Abdicating Their Role

It's not often that I agree with Rav Avi Shafran but, the law of averages being what it must be, sometimes it does happen.  One of those incidents is his latest piece commenting on a recent initiative by the Polish government to make calling Auschwitz and other death and concentration camps from World War II "Polish" a crime.
As Rav Shafran notes, there is a point to their concern with the infamous camps being labelled as "Polish".  Building them wasn't a Polish idea.  What was carried out in them wasn't planned by the Poles.  They weren't in charge of running them either.  But as he cogently notes:

But the justice minister does truth an injustice. In implementing their genocidal program, German forces drew upon all-too-eager-to-help Polish police forces and railroad personnel, who guarded ghettos and helped deport Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often pitched in, identifying and hunting down Jews in hiding and then actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.
In his book “The Coming of the Holocaust: From Antisemitism to Genocide,” University of California, Santa Cruz Professor Peter Kenez described Poles of German ethnicity as “welcome[ing] the [Nazi] conquerors with enthusiasm.”
Nor were ethnic Poles unhappy at the prospect of helping the invaders rid their country of Jews.
History Professor Jan T. Gross, who was born in Poland to a Polish mother and Jewish father, published “Neighbors” in 2001, in which he documented that atrocities long blamed on Nazi officials were in fact carried out by local Polish civilians.
Like the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne in July 1941. Mere weeks after Nazi forces gained control of the town, its Polish mayor, Marian Karolak, and local Nazi officials gave orders to round up the town’s Jews – both long-term residents as well as Jews who were sheltering there. Some Jews were hunted down and gleefully killed by the town’s residents with clubs, axes and knives. Most were herded into a barn, emptied out for the purpose and set afire, killing all inside

I find the selective amnesia of Europeans, especially those from the eastern half, interesting.  On one hand, the most horrific crimes committed against our nation since the destruction of the Second Temple (may it be speedily rebuilt) occurred in Eastern Europe.  Until the full extent of the Holocaust was made known to the world there was great cultural pride in how Jews had been subjugated amongst the locals.  It was only when the enormity of the Holocaust became infamous that there was suddenly a shock and sense of embarrassment.  Sure they had hated us and taken great pleasure in persecuting us but mass murder?  That they weren't so proud of.
And so a certain sense of denial has taken hold of that culture.  The willingness of Germany to take responsibility for its crimes allowed other countries that had eagerly joined in the Nazi effort to implement the Final Solution to stand back, point and say "It was them!"  Austria, Poland, the Balkans, Ukraine and the rest to this day profess great offense if any suggestion is made that they played a role in the Holocaust.  They vigorously point out all their Righteous Gentiles, hoping we won't remember that there were 100 non-righteous ones for every 1 that endangered his or her life for us.  They point out various interwar initiatives to encourage Jewish emancipation and how great they were at encouraging and protecting Jewish communities in the face of testimonies from all the survivors about how such measures were window dressing and nothing more.
I can understand the need for this amnesia.  As recent history has shown, the core Jew hatred endemic in European culture, currently manifesting as anti-Israel'ism, has not abated despite the fires of the Holocaust.  It simply went underground for a while.  Europe may have been shocked by what happened on its territory but it is most without regret and would like very much to shed a tear over another one, this time in the Middle East.
Yes, the Holocaust was a German initiative and run by them but with willing and necessary help from local populations in western and eastern Europe.  This is a fact that we must not allow to be forgotten, lest the false piety of the children of our oppressors comes back to stab us again.

Holocaust Fatigue

As a second generation "survivor", writing about the Holocaust is something I always approach with trepidation.  On one hand it is the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish nation since the destruction of the Second Temple (may it be speedily rebuilt).  On the other hand, because of the scope of the destruction it has come to dominate Jewish thought and practice three generations later with some very negative effects.
I would suggest that one reason the Holocaust retains its "popularity" as a factor in Jewish identity is the nature of non-religious Jewish culture in North America.  As I've written before, most non-Orthodox Jews believe that Judaism is essentially secular liberalism with an all-approving deity and latkes.  As a result, anything that is politically correct becomes Jewish to them, usually under the misused rubric of tikun olam. 
This is why the Holocaust penetrates and endures in non-religious Jewish culture.  It was morally easy.  We were the good guys and the Germans were the bad guys.  There was no "let's see it from their point of view" or "maybe we contributed to what happened".  A non-religious type can be proudly Jewish because of the Holocaust because it requires no moral effort, contradicts no secular liberal values.  As Charles Krauthammer has recently written, this leads to a serious distortion of their understanding of Judaism:
For example, it’s become a growing emphasis in Jewish pedagogy from the Sunday schools to Holocaust studies programs in the various universities. Additionally, Jewish organizations organize visits for young people to the concentration camps of Europe.
The memories created are indelible. And deeply valuable. Indeed, though my own family was largely spared, the Holocaust forms an ineradicable element of my own Jewish consciousness. But I worry about the balance. As Jewish practice, learning and knowledge diminish over time, my concern is that Holocaust memory is emerging as the dominant feature of Jewishness in America.
I worry that a people with a 3,000-year history of creative genius, enriched by intimate relations with every culture from Paris to Patagonia, should be placing such weight on martyrdom — and indeed, for this generation, martyrdom once removed.
When Sanders identifies as a Jew he does it through the Holocaust.  This should not be a shock to people.  The vast majority of non-religious Jews do the same thing.  Why show Jewish pride?  The Holocaust.  Why support Israel?  The Holocaust.  When marry Jewish?  To deny Hitler, y"sh, a posthumous victory. (Thank you Emil Fackenheim)  
It goes further.  Why does Sanders identify with the Holocaust?  Because he can relate to it.  Not the Torah or Talmud.  Not Rabbi Akiva or the Rambam.  In the intellectually stunted worldview of socialism there are two kinds of people - the successful who are evil by virtue of their success and the unsuccessful who were exploited by the former group and are entitled to fruit of all their efforts.  Germans = successful.  Jews = unsuccessful.  With Jews who were innocent sheep led to the slaughter Sanders can relate.  With Jews who guard their borders, build their homes and thrive in the most violent place on Earth?  Not so much.
The big problem with using the Holocaust as the basis of Jewish identity is that it's time limited.  Just like 99% or so of non-religious Jews either don't know about the importance of our Holy Temple (may it be speedily rebuilt) or don't care, just like 99% of Jews observant or not don't think much about the Chielmnicki pogroms, so too the national uniting trauma of the Holocaust will fade in a generation after the last survivor is gone.  With social media destroying our attention spans and ancient history being redefined as only 10 years ago how can it not?  What will the average Jew, without the Holocaust, hold on to as a lodestone?
The Holocaust is morally easy, the State of Israel and the tough task of survival in the viper pit that is the Middle East is a different story.  The same Jews who take pride in their forebears having gone through the black and white Holocaust suddenly become more reticent when faced with grey Israeli reality.  No wonder there's money for Holocaust memorials but when it comes time to fighting BDS on campus things get tighter.
We have to emphasize to people that Jewish history did not begin or end with the Holocaust.  We have seen our share of tragedy but we have also enriched the world through our Torah and our contributions to civilization.  What we're done must be emphasized, not what we've lost if we are to encourage people to see Judaism, especially Torah Judaism, as something to cleave to.

Guest Post - The Story of Irena Sendler

This piece comes from Simcha at TargetSplash and tells the story of a nearly forgotten hero of the Shoah.  It is reproduced here with his permission:

The Nearly Forgotten Story of Irena Sendler

Memorial ceremonies recently held in remembrance of the Warsaw ghetto uprising’s 70^th anniversary have stirred up interest in the historical events of the era, including lesser-known episodes.

One wartime experience involved a woman who was responsible for saving over 3000 Jews. Incredibly her story was almost lost to history until a group of Kansas high school students researched and publicized the affair in 1999.

Irena Sendler was a young Polish social worker who joined the Polish underground in 1939, immediately after the Nazis invaded Poland. During those early days of occupation Sendler helped Jews fleeing the Nazis and it is estimated that she assisted over 500 Jewish men, women and children in this effort.

In 1940 the Zagota underground group was formed so that members could assist the Jews in a more organized fashion. As part of that group Sendler was given forged documents that identified her as a nurse and she entered the Warsaw ghetto as an "expert" on infectious diseases. She was allowed to bring in food and medicine but her true acts of mercy were in what she removed from the ghetto.

Sendler quickly realized that the Nazis intended to murder all of the ghetto residents and she began to smuggle children out of the ghetto, sometimes under tram seats and other times in toolboxes, suitcases and even in bags under barking, snarling dogs. She also learned about the sewer system and other underground exits and brought children out through these tunnels. Many of the children were orphans but others had living parents and Sendler went door to door in the ghetto, to convince the parents that leaving the ghetto was the only hope that the children had of survival. 

Sendler recorded all of the names of the children on scraps of tissue paper together with the names of the families, convents or orphanages in which they were placed. Sendler hoped that the children could later be reunited with their families, though in the end, only a few of the parents survived the war. Through her efforts however, many of the other children were brought to Israel to live as Jews.

Sendler was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 but she did not divulge any information about the whereabouts of the children, even under torture. Zagota members were able to bribe the guards and secure her release and Sendler lived out the remainder of the war in hiding.

Maybe If They Treated Seriously

I've written before about why many in the frum community don't observe Yom HaShoah in any serious fashion.  To be absolutely clear it's not because of any intent for disrespect for those who died or suffered but survived in that horrible, horrible time.  In fact, it's because many look at Yom HaShoah commemorations and are disappointed by what they see as an insufficient attempt to mark the tragedy that the day is disregarded.
I do not for an instant intend to justify the behaviour of certain menuvalim whose actions a couple of days ago brought much of the Chareidi community into disrespute.  The critical response from the Chareidi community itself, a group known very well for circling the wagons in even extreme situations, shows the depravity of this flock of scum and reminds us not to judge the majority based on the actions of an idiotic tiny minority.
But for many the current format of Yom HaShoah, especially in the golus is insufficient.  Perhaps its because the day wasn't picked by "the Gedolim" but rather by the secular Knesset.  This is a reason but not a great one.  How many MK's were there that were unaffected by the conflagration?  Was their desire to set aside a day of memorial any less important simply because they weren't observant?
Perhaps it's because the full name of the day, Yom HaShoah vehaGevurah, rankles those who remember secular Zionism's strong efforts to create a "new Jew", strong and independent, not like those shtetl losers who marched like sheep into the crematoria.  The Zionists couldn't identify with the rank and file Jew who, surrounded by mighty enemies and without any means of defense, surrendered to his fate.  They could only see common cause with the handful that had the opportunity to pick up arms and resist, even if its was futile. It carries the quiet implication that the real reason for the day wasn't so much the Holocaust as it was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  One can understand why that would be bothersome.
However, what's most disconcerting about the day is how empty of Jewish meaning it is.  In Israel there is a moment of silence and a series of ceremonies.  In golus there is a ceremony at the local temple or JCC that lasts about 90 minutes and consists of speeches and a children's choir singing Ani Ma'amin or something similar.  Five minutes after the proceedings have ended Yom HaShoah is effectively over for the participants.  Ninety minutes?  That's all they give the victims of the Holocaust?
Some folks (I used to be one) would like Yom HaShoah to disappear.  They make the argument that there is already a day set aside for commemorating the tragedies of Jewish history: Tisha b'Av.  While they are correct the rituals of Tisha b'Av focus on the destruction of the Temples (may it be speedily rebuilt).  The other massacres and destruction of Jewish history tend to be seen as secondary.  There are kinnos for the Holocaust on Tisha b'Av as well but only recent machzorim have them so they are not universally said.
Others claim that it is forbidden to create new days of mourning, that we simply don't have the authority to do so which means we're left with Tisha b'Av.  Unfortunately this isn't actually true.  The greatest example is the forgotten fast day of Sivan 13 which was instituted for the more than half a million victims of Bogdan Chielmnicki's Cossacks, y"sh.  Once upon a time it was observed by more than a few people and even had kinnos written for it.  The Chielmnick massacres, by the way, were the worst tragedy that befell European Jewry until the Holocaust.  So there is precedent.  If the gezeras tach v'tat were worthy of a special day surely the Holocaust is.
Now we have to be careful at this point.  One focus of Jewish commemorations of tragedies is on moral lessons that can be drawn from the original events.  Tisha b'Av is the best example of this.  We recall the destruction of the Temples but also on the reasons the Chazal bring as to why it happened.  Since the closing of the Talmud, however, we have become much poorer when it comes to explaining tragedies.  Instead of be able to come up with reasons like the Chazal did we are much more mute.  As the strong response to anyone who tries to say "And this is why the Holocaust happened..." indicates, we are simply not psychologically able to accept any reason.  The pain is still too great.
This does not mean we cannot recall the Holocaust in Jewish fashion.  Many religious Jews criticize the moment of silence in Israel as a non-Jewish method of reflection.  Well then why not introduce Jewish methods instead?
If we are truly committed to sanctifying the memory of the Six Million then we need to do it right.  Yom HaShoah needs to become a fast day.  Perhaps the best theme of the day would be silence, al pi Aharon HaKohen's response to God's instructions not to mourn the dead of his two sons in last week's parasha.  While we cannot dare to bring reasons for the Shoah we can acknowledge that the reason it could happen was because we had not yet been redeemed from our exile and we are only still in exile because of our intense hatred one for another.  Words.  We take the power of speech that God breathed into Adam HaRishon at the end of Creation and use it to keep ourselves in the spiritual gutter.
Instead of more kinnos perhaps we should create a day of silence where we are forced to avoid words and instead gather quietly to reflect on our loss.  No special prayers other than those associated with a public fast.  No long speeches about love and achdus that no one really takes seriously anyway.  Just a day where the theme is thinking about how far we have fallen, how much we have lost and from where we have to start to wonder how we ever climb back up.

Holo vs Holo

The Canadian Human Rights Museum, while built to fulfill a noble purpose, has found itself embroiled in controversy over its allocation of space.  As noted in this article from The National Post:

A debate over how the Canadian Museum for Human Rights balances the Holocaust and other genocides has a new flashpoint: a poll that purports to oppose giving the Holocaust primacy of place, though even the pollster himself says the poll has been misinterpreted.

The federally-funded museum, originally the dream of the late Israel Asper and set to open in about two years in Winnipeg, will have an area dedicated to the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War.
Other mass atrocities — including the Rwandan massacres, the Cambodian Killing Fields and the planned starvation and execution of at least 3.2 million Ukrainians in the 1930s under Stalin — will be housed together in an adjacent area.
It is a point that has angered many ethnic groups in Canada, particularly those from Eastern Europe, who feel their misfortunes will be placed on a lower rung on a hierarchy of suffering.

The one community that has been especially angered by this decision is the Ukrainian one.  The argue that their Holodomor, the Stalinist persecution in which millions of them died, is as significant as the Holocaust and that if the Jews get their own wing then so do they. 
One could easily argue successfully with them on this point.  First one should note that as far as mass atrocities go the Holocaust is unique.  Name any other major massacre in 20th century history and you will see the obvious differences.  The Rwandan and Cambodian slaughters were the result of a government turning on its own citizens in order to secure political control.  The Ukrainians were similarly killed by Stalin, y"sh, to prove a point: don't mess with Moscow or else.
The Holocaust was unique in that one national group, the Germans, made it their overriding policy to wipe out another national group, that would be us Jews, no matter where we were.  It wasn't about ridding Germany of its Jews.  It was about ridding the world.  The Holocaust was also unique in that the persecuted group was not a threat to the attackers.  Unlike the other massacres mentioned where civil war, tribal loyalites or the need to show political power were concerns the Holocaust was about killing Jews simply because they were Jews.  Finally, the Holocaust was unique in how not just the Germans but many other nations, including many allied with or occupied by the Nazis, y"sh, along with many actively fighting them otherwise cooperated to ensure that only a bare minimum of Jews could escape the horror being perpetrated against them.
Although in the decades since the war most of the countries directly involved in the Holocaust have expressed at least some statements of regret (even as many of them ironically make strong efforts to repeat the Holocaust in Israel through their open support of our enemies) one such nation that seems not to care about what happened on its soil is the Ukraine:

It seems parts of Europe are less tolerant now than they were in the 16th century. Last week, I watched as bulldozers began to demolish the adjacent remnants of what was once one of Europe's most beautiful synagogue complexes, the 16th-century Golden Rose in Lviv. Most of the rest of the synagogue was burned down, with Jews inside, by the Nazis in 1941.
During the war, 42 other synagogues were destroyed in Lviv, which from the middle ages to the 20th century was known by its Austrian (and Yiddish) name, Lemberg, and then called Lvov after the Soviets annexed it in 1945. The remnants of the Golden Rose are one of the few remaining vestiges of Jewish existence in Lviv, the majority of whose residents, in 1940, were Jewish.
It is not only morally wrong for bulldozers to drill through the last traces of this vibrant past without first giving the handful of remaining Jews here a chance to restore this site, or turn it into a place of memorial. It is legally wrong too. Ukraine's own laws are designed to preserve such historic sites.
The Ukrainian authorities are not the only ones at fault. Where is the UN cultural organization UNESCO? The synagogue ruins were designated part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.
And where is European soccer body UEFA? The Ukrainians are planning to build a hotel on the site to host fans and players at next year's European soccer championships, the world's third most-watched sporting event, which they are co-hosting with Poland. So much for UEFA's much-hyped campaign to "Kick racism out of football." (In addition to there being residual anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the authorities seem to be motivated by cultural and historical crassness and illiteracy, and denial of the past, as well as real-estate greed.)
During the Holocaust, 420,000 Jews, including over 100,000 children, were murdered in Lviv and its environs, more than in almost any other city in Europe. The killing was so efficient that the Nazis organized transports of Romanian and Hungarian Jews to be brought here to be killed once they were done killing the Polish and Ukrainian Jews. There were almost no survivors.
Yet you will hardly find any reference to this in the official guide books or in the museums of Lviv. There is no monument to the murdered Jews in Lviv's old town.
A few elderly people still remember. One Ukrainian woman who approached me last week as I stood at what used to be the ghetto entrance told me she remembered, as a child, seeing Jews whipped as they were forced to walk on their knees back and forth for hours until they collapsed, and were then shot while Nazis laughed.

In the end, this is why the Holodomor might deserve its own wing in the museum.  Like the Holocaust it too has a unique feature: its victims, when given the chance, did to the Jews what the Soviets, y"sh, did to them.  The idea that a people could suffer in such a way and then learn absolutely nothing moral about it, could remain as cruel as their oppressors, is certainly unique.It should be remembered that the Ukraine has an extensive history of Jew hatred including the worst massacres of Jews between the destruction of the Second Temple (may it speedily be rebuilt) and the Holocaust, the Cheilmnitsky pogroms.  It should come as no surprise that Ukraine today has no interest in remember its enthusiastic participation in the Holocaust.  They can't come right out and wear it as a badge of pride but perhaps intentional neglect of history is a suitable substitute for them.

Their Holiday and Ours

One thing many Gentiles and non-Orthodox Jews don't seem to get is the lack of flexibility in many aspects of Jewish practice.  Every so often I'm asked if I can cover someone for work on Shabbos or one of the main holidays.  When I explain to them that I am never available on such days, I sometimes get the response "Oh can't you make an exception this time?"
I understand why, I really do.  For most people there are always exceptions that can be made.  Like the supervisor I had in medical school who insisted that Shabbos dinners were an inviolable part of his family's weekly schedule - except for this week because his favourite band was in concert that Friday night, most people attach strong values to certain events in their lives but always seem to be able to figure out a way to get around the scheduling those values involve.
Where this disconnect seems to cause so much strife is in the interaction between observant and non-observant Jews.  When confronted with an Orthodox Jew who refuses to cooperate with a certain effort by other elements of the Jewish community because doing so would violate halacha in some way the non-Orthodox Jew may often huff "Well I'm Jewish too and I don't have a problem with it."  Many frum doctors will often tell you, for example, that requests to avoid being on call over Shabbos, even when accompanied by offers to work more Sundays and civic holidays, is usually supported by the non-Jewish members of the team but then torpedoed by the non-religious Jew who says "I have no problem coming in on Saturday and I'm just as good a Jew as you!"  It happened to me a few times during medical school and bewildered the non-Jews on the team, especially the devout Muslims who understood the concept of non-negotiable religious holidays and were amazed that another Jew would strive to torpedo my efforts.
Another time this causes trouble is on Yom HaShoah.  Now, off the top I want to make clear that my remarks regarding Yom HaShoah are restricted to observances of the holiday outside Israel.  Inside the State the holiday is of a completely different nature and this discussion is not relevant to it.
The big problem with Yom HaShoah within the religious community is that it seems to be have been invented by people who sincerely wanted to create a meaningful day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust but then did so with a  complete ignorance of Jewish calender periods and history.
The day chosen was during the Sefirah period which already is dominated by a mourning theme of its own, one quite applicable to the Jewish people today.  Yes, one could argue that Yom haAtzma'ut is also during Sefirah but in contrast to Yom HaShoah, Yom Ha'atzma'ut had its day chosen by historical events, not some committee of Jews wondering where in the calender to put it.
Then there is the way Yom HaShoah is observed.  Traditionally, when Jews have set aside days for mourning they have done just that: set aside the entire day.  Tisha B'Av isn't about an evening program with bagels and lox after an inspiring reading of Eichah.  The 20th of Sivan was set aside for various massacres of European Jewry, most recently the Chmeilnitsky massacres of 1648-49.  The entire day takes on a theme and atmosphere.
For Yom HaShoah none of this takes place.  Instead communities hold "meaningful" ceremonies that follow a specific pattern: the local secular Jewish leadership makes speeches about "Never again" and "Never forget", then civic leaders make declarations of support for the Jewish community and statements of sympathy for the victims, a children's choir or two is trotted out to sing either "Ani Ma'amin" or "Mir Zeinen Du" and finally someone plays a violin or cello as token survivors light an electric menorah with six branches.  After that everyone goes homes.  Yom HaShoah is over.
Beyond that there is the emphasis secular observances of Yom HaShoah place in the events.  God is, as best, offered a token mention but nothing more.  The senselessness of events, the idea that a survivor endured the horror of the Holocaust only by accident, the place Yom HaShoah has in Jewish history, all these are ignored.  Only the slogans "Never forget" and "Never again" and nothing more.
The religious approach to Yom HaShoah is far deeper.  We recall that just as 1 in 3 Jews died in the Holocaust, so did 1 on 3 Jews die during the Churban of the Second Temple (may it speedily be rebuilt) and even higher proportions at the first Churban.  We recall that 1/3 of Europe's Jews were killed by marauding Cossacks in 1648-49.  We ask God why we must suffer so, we confess our sins and seek to improve ourselves as Jews, we fast to show our sense of affliction and we recognize that until our Moshiah arrives we must endure such tragedies as history has heaped upon on.  There really is very little comparison between how religious and non-religious Jews recall the Shoah.  How could there be when our worldviews are so radically different?
But what I find most frustrating is the intolerance some in the non-religious community show over Orthodox non-participation in Yom HaShoah ceremonies.  Some understand, to be sure, but most are bewildered as to why we don't join in the observance of the holiday they created.  Religious Zionists understand quite well why Chareidim don't say Hallel on Yom Ha'atzma'ut but Jewish Federation officials are flummoxed as to why we don't join with the program on Yom HaShoah.
To be fair, there is much guilt on the religious side of things.  Many Chareidim are notoriously insensitive to the feelings of the non-religious on Yom HaShoah.  Just because I don't recognize the holiday in my set of yearly observances doesn't mean I should shove that in someone else's face.  At the very least the religious, when confronted by the "Why don't you participate?" crowd should demure politely and simply state "We have a different way of remembering the kedoshim."  But such sensitivity should go both ways and often the people who demand have the least for others.
In many ways, it comes back to how this post started.  We don't listen to music during Sefirah.  You pull out a cello.  We don't listen to women singing.  Inevitably one does.  Some of us don't like to sit in mixed seating even at non-prayer ceremonies.  You allow free seating.  Without intending to, the non-religious have created a holiday that the Orthodox cannot participate fully in and, when we don't, they condemn that lack of participation.  We hold by halacha and are called bad Jews for doing so?
When we point out that on Tisha B'Av they are expected to fast in commemoration of the destruction of the Temples, we are told that such ancient historical events are irrelevant.  Point out that Tisha B'Av also recalls the Crusades, the Inquisition and Gezeras Tach v'Tat and we get a look of bewilderment.  Centuries ago, who cares?  But the Holocaust just happened!
Please tell me someone what the expiry date on remembering a tragic event is.  Clearly it's less than 1900 years.  It's also less than 350 years.  At what point do we start ignoring the Holocaust and forget about what happened?  In 2245?  In 2145?  Because by ignoring Tisha B'Av that is the message the non-religious population is sending us: only recent tragedies matter.  There is an expiry date on grief.
It always comes down to the same frustrating point: the same people who don't have a clue about the rest of the Jewish year and have no trouble eating and drinking on Tisha B'Av are the most outraged when they read about Chareidim ignoring Yom HoShoah.  Their viewpoints, their sensitivities have to be respected but not religious ones.  What does that say about non-religious Jewish tolerance?
Is this the real fate of Yom HaShoah, to become the example of how both sides of the Jewish community, observant and non-observant, really don't care at all about one another?  Is that what the kedoshimi would have wanted?

To March or Not To March

March of the Living is a well known program that takes Jewish children from North America and Israel to visit Holocaust sites in Israel like Auschwitz. The premise is simple:
THE MARCH OF THE LIVING is an international, educational program that brings Jewish teens from all over the world to Poland on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, to march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest concentration camp complex built during World War II, and then to Israel to observe Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, and Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.
The goal of the March of the Living is for these young people to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and to lead the Jewish people into the future vowing Never Again.
While it sounds very nice, I've always had a problem with the program. Without going into how unspeakable a tragedy the Holocaust it, I've never been comfortable with how central it has become to so many people's Judaism and sense of Jewish identity. For many, it seems, the Holocaust is the basis and rock upon which their sense of Jewish belonging rests. And to me that's wrong.
The many reason I feel that way is because it provides a mainly negative definition to one's Jewish raison d'etre. Why be proud to be Jewish? So as not to give Hitler, y"sh, a posthumour victory. Why marry Jewish? Same reason. Why support Israel? Because the State will protect us from another Holocaust.
Only it seems obvious to anyone who is watching North American Jewry decline that this is not the case. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. The constant focus on the Holocaust provides short term affirmation of Jewish identity but in the long term it turns them off. Judaism becomes about suffering and dying. Identifying with Jews becomes about memorial ceremonies and a sense of loss. All the beauty that is Judaism, all the livliness and happiness that it contains, is lost.
Perhaps this is why more and more rabbinic authorities are starting to openly oppose the program, something that was once taboo because it was considered akin to not respecting the tragedy of the Holocaust enough. For example:
Prominent Zionist-religious figure Rabbi Zalman Melamed this week stated that Poland is an "impure country riddled with anti-Semitism" that Jews should refrain from visiting.
Prominent Zionist rabbi says leaving Land of Israel not for sake of mitzvah banned, as is helping Poles – who collaborated with Nazis – make living out of death camps
Less than two months ago another leading rabbi, Shlomo Aviner, almost sparked a diplomatic incident with the Polish government after saying that Israeli students must not take part in educational trips to the Nazi death camps in the country, so as not to provide livelihood to "murderers" who assisted the Nazi regime.
Now, one must note that the official Polish government position regarding Jews and Israel has improved tremendously since the end of communism. Poland even boycotted the farce of Durban II. I would not recommend not participating in March of the Living because of prior Polish crimes.
Rather, I would say there's a much different reason for not visiting Poland. One can learn about the Holocaust at Yad VaShem in Israel. Certainly many of the exhibits there have been designed to maximize the emotional experience of learning about Churban Europa. However, there is one additional experience that Yad VaShem provides that a walk from Aushwitz to Birkenau cannot: one leaves the darkness of Yad VaShem and enters the bright sunlight of Israel. One leaves the destruction of our parents and grandparents behind and sees what the survivors built. Jews are a people who, through the help of God, have survived attempt after attempt to destroy them and after this last, most horrible encounter with fire and death, built a new country out of sand and rocks, a country that has defied all odds to became one of the most amazing places in the world, all through Jewish perservance, intelligence and determination. The State of Israel is a positive expression of Jewish existence and, in my opinion, a far better place to create a sense of Jewish connection than in a glorified graveyard that is best remembered for posterity from a distance.

Too Many Happy Endings

One of the problems with any stories or movies about the Holocaust is that they tend to disproportionately focus on survivors. Well, no wonder. The dead aren't in any position to tell their tales, the survivors are never anxious to discuss their lost loved ones because of the pain it brings and no one wants to pay twelve dollars and change to watch a movie in which everyone dies and no one has a happy or triumphant outcome.
As a result, we get many fine movies and TV shoes like Schindler's List, The Piano, Hogan's Heroes, and others, but we also get a very different impression than one we might desire: how bad could the Holocaust have been? Look at the all the people who survived!
What's worse, however, is when people make up stories about miracles and heartwarming events that never happened, as a way of drawing attention to themselves or perhaps simply to ease the bitterness of the memories of their suffering.
Such is the problem with An Angel At The Fence, an almost published Holocaust memoir by a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Herman Rosenblat. According to early releases about the story:
His young angel hid behind a tree with an apple underneath her warm coat.
And that's where the fairy-tale love story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat began more than half a century ago, across a barbed-wire fence of a Nazi concentration camp.
The Holocaust survivors left their North Miami Beach, Fla., home earlier this month to retell their remarkable tale to a New York television audience, not knowing the latest chapter was about to unfold.
A rabbi watching the show realized the retired 76-year-old electrician missed his bar mitzvah because he was a prisoner when he was 13. So. on Thursday, Herman Rosenblat underwent his long-overdue rite of passage into adulthood at a Long Island temple.
And while news cameras captured the moment, it was the Rosenblats' love sojourn that captured everyone's hearts, said Rabbi Anchelle Perl of the Congregation Beth Sholom Chabad in Mineola, N.Y.
"Everyone who was here was touched. You can really see the history of their lives, such unassuming people," Perl said Friday.
Herman Rosenblat, reached by phone on Friday at his daughter's home in Manhasset, N.Y., said he plans to add the bar mitzvah into the book he has been writing for years.
The tale began in Schlieben, a German concentration camp, where the two Polish children were shipped separately after their families were taken prisoner during World War II.
Herman Rosenblat spent his teen years there carrying bodies from gas chambers into a crematorium.
One cold evening in 1942, after completing his macabre work for the day, Rosenblat said he noticed a little girl hiding behind a tree across a barbed-wire fence. He called to her, but she didn't respond. He called out to her again, this time in Polish.
When she responded, he asked if she had anything to eat. From underneath her brown ragged coat, the girl tossed him an apple and a clump of bread. The scene would repeat itself every evening for the next six months, Rosenblat said.
"I never really noticed her much back then. I was only interested in the food," he recalled.
The meetings ended when Rosenblat learned he was being transferred to a different camp. He told the girl, who appeared to be 9 and whose name he never learned, not to return.
"After that, I never thought about her again," he said.
Freed by the Russians, Rosenblat immigrated to New York and joined the U.S. Army in 1951.
After his service, he began taking night classes to learn to be an electrician. A classmate later set him up on a blind date, but Rosenblat was reluctant to go.
"A blind date? Never! You never know who you are going to meet," Rosenblat recalled saying.
But his friend insisted, saying the woman was Polish like him, and Rosenblat eventually agreed. He "had a great time" and as the couple was returning home from dancing, they began to share their experiences.
"She said she used to throw apples and bread to a little boy in a concentration camp," said Rosenblat. "And as she spoke, I thought, 'That's me!' She was the little girl!"
So, he proposed in the car. She thought he was crazy.
They married six months later, almost 15 years after they exchanged goodbyes through the fence.
Rosenblat retired in 1992 after he was shot during a robbery at his television repair shop in New York.
Once settled in South Florida and with nothing much else to do, Rosenblat began writing his book, "The Fence." The couple's story caught the attention of a television news producer in New York. The two traveled to the Big Apple in early February to be interviewed for a Valentine's Day story.
"When I saw the story, I was thinking, this poor man needs a bar mitzvah," Perl said.
Rosenblat said he told the dozens gathered at the ceremony that his horrible childhood led him to lose his faith.
But he regained it years later when he remembered that his mother – who was killed in a concentration camp in 1942 – came to him in a childhood dream and told him she would one day send an angel for him.
"Roma," he said. "My angel is Roma."
A wonderful tale with a wonderful ending. There's only one problem with it: it's not true.
Even in this cursory telling, the story is capable of inducing peals of laughter in anyone half-acquainted with the details of the Holocaust. It aroused the suspicions of a Holocaust scholar, Michigan State University’s Kenneth Waltzer, who double-checked for the obvious and established that there could be no possible means of approaching the wire at Buchenwald safely from either side. (The German government’s reasons for keeping people away from the outside of the fence were, after all, at least as strong as their reasons for keeping prisoners away from the inside.) Moreover, the fabrication not only diminishes the cruelty and effectiveness of the Nazi forced-labour regime, but manages to minimize the wartime suffering of German civilians by implicitly suggesting that apples were lying around in such casual abundance (during an unforgettably brutal winter, no less) that 200 of them would not be missed. The Angel at the Fence fiasco has raised odd, futile questions about the standard of fact-checking applied to non-fiction books. Perhaps the general public doesn’t realize that, by and large, there is no fact-checking of non-fiction books. There has never been any procedural guarantee of their veracity, and counting on the existence of one would be expensive and foolish. Our best defences against fabulators are personal skepticism, the scrutiny of an informed public and the judgment of time.
The more frightening part of this affair is just how close an incredibly implausible fish story could come to being published as fact by one of the most esteemed entities in the book world. One can only be grateful that Waltzer was still able to ring up many other Buchenwald survivors and try Rosenblat’s fable out on them; soon enough, such a strong litmus test will no longer be part of any scholar’s investigative apparatus.
Rosenblat’s lies were caught before they reached bookstore shelves. This suggests that the implied standard of rigour that Holocaust stories face in the marketplace is higher than that faced by other material, not lower. Still, the Holocaust deniers and trivializers will hold this affair up as proof that today’s torrent of Holocaust literature is in the nature of a racket, and unfortunately, they have a tiny kernel of truth on their side. There is so much money to be made in using the Holocaust as a prefabricated backdrop for heart-tugging tragicomic tableaux that the temptation has proven irresistible several times, both to phony memoirists and bandwagon-riding movie makers. Some sort of moratorium, or perhaps even just a rule of taste that forbids turning the wreckage of a continent into cheap kitsch, would seem to be in order.
I would not, chas v'shalom, ever want to minimize Rosenblat's suffering during the War. That he even continued to identify as a Jew, albeit a non-practising one, is a testament to inner strength and courage. But the damage he has done, as Colby Cosh noted above, is incalculable. If he made up stories about his "angel", how can we believe the rest? And even if we can pove the worst crimes, what about all the individual stories of personal salvation? How many of them are now cast into doubt?
This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now, as those who know me well can vouch. I have always been especially disturbed by Holocaust revisionism when it comes from the frum velt. The Holocaust was a trying time and people who were undoubtedly scrupulous in their observance of mitzvos before and after the war did have to spend several years scraping for survival by whatever means possible. If that meant eating on Yom Kippur, working on Shabbos and having stale bread with their ration of soup during Pesach, what alternative did they have? Survival was the priority. Keeping kosher and Shabbos got you killed.
For some, however, this is too troubling. A tzadik must be a tzadik always, even under the worst conditions. This is typified by the hagiographical treatment of the Klausenberger Rebbe, zt"l, for example:
On March 19, 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary and Gestapo chief Adolf Eichmann immediately organized the round-up, ghettoization, and deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The Klausenberg ghetto was established on May 1, 1944, and was liquidated via six transports to Auschwitz between late May and early June. Knowing that the Gestapo targeted community leaders first, the Rebbe hid in an open grave in a cemetery for several weeks. He then fled to the town of Banya, where he was conscripted into a forced-labor camp along with 5000 other Hungarian Jews. Though hunger was not a problem here—the barbed-wire enclosure had a back exit through which Jews could buy bread and milk from non-Jews—the Hungarian soldiers constantly badgered and searched inmates for their valuables. The Rebbe was forced to shave his beard, but he did not lose his composure or faith in God. He continued to conduct prayer services and even a Shabbat tisch.
In Auschwitz, Halberstam seemed to live in another world. The bits of food that other prisoners hungered for and fought over were, in the Rebbe's eyes, less important than their use for mitzvot. He decided early on to try to keep every Torah commandment he could, and even the minhagim that he had learned from his forefathers. Thus, he would often choose to use the bit of water he had to wash his hands for prayer, rather than to wash his hands to eat. He never touched non-kosher food and refused to eat food cooked in a non-kosher pot. Often he went hungry. His staunch faith gave spiritual strength to many. He assured his fellow inmates that God was with them in the valley of death, and would not abandon them.
In 1944, a year after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Halberstam was assigned to a special labor detail to clear out the ruined ghetto. He and 6000 other prisoners searched for valuables and demolished the ruins by hand and with rudimentary tools so that the Nazis could sell the bricks and steel to Polish contractors. As they beheld skeletons piled in the street, and uncovered bunkers in which Jews had died by gas or shooting, the Hungarian prisoners realized for the first time the extent of the annihilation of European Jewry.
This time the Rebbe did not shave his beard, which is considered a mark of holiness for Hasidim. He wrapped his beard and face in a handkerchief, pretending he had a toothache. This charade was accompanied by the fact that he cried all day as he worked, praying and communing with God.
What was that about peals of laughter? I ran many of these details by my father, may he live to 120. My father suffered under Hitler's wrath from the time the Nazis, y"sh, invaded Poland until their defeat at the end of the war. He was in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He rolled his eyes in disbelief when I told him the following details.
Never ate non-kosher food? My father remembers people like that. They died within a week of arriving in their first camp from starvation. Perhaps the Rebbe had mehadrin or did he have to make do with just plain glatt? Prayer services? The Germans supervised almost every waking moment. It was impossible. And besides, did the Rebbe have both Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam tefillin? He held tischen? Ah, but the German guards probably attended and sang merrily along with the zemiros.
For me, stories like this are even more damaging that An Angel at the Fence. They create a preternatural holiness that creates disdain for the ordinary Jew who survived so much horror during the Shoah. Your father didn't keep kosher? Well, the Klausenberger Rebbe did. Your father worked on Shabbos? Tsk, not the Rebbe!
The mark of a surviving observant Jew is that, after living through the worst period of hester panim since the destruction of our Temple (may it be speedily rebuilt), he returned to his faith. The real greatness of the Klausenberger Rebbe is that he survived the Holocaust with faith, knowlege and ambition intact and went about rebuilding what was lost with the same fervour that he had been raised with. Stories that simply could not have happened, however, cheapen this triumph.
In the end, maybe we should start reminding people not of the survivors but of the dead. True, theirs are not happy stories and their final days and months are not uplifting and inspiring. But when the Holocaust become a source of chizuk like that?

The Problem with Yom HaShoah

As a child of Holocaust survivors, I grew up with the idea that Yom HaShoah is a fixed holiday on the Jewish calender (athough it always seemed to come out on Sundays where I lived!). Every year we followed the same routine. For a few weeks before, our Hebrew school teachers would show us films of the Holocaust, teach us a few simple songs like "Ani Ma'amin" and tell us how important remembering was. Then the day would arrive and we would troop up in front of the assembled throng and sing our songs and say our little speeches and everyone would clap politely and nod seriously. Yes, we must remember, they all kept saying. Never again, don't grant the Nazis a posthumous victory, you've heard all the lines. There was a special sense of solemnity when we would light the six light bulbs on the ceremonial candelabra, one light bulb for each of the six million martyrs. We were remembering them and ensuring they would not be forgotten.
But all that was a long time ago. Since that time, I've had many opportunities to think about Yom HaShoah and the more I've learned about Judaism and our blood-soaked history, the less importance it has held for me.
That's not to say I'm diminishing the unspeakable tragedy that was the Shoah. God forbid I ever suggest that. What happened in Churban Europa was and is still undescribable in its magnitude and horror. Each of the Six Million is a holy martyr whose soul was sanctified in the name of Heaven, the highest honour a Jew could ever achieve and to doubt that, or to minimize in any way what happened is unacceptable. All this I strongly believe.
But the idea of a special day just for the victims of the Shoah? With that I've developed a problem with over the last few years.
The first issue is that of context. Yom HaShoah recalls the fate of our people under the Nazis from 1933-1945. It rarely deals with what came before in more than an oblique way. It rarely deals with what came after except to mention the establishment of the State of Israel. We are told over and over again about what the Germans, y"sh, did to our people but almost never about what the rest of the world did and how they either helped or were complicit in the process.
The problem with this is that the Jewish approach to history has always been one of comprehensiveness. We are all God's children carrying out His plans for history. Events of significance are not random occurences. They are almost always the culmination of other events and carry with them moral lessons for us. The Torah observant Jew approaches the Shoah from a position of fear and dread. Why did this happen? How was it part of God's plan for history? What role did we play in bringing it about? What are we to learn from it? How do we properly santify the souls which were lost and make their sacrifices meaningful? For the non-observant Jew Yom HaShoah can answer none of these questions.
And I wonder if that's the point. After all, one must always be wary of anyone, no matter how educated or observant they may be, when they start a sentence with "The Holocaust happened because..." Perhaps in a few centuries we will be able to more dispassionately analyze it like we do now with other great tragedies of our history but the Shoah is still far too close, too personal, to allow such introspection. And the secular answer to this dilemma seems to be not that we cannot yet answer these questions but rather that there are no answers.
This makes sense from a non-observant point of view. The idea that our people were picked for destruction for more than simple reasons, that some part of history was played out through their deaths, that a higher purpose may have been served and something accomplished through all the suffering is not something that has much currency outside the religious world. Just as in daily life, God plays a peripheral role, if any at all, in life, so too in the realm of history He is seen to be just as absent. The Shoah happened, it just happened, and that's about as deep as one can go looking for a meaningful answer. And that kind of thinking feels quite unfufilling.
There is the matter of the commemoration as well. In Jewish law and tradition, mourning for the dead has always been shown in specific ways, through fasting, prayer, supplications and certain public displays. Choirs singing short ditties and speeches by local public officials have never been on that list.
I'm also not a fan of slogans, especially unfulfilled ones. Never again? Tell the Cambodians, Chinese and Rwandans about that one. The need for Jews to be vigilant against resurgent anti-Semitism? Then why is the government of Israel negotiating with a terrorist leader whose PhD is in Holocaust Denial? Not to give the Nazis a posthumous victory? The Jewish population of the United States has declined by 2 million in the last two generations. The worldwide population is stagnant if not slowly dropping. The only thing concealing the real magnitude of the decrease is the increasingly liberal definitions of "Jew" being used. Were one to use the strictly halachic position, people would be even more shocked.
Then there's the next issue I have which is the timing of the day. Yes, I know it's to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but it also happens during Sefriah, a time in the Jewish year when we are supposed to limit public gatherings and avoid live music. I sometimes wonder if the people who chose the date did so saying that the need to remember on this particular day overrode the Sefirah obligations, or if they had simply never heard of it at all! but for the observant Jew trying his best to both remember our fallen kedoshim and observe halachah properly, this creates an emotional conflict.
It also leads into my greatest problem with Yom HaShoah, and this is obvious for anyone who knows the Jewish calender. There already is a day set aside for the Holocaust and it's called Tisha B'Av. That day, set in the long humid days of mid-summer when many don't think about their Jewishness (after all, God went on vacation with us when Hebrew school ended in June, didn't He?) has been in our calender for over two thousand years as a day of mourning for not only the destruction of our Temples (may the Third One be speedily built) but for all the other great destructions that have overwhelmed us in the past. The Roman persecutions, the Crusades, the slaughter of the Jews of Arabia by Muhammed, y"sh, the Inquisition, the Chielmniski uprisings, the pogroms, and all the other untold sufferings are all recalled on Tisha B'Av. For non-observant Jews, most of these are events from history without a feeling of personal connection. The though of fasting for 25 hours for a Temple one has never seen or felt a connection to must sound absurd. However, for the observant Jew mindful of God's place in our world, aware of the need to keep all our history in context and yearning for a connection in the midst of mourning with our Creator and generations gone by, including a fitting recollection of the Holocaust is a natural part of Tisha B'Av. Now the Holocaust means something other than a random event in recent history. It is part of our journey, part of our suffering since the destruction of the Second Temple. Its magnitude can be appreciated with a bit more depth.
So in the end, that makes Yom HoShoah a less sensible idea for me. Separated from the continuum of Jewish history and ingnorant of Jewish law and tradition, it ironically shows how cut off many modern Jews are from their history and the generations that came before. Not the way to best show defiance to our enemies, is it?