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.
No comments:
Post a Comment