The Jewish Transcript, Seattle
April 27, 2001
Viewpoint
E-mailing God for Remembrance
In the last month I received several e-mails about God and the Holocaust’s Jewish victims. Based on the Jewish (lunar-based) calendar, Holocaust Remembrance Week was the week of April 15th and Holocaust Remembrance Day was April 19. This is the e-mail:
“IN REMEMBRANCE Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please wait 20 seconds before you close this e-mail. This message asks you to do one small act to remember the six million (6,000,000) Jewish lives that were lost during the Holocaust. Send this message to everyone you know who is Jewish. If we reach the goal of reaching six million email names before May 2nd, we will fulfill and give back to G-D what He gave to us: Six Million Jews who are ALIVE today who remember those who perished. Please send this message to as many Jews as you know. Ask them to send it to others. I do not know how it will be known when this e-mail reaches 6 million Jews, but nevertheless, it is always good to remember.”
I agree that it is always good to remember, but the first time I read it my reaction was anger. “This is obscene” crossed my mind, “nearly perverse.” Why? By having 6 million of today’s Jews e-mail each other ad infinitum, we don’t “Give back to God” what was taken from us by human evil and human silence.
As a lecturer in schools, colleges and other places on the Holocaust, I always introduce my presentations by asking students to think about the ethical and moral choices that most adults faced at the time of the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not have to happen!
What is appropriate and what is wasteful for Yom Ha’shoah? [Yom is the Hebrew word for day; Shoah is the Holocaust.] For Jews and anyone else who receives that e-mail to simply forward it must be one of the laziest and easiest ways to honor the victims of the genocide.
It’s hard enough having people feel fulfilled by watching “Schindler’s List” and feel as if they’ve ‘taken care’ of that obligation, to honor the murdered Jew and then move on.
Should remembering the Holocaust focus solely on Jewish victims? In addition to the Jews, 500,000 roma and sinti (gypsys) and 250,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans were targeted for death and also murdered; the disabled Germans in a precursor to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and gypsies. Had German teachers, professors, doctor’s, lawyers and judges who knew yet remained silent spoken out loudly and forcefully, it’s entirely possible the murder of the Jews that followed might not have happened.
Lest us not also forget that one to one and a half million non-Jewish Poles and two million Soviet prisoners-of-war were murdered. There were thousands of homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, especially trade unionists and labor activists, socialists and Communists, who, while not targeted for death, perished as the result of inhumane and barbaric treatment while prisoners in concentration camps.
While few, there were Christians, including clergy, who spoke out, hid Jews or helped others helping or hiding Jews. Some were arrested and some executed for doing the morally just thing. They are remembered as “Righteous gentiles.”
What about more traditional ways of memorializing the victims?
The name readings that go on in Jewish Community Centers, synagogues and other sites, such as at Westlake Mall last week, make young student readers feel they are doing something important. But are they? During a 24 hour time period, many high school and college students and their adult leaders will read unpronounceable names (for English speakers) of villages, towns and cities in Poland and other countries whose Jewish populations were decimated; many will read names of individual victims.
But what will they learn about who the victims were? Will they learn about their communities and culture, how they worshiped God, their literature, theatre, their lively newspapers, their educational methods, their prosperity and their poverty, their birth and death rituals and everything in between that makes someone’s life?
What will they learn about the political, religious and social climate that encouraged the perpetrators and the silence of 99 9/10% of Europe’s adult population between 1933-45?
Of Holocaust memorials, they don’t teach either. I’ve visited the Auschwitz museum and walked around the remains of barracks and some of the vast expanse that made up its larger sister camp Birkenau in Poland. Despite millions of visitors, these memorials fail entirely to educate about the Jewish people, life or religion. Is it any wonder that the disease of anti-Semitism in Poland continues on today, with scarcely several thousand mostly elderly Jews there?
In the religion-fueled turf battle over Auschwitz, Jews and Christians more than differ today. Auschwitz is both the largest Jewish graveyard in the world and an unconsecrated one, too, yet another large cross was recently erected there. This Christianizing of the Holocaust eliminates the need for many Christians to address the role of Christianity in the Holocaust and the 2,000 year long conflict between Christianity and the Jewish people.
What about the thriving state of building new outdoor Holocaust memorial sculptures? While they may provide a measure of solace to the aging and dying community of Holocaust survivors and their middle-aged children, they have the same inadequacies as the concentration and death camp memorials.
In 25 or so years when the Word War II generation is gone, will these bronze and concrete statues be viewed any differently than war memorial sculptures we see in city parks extolling heroes of now long ago wars and battles?
I’d rather see students and their adult guides get involved in meaningful, interactive and discussion oriented presentations. Movie screenings in classrooms and auditoriums can be followed with group discussions. Children and youth can do performance readings of letters written by deported Jewish children, such as those that were read here today.
Students can write and/or perform in theatre, do music programs, and create art such as murals and mosaics for schools and houses of worship, involving youth of all backgrounds, faiths and races in learning about what happens when racism reaches its zenith.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many survivors hoped that the world would learn great lessons from the horrors of Auschwitz, yet there is no end to the cruelty and strife that afflicts us.
It’s far too easy to click on your mouse and forward e-mail to everyone you know, when students need direction, they need community, they need after school activities that engage them, and they need understanding and tolerance education.
Thank you.