Shavuot 5776 ~ 13 June 2016
My mother rarely spoke of her life in pre-war Poland. She grew up in Brzeżany, a Galitzianer town, which existed under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet dominion. Jews had lived in Brzeżany from the 16th century. On the eve of World War I, approximately 4,500 Jews were among its nearly 13,000 inhabitants.
My mother left Brzeżany for Milwaukee in December 1938. Nine months later, on the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, capturing the region of Galicia. Brzeżany was occupied by the Soviets. In June 1941, Operation Barbarossa began, and the Nazis occupied Brzeżany in July. My mother’s family was among those killed in group executions and deportations to Bełżec. A few years ago, a guest scholar, Prof. Israel Knohl of the Hebrew University, told me that his family was also from Brzeżany and that the last aktion occurred just after Shavuot. It was June 12, 1943. I now mark that day as a yahrtzeit to the Jews of my mother’s town. Fewer than 100 Jews survived the war.
On this past Shabbat, following services, participants in the March of the Living this year shared their experiences. They spoke about their pain and awareness of the Nazi Holocaust. They also pointed to how powerful it was, as they walked into Birkenau, to look behind and see thousands of young people in their blue jackets. Living. For the future.
When I was a leader on the March, we visited the Medical University of Lublin, the site of the former Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin. Rabbi Joel Zweigel, the father of Dorothy Hendeles, was one of the teachers in this first modern centre of Torah study. My uncle Hayyim studied there prior to returning to what would become his death in Brzeżany. Standing there with young people, I felt profound sadness and despair, yet also much hope.
I associate Lublin with Shavuot because of the Yiddish poem by Yankev Glatstein,
We accepted the Torah on Sinai,
And in Lublin we gave it back.
Nisht di meysim loybn Gott
The dead don't praise God
The Torah was given for Life.
And just as we all stood together
At the giving of the Torah,
So indeed did we all die in Lublin.
In 1946, Glatstein wrote in anger. But another generation wants to live and renew Jewish life. We didn’t all die in Lublin. In fact, the site of the Yeshiva was returned to the Jewish community in 2007. It has been restored and now operates as a synagogue. Jewish life in Poland—as in Germany—is undergoing a small, slow, steady revival.
As we gather to recite yizkor, I reflect on our history and the determination of our people to live, to receive and transmit Torah to future generations. At our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot, approximately 130 people participated. At the Miles Nadal JCC, Spadina Meets Sinai attracted 700 people, many of them young adults. Young Jews throughout the world continue to grapple with their desire to remain part of the golden cord of our tradition. Today, I simply ask: after great pain, profound tragedy and absolute anger, how does one go forward? Let me explore some models from our tradition and from the experience of others.
Time and changed circumstances play a role. On Shavuot we read the deceptively simple story Ruth. Ruth is a narrative of becoming a Jew, which serves as a link to Sinai and receiving of Torah. Ruth is also a story of how hesed and personal kindness can overcome the sins and omissions of earlier generations. The acts of Lot’s daughters and Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law, are described in Genesis. The lack of welcome by Moav, when the people of Israel were in the Wilderness, is narrated in Numbers. Yet Ruth and Boaz will resolve the pain of earlier generations. It is a long, slow process of tikkun, a redemptive arc that takes generations.
Telling what happened to someone who listens makes a difference. Following the Ipperwash Inquiry, one of the witnesses, former Deputy Minister Elaine Todres, told me that she heard the story of Native Canadians as if it were a Jewish narrative. Similar sentiments were expressed to me by our member, Justice Sidney Linden, who chaired the Inquiry. “Their saga resonated with me, as a Jew.”
What they heard was reinforced by Irwin Cotler, the former Minister of Justice, who told me that Native Canadians described themselves as an indigenous people who share indigenous lands and traditions, and speak an indigenous language. These three Jews heard representatives of the First Nations through a Jewish ear. Our historic effort to retain our indigenous land, literature, language and traditions.
Defining personal meaning out of the pain helps the healing. Justice Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, spent years listening to the painful stories of the abuse of Native children in the residential school system. He also heard from Holocaust survivors who have found ways to face forward despite terrible tragedy. Justice Sinclair has spoken of four parts of a process of reconciliation, healing and defining a future. See if these sound familiar to you.
- the importance of knowing one’s personal story;
- gaining an awareness of the collective story of your people;
- defining a belief about where we are going in life and death; and
- seeking an answer to the question מיאני- who am I? - that enables an individual to see a personal purpose and role for oneself.
These points resonate for many people, not only for the people of First Nations and Jews. There is a universal aspect to these concerns.
On our Path of Abraham program, we bring participants to hear the stories of bereaved families—Jews and Palestinians—who have lost a loved one in the conflict. Regardless of the cause, each family must mourn and find a new purpose in life. As one begins to discern a path forward, a new direction in life, they begin to heal. not a one-generation process.
As we mourn and move forward in our lives, during the kaddish cycle, I watch how mourners slowly transform the darkness of mourning into the light of morning. At first, they simply show up. They feel like they are swimming in molasses. Some are teary. Others can’t speak. They mumble the words. They sit in silence.
Gradually, they begin to talk about their loss. They hear others tell of their pain. They start to tell personal stories of their parent or spouse. They even laugh. They gradually articulate a sense of how their brother or sister saw the Jewish people. They wrestle with their belief about death and afterlife as they grieve a child. Gradually—and this can take 2 to 5 years—they seek to define a new life-purpose for themselves.
Yaakov Glatstein did not only write poems of anger. He also wrote of memory:
Sometimes you will put things in order
and say: This was told to me,
that was sung to me.
Your tenacious ears and eyes
will rise …
your shrewd eyes and ears
will hear and think,
see and think.
And three angels will enter your home
and bless you
A teaching attributed to the Baal Shem Tov suggests that mourning occurs in stages. Initially, one is silent, overwhelmed by the pain. Then, during the later part of the shiva, one cries. Eventually, when we can integrate our loss, we learn to sing .
Recently, Justice Rosalie Abella was awarded an honorary doctorate from Yale Law. She spoke of finding a family document written by a young Jewish lawyer, who, along with his wife, survived several years in concentration camps. He was head of the Displaced Prison Camp in Stuttgart after the war, and this is the introduction he wrote for Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited the Camp in 1948: "We welcome you, Mrs. Roosevelt, as the representative of a Great Nation, whose victorious army liberated the remnants of European Jewry from death. We shall never forget that aid rendered by both the American people and army. We are not in a position of showing you much assets. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future."
Justice Abella went on to say, “That man was my father, and I was one of those few children. That history taught me that it is not just what you stand for, it is what you stand up for.”
In his poem, “To the Limits,” Glatstein emphasized the possibility of renewed life:
Let’s go to the limits,
where its sad and there is no speech,
Let’s liven it up with talk
from the Jewish streets in our memory.
Let’s show us with a hullabaloo,
Make things sum,
dig up a proverb,
a seething insult, a shrewd curse,
a “gutt morgen” with a punch -
sit and schmooze a while.
Maybe we’ll breathe life back
into what lay so long
abandoned, frozen, unrevealed.
Yizkor time reminds us that we must continually situate our personal story in the saga of our people, clarify what Judaism teaches and we believe about life and death, and strive to identify a personal purpose for our lives. We must be silent. We must cry and mourn. Perhaps, eventually, after great pain, we can sing again.
Shimon Redlich,Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919–1945.
Yankev Glatstein, I Keep Recalling: The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein, trans. Barnett Zumo (Ktav, 1993).
Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Richard J. Fein (JPS, 1987)
Yeshivah Hakhmei Lublin.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chachmei_Lublin_Yeshiva
https://kollublin.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/the-chachmei-lublin-yeshiva-neta-avidar/
Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/a-battle-that-never-ends/article751532/
