Spotlight on CLAL
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A Review of Remember for Life –
A Different Way to Remember the Holocaust
REMEMBER FOR LIFE, Holocaust Survivors’ Stories of
Faith and Hope, edited by Brad Hirschfield, published by the Jewish
Publication Society, Philadelphia, Pa. 2007, 116 pages, $18.-
Reviewed by Rabbi Jack Riemer
How shall we remember the
Holocaust? That is a question that has troubled many people in the last
sixty some years since it occurred. To ignore it is morally impossible, for
it was surely one of the central events in the history of civilization (or
the lack of it). And yet, most of the ideas on how to mark the event have
turned out to be banal and trivial. Most Jewish communities have a Memorial
Service of some kind on Yom Hashoah, but less and less people come
each year, and those who do come are primarily survivors or their immediate
families. There are museums, some of them of extraordinary caliber, but is
that enough? There are endless books, but after a while, they seem to blur
into each other for they tell essentially the same story. Some people light
six candles on Yom Hashoah, others sing “Ani Maamin” or some
of the other songs of the Holocaust, but whatever we do never seems to be
enough. By now most of us are third and fourth generation of American born
Jews, and many of us have few relatives that we know of who died in the
Holocaust. So what shall we do to keep their story alive?
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, the President of CLAL, came up with a simple but
impressive idea. He decided to remember only their deaths would not be
Jewishly appropriate. He said that we can, if we want to, remember how they
were tortured and starved and demeaned, and we can respond with
anger---towards the Nazis, towards the bystanders, or towards God if we want
to, but that choice will do little to hurt them or to heal us. Or, he said,
we can choose to remember how and for what they lived---and this is a much
healthier way to pay honor to their memory. We can remember, he says, for
life: echoing the phrase that we say so often on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom
Kippur: Zochreynu lichayim.
Each year now there are less and less survivors still alive. And so the
challenge for our generation is to find ways to remember what happened, even
when we will no longer have witnesses who can testify. The challenge is to
remember the past in such ways as will enhance the future. And so what he
has done is go to the archives at the University of Southern California,
where a great many survivors recorded their experiences both during and
after the Holocaust, and he has chosen selections from their testimonies and
matched them to the themes of the sedras of the week and the holy
days of the year.
In the selections that he has chosen, there is almost no description of the
horrors of what happened. Instead, there are the simple, unsophisticated and
therefore very moving accounts of how these people rebuilt their lives after
the Holocaust. With no narcissism and no self-praise, these people tell
their stories of how they came to a new country and started over again, how
they created new families to replace the ones they had lost, and how they
learned to have hope and faith again, despite all that they had gone
through.
In simple language, these people tell us how they found meaning in life
after what happened, and they invite us to learn from them how to do the
same. To have arranged these testimonies around the weekly portions of the
Torah was a brilliant strategy, for the purpose of the Torah is to teach us
how to find meaning in our lives, and these testimonies do exactly that.
These people bear witness that the Torah is a Torah of life, an eternal
story that speaks to each and every generation, and this collection enables
us to link ourselves to both, to the Torah and to these witnesses.
Each selection is just a page or a page and a half at most. It will take
only a few minutes to read one as a prelude to the recitation of the Kiddush
at the Friday Night table, or to study it after the dinner. The family will
be intrigued to see how these personal accounts are juxtaposed with the
theme of the sedra of the week. I warn you that you will have trouble
keeping your eyes dry when you read the story of the woman who arrived in
Boston at last and was met by her husband’s family who took them in and gave
them an opportunity to begin life over again. It is told in such simple
words, and yet it is an account of how human beings can experience love and
hospitality and responsibility, after they have experienced Hell itself that
is bound to move you.
The focus in each of these accounts is not on the ugliness of what they went
through during the war but on the resiliency that they learned that they
possessed after the war, and the wonder of how they learned to live and to
love again after all that they had gone through. That is why this is not a
morbid book, but an inspiring one, a book that encourages us to believe that
we too can live through disappointments if we must, and yet survive. It is a
very fitting book to read from at the Shabbat table. For it teaches us how
to remember—not for anger and not for vengeance and not for self pity—but
for life.
Rabbi Jack Riemer is a frequent reviewer for this and other journals in
America and abroad. He is the co editor of So That Your Values Live On,
a treasury of ethical wills, published by Jewish Lights, and the editor of The
World of The High Holy Days, published by the National Rabbinic Network.
For more information about the book,
click here to go to The Jewish Publication Society’s website.
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