we read, “Rav Abba used to kiss the stones of Acco; Rabbi Chanina would mend its roads; … and Rav Chiyya bar Gamda would roll himself in the dust of the Holy Land; all this, in order to fulfill the verse, ‘For your servants delight in her stones and love her dust’” (KETUBOT 112A-B). The Rabbis even ruled that if a man or woman wants to settle in the Holy Land, and the spouse refuses, that is sufficient grounds for divorce.
Countless Jews throughout the Diaspora period were swept up into the messianic movements that promised a return to the Holy Land. Many great rabbis, such as Nachmanides and Judah Halevi, themselves went to settle in the Holy Land. The mourning fast of Tisha B’Av and the other fasts related to the Churban are a confirmation of the love for Israel, and in our prayers every day, three times a day, the theme of return is a most prominent one. Even in our Birkat Hamazon we make a simple, outright plea: “And rebuild Jerusalem, the holy city, speedily, and in our day. Blessed are You, God, Who rebuilds Jerusalem.”
When you love someone, you not only talk and think about him (or her), but you identify with him, and with what he or she is doing at a given moment. That is how we can understand the holiday of Tu B’Shvat that has been celebrated by Jews of the Diaspora for two thousand years. Tu B’Shvat is the New Year of the Trees, but if you live in New York, and the fifteenth day of the month Shvat comes out in January, as it usually does, the rebirth of trees is the furthest thing from your mind. And yet, if you are a Jew, in love with the Holy Land, you have no trouble at all spanning time and oceans and seasons. Tu B’Shvat is when the sap begins to rise in Israel’s fruit trees. Diaspora Jews have celebrated this day by eating fruits that grow in the land of Israel, such as bokser, the fruit of the carob tree, and almonds, which will soon begin to flower and bear fruit in the hills of Judea and of Galilee. And if you can’t be there physically to plant a tree in the Holy Land, then you send money to purchase the sapling which a child in Israel will plant on this day.
All that, in very small measure, is part of the dream and the love and the longing.
The immediate history of Yom Ha’Atzmaut begins with nineteenth-century nationalism, which stimulated Jews as it did all other peoples. In addition, the political Zionists, such as Moses Hess, Tzvi Hirsch Kalisher, Leon Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl, built upon the hopes for messianic return and redemption in their strivings to create a Jewish national state. Since they were evoking latent feelings that were continuous with Jewish tradition, the impetus for their followers came as much from Jewish memories as it did from European nationalism. Also, the pogroms of Eastern Europe played no small part in pushing the process forward.
In 1897, Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Herzl is rightly called the father of modern political Zionism. Though he died an early death not too many years later, his enormous and single-minded efforts on behalf of the Jewish state bore fruit half a century later.
In the early 1900s, the Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, a British mandate over Palestine superseded Turkish rule. All the while, there was a yishuv population that had settled in the Holy Land and that was slowly organizing itself into what would someday be its independent government. In the early 1920s, for example, the Jewish labor organization and the Jewish self-defense forces were formed.
During the 1930s, largely as a result of Arab pressure on the mandate government, the British Foreign Office issued several White Papers limiting Jewish immigration. Nevertheless, from ’33 to ’39, with the specter of Nazism over Europe, additional Jews were smuggled into Palestine. This was known as Aliyah Bet. An illegal immigration.
There was no other choice.
Relations between Jews and Arabs continued to deteriorate. In 1937, the British commission, under Lord Peel, recommended a partition of Palestine into two states. The Jews accepted the partition; the Arabs were against it, and revolted. Arab riots, which were not uncommon in the twenties and thirties, again broke out. In the 1940s, World War II conditions sealed off all immigration. A very small number of Jews managed to escape the nightmare of Hitler’s Europe. Of those, only a handful were able to get past the British.
In 1947, the world had a change of heart. Partly in response to the devastating blows of the Holocaust, the nations of the world voted in favor of partition. It was to go into effect on May 14, 1948, when the British would withdraw their forces from the Middle East. On that day, Israel declared itself an independent state. On that day, the fifth day of the month of Iyar, the seven Arab nations that surrounded Israel declared war. The War of Independence lasted until 1949 when cease-fire agreements were struck with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In 1949, Israel became a member of the United Nations. Some people cite as proof of the miraculous nature of Israel’s resurrection as a state the fact that the Soviet Union voted in favor of partition and in favor of membership for Israel in the United Nations.
In 1950, the Israeli Parliament passed the Law of Return, that every Jew could come home and be granted citizenship, no matter what state of health, no matter what degree of financial need. More than a law, it was a fulfillment of the yearnings of Jews for two thousand years.
CELEBRATION
The celebration of Yom Ha’Atzmaut has not yet fully incorporated the broad range of emotions that Israel evokes in a Jewish heart. However, the character of the day is still in flux and, year by year, the gap between feelings and ritual expression is shrinking. As one would expect, we can see the metamorphosis of Yom Ha’Atzmaut most clearly in Israel. In the early years of the state, Independence Day was marked by military parades. The Israelis were flexing their muscles, showing the world “we can be a state like all other states; we have an army to protect ourselves.” I remember going to the center of town in Jerusalem in 1969, on Yom Ha’Atzmaut, and watching people with noisemakers, streamers, and funny hats, and thinking to myself, This is all perfectly legitimate but somehow not to my liking. Unfairly, perhaps, I felt disappointed.
How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household Page 45