So it was through the heroic efforts of our people that 300 cigarettes – powerful currency in the camps – were collected to buy a shofar and a machzor.
But there was another problem. One shofar could be heard by multitudes but surely one machzor would not suffice. So once again our rabbis designed a plan. Everyone would learn at least one prayer to be recited from memory. But which prayer, which Psalm, which berachah? Surely all the supplications, all the Psalms, all the blessings in the machzor are holy. So which one should it be?
The decision was made: “Bochen Levavos – let us pray to Him who searches and tests our hearts on that Day of Judgment.” Yes, we invited G-d to come to Bergen-Belsen and examine our hearts in order to see for Himself that despite our pain and suffering we had not faltered one bit in our faith and our love for Him.
Adjacent to our compound was a Polish camp (the Nazis often kept nationalities separate). Somehow our Polish brethren got wind of our treasure.So when Rosh Hashanah came and the piercing cry of the shofar was sounded, they crept close to the barbed wire fence separating us to hear the ancient call. The Nazis also came running and beat us mercilessly. But even as the truncheons were falling on our heads we cried out, “Blessed is the Lord our G-d who has commanded us to listen to the sound of the shofar.”
Many years later I was lecturing in Israel in a village in Samaria called Neve Aliza. It was late summer, just before Rosh Hashanah, and I felt a need to tell the story of the shofar of Bergen-Belsen. When I finished, a woman in the audience got up.
“I know exactly what you are talking about,” she said, “because my father was the rabbi in the Polish compound. You may not realize this, but your shofar was smuggled into our camp in the bottom of a large garbage can filled with soup and my father blew the shofar for us.”
I looked at her, momentarily speechless.
“And that’s not all,” she went on to say. “I have the shofar in my house, here in Neve Aliza. When we were liberated, we blew the shofar again and my father took it with him. Today I have it here in Eretz Yisrael.”
With that, she ran home and returned a few minutes later with the shofar in her hands. We wept and embraced. Here we were, two little girls from Belgen-Belsen holding that shofar in the hills of Israel.
The entire world had declared us dead. Millions of our people had been slaughtered but the shofar, the symbol of Jewish piety, triumphed over the flames. And G-d granted me the awesome privilege of rediscovering that shofar in the ancient hills of Samaria to which our people had returned after more than two thousand years of wandering, darkness, oppression, and Holocaust.
The call of the shofar is eternal. Its magnetic allurement cannot be explained. It is not musical. Those who lack understanding might describe its sound as primitive. But when the Jewish people hear the cry, it’s familiar. It awakens us. We heard that cry before and we remember it. We heard it at Sinai when it entered our souls and it is forever embedded in our collective memory, in our inner hearts, in our very neshamahs.
Consider what we have been destined to hear with our own ears and see with our own eyes. We Jews have traversed the world, surviving long, tortuous centuries. Many of us have forgotten our past but even the most assimilated among us have never forgotten that shofar, that call that pierced the heavens and the earth.