Among the myriads of tragedies that were unique to the Holocaust, there were a separate set of often insurmountable issues for the survivors. A series of documents I acquired recently tells one such situation, where a woman who survived the war, but whose husband did not, spent several years dealing with the halachic ramifications that resulted.
The first document is a form that was created for the rabbinical courts after the war obtaining testimony regarding the death of a person during the war. The questionnaire form lists a series of haunting questions including: Was the person directed right or left at Auschwitz? Was he seen in the showers? Was he sent to a labor camp? Did the witness see that he was killed or was it just hearsay? In this form, all the details regarding her husband’s death are recorded with the testimony to that effect, confirming his death.
The second document raised another issue, that of her needing a chalitzah, the ceremonial release from a Levirate Marriage, being that her husband passed away without leaving any offspring. The document directs her to procure chalitzah from her husband’s brother, residing in Springfield, in the United States. The final document, dated in 1949, a full four years after the war, is written in Brooklyn, N.Y., and details her having performed the chalitzah ceremony and being permitted to marry anyone who was not a kohen.
After the war, an intense effort was made by rabbis who survived to record as many testimonies as possible from survivors as to the death of the victims to enable such women to marry. The testimonies were collected in numerous ledgers and files were created for many of the victims, allowing the sharing of the obtained information and recording it for posterity. Many cases required halachic ingenuities and a study of Nazi methods as well as their own internal records. Unfortunately, there were still a percentage of women whose husbands vanished without a trace and unfortunately lived out their lives as agunot.
