Daily Briefing: REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST DIGITALLY(April 21,2020)

This week’s scaled-back commemorations, “made us realise what the future might be like,” Smith told AFP.  “It is a test of our resolve…”

“Maybe it is an opportunity to say… we won’t get 10,000 people at Auschwitz, but maybe we can get a million people (watching) online,” he added, referring to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland.   
         
‘Attacking the memory’

For survivors like Badehi, any comparison between Covid-19 isolation and Nazi-era confinement in ghettos and camps is inappropriate. “In France, during the war, we lived in fear, we hid our identity and we lost contact with our parents…”
“Today, we may be locked inside, but we have contact with our children and grandchildren through the phone and internet,” added Badehi, who volunteered at Yad Vashem until it closed due to the virus.

Dov Landau, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor, said it was “indecent” to make comparisons between the two eras.  “Today we are neither hungry nor thirsty. Men, women and children are unlikely to be burned alive. Sure, I’m bored… but it’s nothing serious,” he told AFP. … [To read the full article, and watch the video, click the following LINK – Ed.]              
______________________________________________________

Remembering the Holocaust in a Post-‘Sacred Survival’ Era
Jonathan Tobin
JNS, Apr. 20, 2020

For several decades, the Holocaust shaped the way American Jews thought about their place in the modern world. For the generation that arose in the aftermath of World War II, the Shoah was the key to understanding the purpose of modern Jewish life.

For many, if not most, Americans, the Holocaust served as the primary justification for the defense of Israel. The failure of American Jews to demand the rescue of European Jewry when the Holocaust was happening also became the primary historical lesson that guided the community’s consciousness in the public square. It supplied both the motivation and the rationale for the transformation of a once fearful and passive minority group into a confident “Jewish lobby” that was willing and able to use its political and financial clout to agitate for freedom for Soviet Jewry, as well as to advocate for the U.S.-Israel alliance.

For the overwhelming majority of American Jews who were not Orthodox, these two elements that had become inextricably tied together—Holocaust remembrance and support for Israel—became the primary expression of Jewish identity. What historian Jonathan Sarna called “Federation Judaism” served secular Jews well in the era of the Soviet Jewry movement and the first few decades of Israel’s history, when efforts to destroy it were justifiably viewed as an attempt to perpetrate another Holocaust.

Dubbed “sacred survival” by scholars, the culture of American Jewry was an expression of philosopher Emil Fackenheim’s concept of a “614th commandment” that forbade granting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis any “posthumous victories.” Perpetuating Jewish life and Israel had become an end in of itself. And for those who grew up either during the Holocaust or, as in the case of the baby-boom generation, in its shadow, sacred survival was enough. It supplied a compelling argument for giving to Jewish philanthropies and activism, as well as for supporting local institutions like synagogues, even if the faith that ought to sustain them was largely lacking.

Today, the threats to Israel’s existence still exist—in terms of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the refusal of both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn attest. But the ability of the Jewish state to pull at the heartstrings of the overwhelming majority of American Jewry—let alone to supply it with a reason for its ongoing existence—is largely gone.

Contrary to the calumnies thrown at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this has far less to do with American criticism of his policies than it does with demographic changes and assimilation, which rendered “sacred survival” irrelevant to most of those who now claim Jewish identity of one sort or another. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
______________________________________________________

Mira Rosenblatt: A Story of Leadership, Resilience and Survival
Heather Robinson
JNS, Apr. 20, 2020

Mira Rosenblatt will never forget Aug. 12, 1942. On that day, the teenager was among the 30,000 Jews living in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in Poland who were rounded up by the Nazis and herded into the industrial city’s stadium.

She was separated from her parents and three of her siblings, segregated into a group deemed strong enough to work.

At Yom Hashoah 2020, Mira, now 96, remains haunted by those events more than three-quarters of a century ago. In her apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., she recounts the harrowing experience. “Nothing is easy,” says Mira. “I want people to know about the things that happened.”

In the sea of detainees packing Sosnowiec’s arena, Mira somehow made her way back to her family. As a family, they decided that she would take her siblings and attempt to blend them in among those fit for labor.

As they were being marched forward, she pushed her three siblings—older sister Vida Malka, younger sister Etusha and brother Natan—into a garden to try to save them. A Nazi guard put a gun to her shoulder, forcing her away from them. She later learned they survived for a time, but did not ultimately survive the war. Nor did their parents, Helena and Shlomo Isaac Rosenblatt. “I had very good parents, very understanding parents, educated parents,” she remembers.

‘A very good person’

She was soon deported to Gruenberg, part of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp complex in the German town of Silesia, where she worked until January 1945, when camp directors forced the prisoners on a death march. In February, after two weeks of marching, she saw her chance to escape when a Nazi looked away. She took her chance and ran.

Another girl followed. They spent “three or four days” in the freezing forest, where they banded with a trio of other girls on the run. The group slept in holes covered with snow; Mira said they ate ants and snakes to stave off starvation. One day, they came upon a home with a “big chimney,” and Mira took another risk. “I knocked on the door and a woman opened [it], a short little woman who said, ‘Gott! You’re a dead person!’ ” she recalls. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
______________________________________________________

Field of Silence
Machla Abramovitz
Mishpacha, July 19, 2017

It was a clear, cold day in Poland this past March as Toronto resident Yosef Rosenzweig stood alone in a forest bundled in his winter jacket, crunching the dry leaves underfoot that carpeted the grounds. 

The stately trees all around, bare of foliage at winter’s end, seemed to be guarding the tombstones protruding out of the slumbering undergrowth.

The quiet may have been broken by the wind as it swept over the crackling leaves, but if so, Yosef was unaware. Within this vast forest, Yosef was focused on a slab of concrete darkened by age with celadon-colored moss seeping from its side, on the stone plate engraved with a name and date of death, and on the mournful melody of the Keil Maleh Rachamim that he was softly chanting. Resting beneath this concrete were the remains of his grandmother’s sister Dina Dzialoshinski who passed away in 1943 at the age of 13 from typhus. She was one of 45,000 Jews buried here in the Lodz Ghetto Field who perished in the ghetto, either from starvation, disease, shootings, hangings, or other forms of brutality at the hands of the German Reich.

This was 26-year-old Yosef’s first trip to Poland, to pray at the gravesites of his great-aunt and two great-great-grandmothers. Yosef and his family are fortunate — there are graves to which they can come, and yahrtzeit dates that can be commemorated — yet until 2003, the Rosenzweigs had no idea that these graves existed, let alone the precise date of their relatives’ deaths. Like many descendants of victims of the Holocaust, for decades they were sure there were no records.

But 14 years ago, Yosef’s father Shlomo Rosenzweig was informed otherwise. On a trip to Israel and a visit to Kiryat Arba, Rosenzweig met with the rosh yeshivah of Yeshivat Otniel — Rabbi Benny Kalmanson — who is also a noted Holocaust historian. When Rosenzweig mentioned to Rabbi Kalmanson that his mother was a survivor from Lodz, the rabbi connected him to Rabbi Symcha Keller, who is currently chairman of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, and who was at the time president of the Lodz Jewish community, a position he held for 20 years.

“Lodz is unusual because these records survived the war. Imagine my elation when Rabbi Keller faxed me copies of my relatives’ death certificates, their name, age, date of death, and date of burial printed in Yiddish and German, as well as the precise location of their graves,” Rosenzweig says. He immediately arranged for matzeivos [tombstones] to be erected in their memories.

As tragic as their lives in the ghetto were, Rosenzweig’s relatives and the thousands of others who perished were given a gift — most of them were brought to kever Yisrael in individually marked graves, their death records intact, as opposed to the horrifying fate of being buried in an anonymous mass grave. The victims were buried in what became known as the Lodz Ghetto Field, which is actually part of the main Lodz cemetery — the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, containing about 230,000 graves in more than 40 hectares (about the size of 40 football fields) of space. ….  [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]

Machla Abramovitz, a freelance journalist, is the CIJR Publications Editor.  She recently co-edited the book Zionism:  An Indigenous Struggle.
_____________________________________________________

For Further Reference:

Jewish Resistance During The Holocaust: Abigail Hirsch, Israfax, Apr. 21, 2020 – Although many of us are aware of Holocaust history, it still may be hard to place ourselves in the shoes of those Jews who experienced the day to day crises of World War II that upended their lives.

Bielski Family, Doc Make ‘Defiance’ Personal:  Tom Tugend, Jewish Journal, Apr. 16, 2009 — The film “Defiance” told the story of the Bielski brothers, who led a group of partisans in fighting the Nazis and established a self-sustaining Jewish community in the forests of Belarus, but it didn’t show what is ultimately their greatest triumph.

Polish Leaders Block Resolution That Would Have Stopped Restitution of Property Lost During the Holocaust:  C’naan Liphshiz, Jewish Journal, Apr. 15, 2020 — Poland’s ruling party took a stand on Wednesday against a far-right push to stop the restitution of property owned by Jews and others before the Holocaust.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Data Shows 189,500 Survivors Live in Israel:  Benjamin Kerstein, Algemeiner, Apr. 20, 2020 — On the eve of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Finance Ministry’s Holocaust Survivors Rights Authority stated there were 189,500 survivors currently living in Israel.

13 Million Documents with Information on Nazi Victims Made Freely Available Online:  Jacob Judah, JC, Apr. 17, 2020 — The Arolsen Archives, formerly known as the International Tracing Service, have added a “milestone” 13 million documents to their online database of documents and information on the victims of Nazi persecution.