From: backon@vms.huji.ac.il
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: The Holocaust (was Please! I need your help etc.)
Date: 14 Oct 92 21:38:45 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In article <1992Oct14.083443.626@vms.huji.ac.il>, backon@vms.huji.ac.il writes:
> In article <199210131411.AA25829@das.wang.com>, MASH@WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL (Michael Shimshoni) writes:
>
>
>> Eliot is not alone  in thinking that what it means to  him it also has
>> to mean to "Jews  and to the entire world".  Well it  does not, not to
>> everyone, not perhaps  to many.  This "calamity for  the Jewish people
>> at large" was so enormous that some  of us just could not continue the
>> way they  went before.  I  would not be  surprised if Eliot,  and many
>> others have  used this Yom  Kippur the  same Mahsor (prayer  book) his
>> parents and grandparents  have used before.  Not one  word got changed
>> by this calamity.  I know that Eliot  and all of you know the facts of
>> the Holocaust,  what I  do not  comprehend is  how (counting  only the
>> Jews) after 6000000 dead, of them 1000000 children of them uncountable
>> babes torn from their parents and  thrown alive into the flames of the
>> furnaces, they  can still  repeat Adonai Adonai  El Rahum  veHanun etc
>> (Adonai, Adonai a merciful and  compassionate God, my own translation)
>> as they did before 1939.
>>
>> Eliot can,  many others perhaps can,  but I will never  address myself
>> any more to such a being even if it exists.  For me either there is no
>> God or  if there is  one and lets these  things happen, then  I better
>> ignore him as  I want nothing of  such an entity.  Bialik  in his last
>> lines of  Ir Hahareg, (the city  of the slaughter) about  the Kishinev
>> 1905 pogrom said it well.  Yes, it  really can be said in a one liner,
>> there is no need  for long books to try and  save one's belief.  Those
>> who cannot  live without the comfort  of believing in a  higher being,
>> can keep him and his "mercy".
>>
>> Yes, the  Holocaust was for  me a "philosophical challenge"  and after
>> facing  it there  were  no  longer any  "theological  issues" left  to
>> consider.
>>
>>>Eliot Shimoff
>>
>>  Michael Shimshoni
>
>
> Michael,
>
> As someone who lost 70 (80 ?) relatives in the SHOAH including a grandfather,
> uncle, aunt and their two year old son who was thrown alive into a burning pit
> in Treblinka, I beg to differ with you. My close family is still religious as
> is my father's cousin who at age 15 in March 1944 was in the Sonderkommando
> at Auschwitz. Two days after he arrived, he saw the bloated bodies of his
> parents being thrown into the crematorium after they were gassed to death. Yet
> he puts on Tefillin every morning.
>
> There is a Talmudic dictum: AL TADUN ET CHAVRECHA AD SHETAGIA BIMKOMO (don't

Sorry for typo: that should read LIMKOMO.                       ^




> pre-judge anyone until you yourself have been through what he's been through).
> I will be the last person on earth to criticize a NIZOL SHOAH (one who went
> through and survived the Holocaust) regarding his degree of religiosity. Yet I
> know many survivors who are infinitely more FRUM ("religious") than I am.
>
> There were Jews in the concentration camps who built a miniature (but
> halachically kosher) SUKKAH. They risked their lives to pray and to blow a
> SHOFAR. (There's a whole book on SHEELOT UTSHUVOT by Harav Oshry on this).
> There are instances of starving Jews who upon finding a piece of rotting horse
> meat in their "soup" would put it aside and not eat it because it wasn't
> kosher. I hope secular Israelis with their minimal lack of Jewish self-respect
> enjoy their ham and cheese sandwich on Pesach when reading this book by Oshry.
>
> Josh
> backon@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL
>
>

I'd like to recommend a few more books.

1) EIM HABANIM SEMAYCHA by Rabbi Teichtal
2) Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought. Pesach
Schindler. Ktav Publishing, NY, 1990. ISBN: 0-88125-310-3

3) SHOAH, Artscroll Publishers

4) Harav Oshry, SHEELOT UTSHUVOT MEMA'AMAKIM


Josh
backon@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL





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