For many years, I have told the story of how the Czech
Torah scrolls came to be distributed to so many hundreds of synagogues around
the world. The story goes like this. The Nazis, gloating over their continued
success in making Europe Judenrein (German for: Jew-Free), devised a plan to
memorialize their genocidal efforts. They sought to gather the ritual items of
synagogues throughout Czechoslovakia with the intent of someday displaying
these items in a Museum of an Extinct Race. So they gathered these ritual
items, including hundreds of sifrei Torah (i.e., Torah scrolls), but their
plans would be defeated along with their defeat in World War II. Following the
war, these Torah scrolls were then distributed to willing Jewish communities
throughout the world for display, a sobering testimony to the Nazi downfall so
starkly contrasted with the survival of the scrolls. And we have one of those
scrolls.
It’s a great story. It’s also false. I didn’t know it was
false until recently. Many of my colleagues have told the same story,
innocently, but the time has come to correct the record. And now the truth. In
the middle of World War II, when Czechoslovakian Jews sensed the future growing
bleaker and bleaker, the Jewish Museum in Prague asked Jewish communities
throughout Czechoslovakia to transfer their ritual items to the museum for
cataloguing and safekeeping. The Jews willingly transferred those items to the
museum thinking Prague safe. Prague was safe, but the little Jewish communities
throughout Czechoslovakia were not. The Jews were murdered on the spot or
transferred to death camps, but the ritual items survived the war. The scrolls
represent the prescience of the Jewish community acting to safeguard its most cherished
possessions. And that’s why we at Midway, like so many others, have a Czech
Torah scroll on display today.
It could very well be that a Nazi official here or there,
spying these ritual items, thought of a Museum of an Extinct Race, but the
genesis of this precious legacy was not the nefarious plan of some Nazi thug. Our
story must change to fit the facts. We gain nothing in promoting fantasies. To
the contrary, how we remember the Shoah will speak volumes about who we are as
a people. Do we willingly perpetuate falsehood or do we demand of our memories
honesty? I would hope the latter is the value by which we conduct our lives.
In viewing our new Shoah Memorial, designed by the talented
Jewish artist, Jeanette Kuvin Oren, you will see a tribute to the Jews of
Horovice (pronounced: ho-ro-VEECH-ay), the one-time guardians of this sefer
Torah. They gathered in synagogue for semahot—B’nai Mitzvah and weddings—and
they celebrated holidays and Shabbat. Some may have been observant and some
less so. Some may have been very bright and entrepreneurial while others may
have been more modestly endowed. They were people like you and me but for the
way their lives came to an abrupt and cruel end. We remember them for who they
were and connect our lives to theirs by assuming guardianship of their Torah.
We remember that although this Horovice Torah is pasul,
that is, unfit for ritual use, we have a special obligation as a community to
maintain the kashrut of our sifrei Torah, and as such, we have assigned a
second Torah, this one kosher, in the memorial ark to be used during services
on those occasions when we remember our families and friends who perished in
the Shoah. And on the special mantle designed for this Torah is the design of a
kiddush cup brimming with fields of flowers and grain. The kiddush cup is taken
from the design of the Horovice synagogue, today a church, which features a
ceremonial chalice above the main entrance. This design directly connects our
Horovice Torah with the synagogue of its provenance. And the fields of flowers
and grain—this is a symbol of the promise of Israel, a land of beauty and
growth, a safe haven for the Jewish people. Israel is a story that does not
stand as a sequel to the Shoah, but one that is not disconnected from it
either. When we view our Shoah memorial, and we choose to remember Medinat
Yisrael, the State of Israel, we resist the inclination to be engulfed by
sorrow, and choose rather to remember the greatest symbol of Jewish autonomy and
power today. This is a thought that should strengthen and empower us. And this
is a memory that is far from fantasy, but based on fact. It is honest to say
that we no longer are a powerless people, the hapless victims of an immoral
force. To the contrary, we have become a formidable force in the Mid-East and
as such, restored our fate to our own hands, to the extent that anyone’s fate
lies in their own hands.
So there are all sorts of things we need to remember. We
need to remember the truth. Were we direct survivors of the Shoah, knowing the
terrible end our relatives and friends suffered, we would want to remember. We
would have to remember. To forget their lives would be to subject them to a
second death, and perhaps one more terrible than the first. We may not be
direct survivors of the Shoah, but our Jewish identities are inextricably tied
to those who are. Were we actual survivors, we would converse with each other
using the lingua franca of European Jewry: Yiddish. And knowing what happened
to us as a people, we would say to each other: Gedenkt, the Yiddish word for
“Remember!” Gedenkt, we say, both the tragedies and the miracles. And we will
remember them as honestly as possible.
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