The Forgotten Memoirs: Moving Personal Accounts from Rabbis who Survived the Holocaust
By Esther Farbstein
Shaar Press
Esther Farbstein’s The Forgotten Memoirs is a book that has already accomplished much in the recent annals of Orthodox historiography on the Holocaust. It is a boon to researchers seeking to incorporate the religious understanding and standpoint of victims of the Holocaust through their most studied and eloquent writers.
The Forgotten Memoirs, in this regard, goes a long way in addressing central tenets surrounding the “cultural diversity” of Jews during the destruction. She asks at the very beginning of this unique book, “Where is the voice of some of the most articulate members of the Jewish people”, the scholarly rabbis and their reflections on the Holocaust? Farbstein and her team of researchers at the Zachor Center in Jerusalem mined hundreds of religious book (sifrei kodesh), written since 1940, to uncover these experiences and perspectives – during and after the Holocaust – by the writers of the texts. Their memoirs capture these experiences through a Torah-faith point of view.
In their search for these writings, the team at the Zachor Center discovered their location and religiously appropriate habitat: in the rabbis’ prefaces to their scholarly texts. These prefaces, she explains, must be understood as a distinct Orthodox memorial genre about the experience of the Holocaust, and the religious book itself as a memorial to the kedoshim. This forgotten oasis of rabbinic writings is now available, and in such numeric splendor, for the first time in English.
Indeed, The Forgotten Memoirs brings attention to the first references by rabbis to the destruction. As an Orthodox historiographer, Esther Farbstein writes much like a modern ethnographer, searching for hidden meanings in the rabbis’ personal recollections. Commenting on Rabbi Zvi Hersch Meisels’s view of books as memorial objects, she writes: “[He] too viewed the title of his treatise, Sha’ar Machmadim [Gate of the Loved Ones] as a means of memorializing his students and family members, the initials of whose names can be found in the words Sha’ar Machmadim. The gematria [numerology] of book titles was an expression of Holocaust memorialization.”
Yet, Farbstein’s The Forgotten Memoirs begs a broader and more critical question regarding the virtual absence of Orthodox interpretive genres within modern academic research programs, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust. It is interesting to note that memoirs, diaries and testimonies have become much sought after interpretive genres today, in that they portray unique individual experiences of the Holocaust. And, rightly so. They have, certainly in the last 20 years, become central to memorial museums and new scholarly historiography.
This is particularly the case since the noteworthy publication of Saul Friedlander’s magnum opus, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939 – 1945: The Years of Extermination, a major book that creatively interweaves the individual voice throughout the historical record, however most importantly, not using that voice to simply confirm empirical data, but to give the reader the closest possible sensation of what people were actually thinking and experiencing. This is often difficult to capture using traditional historical methodology.
The Orthodox experience and perspective, through the unique sources that Esther Farbstein brings to our attention, is certainly as historically significant as survivor memoirs, diaries and testimonies. Indeed, Orthodox Jews would argue more so, as these are recollections of revered community leaders. The historical irony in this is the following: by not acknowledging religious culture, and the centrality of the writings of rabbis as unique mnemonic genres, short shrift is given to the central role their reflections played in the revitalization of yiddishkeit through a unique and persistent stewardship of the living memory of a lost world. Esther Farbstein’s The Forgotten Memoirs goes some way in correcting these glaring lacunae.