It’s during these days that Jews throughout the world remember the Holocaust. It can be argued that Shoah memory, in some measure, follows the different stages of mourning for individuals who have passed away.
The Torah (Leviticus 10:3) informs us that after Aaron’s sons died, he is absolutely silent (vayidom Aharon). Silence is an understandable emotion after the death of someone so close. This is because the mourner is immobilized, often unable to function. Although the high priest was always expected to continue the sacrificial service even immediately after a loss, other mourners are exempt from the performance of affirmative commandments between death and burial, a period of time called aninut.
Only following this period does the period of shiva begin, when one sits for seven days as he or she is comforted by family and friends.
Perhaps the most difficult part of shiva is when it ends. It is then that mourners must return to their normal lives. Indeed, as the weeks turn into months and then into years, the challenge of mourning is to remember one’s beloved departed long after the formal mourning periods.
In a certain sense, Shoah memory has gone through similar stages. For the first twenty years after the Shoah, approximately until the Six-Day War, survivors (as well the larger Jewish community) were silent (vayidom). Survivors were still shell‑shocked. So preoccupied were they with picking up the pieces of their lives, they had little energy for anything else. And it must also be said that at the time, many were unwilling to listen to their stories. In a sense, it was a protracted aninut period.
Only after twenty years did the community begin its shiva by taking stock of the memory of those departed. Holocaust studies and commemorative programs sprang up every year.
Seventy years after the Shoah, we are moving from a period of “short term memory” to one of “long term memory.” Despite the fact that the survivors have played an instrumental role in accurately preserving the Shoah during the past seventy years, with the passage of time there is serious concern that the “long term memory” of the Shoah will not remain intact.
History indicates that Jewish events are remembered when they become part of Jewish ritual. Unless ritual is introduced, the Shoah will be remembered only as a footnote in history one hundred years from now. For this reason, we in our synagogue have made modest attempts to ritualize the Shoah. Every Shabbat, before the reacting of Av HaRachamim, the prayer that commemorates the Crusades, a congregant rises to read a short vignette about a shtetl that once was. For Yom HaShoah we have written a Seder service, ritually commemorating the six million.
If we fail to spread this kind of ritual worldwide, I fear we will return to the time of vayidom. Not the vayidom of immobilization when death is so close, but rather the vayidom of forever forgetting.
Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Yom Hashoah Seder (taking place on April 15 this year) or to receive a copy of the Yom HaShoah Seder Haggadah, contact Rabbi Weiss’s office: [email protected].