We cried out to the Eternal from the harsh sting of Pharaoh’s whip. We wept by the waters of Babylon, bereft that our glorious Temple had been destroyed and we were driven to exile. We were lost and vulnerable when we were cast out to the four corners of the globe when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. In the centuries since, we have endured persecution at the hands of governments and thugs. Our own part in the narrative has smokestacks as backdrop.
It is true, in each generation a Haman arises to plague us.
Is it any wonder that it is both easy and understandable to view Jewish history as a narrative of distress and persecution? Yes, we have suffered. We have cried out to the Almighty to save us, to deliver us. We have ached and we have bled. We have been packed in railway crates and marched to the crematoria.
Oh, we have suffered.
We have been murdered.
Is there a lesson to be learned from our experience? Is there transcendence to be realized from our suffering? We have known the darkness of the darkest night. Is it, as Rabbi Soloveichik taught, that in the midst of every galut there is geula; that there can be no night without the morning to come? The world moves on, leaving behind and forgetting those who suffered and died. Is my father’s lesson, that those who perished left us with a clear mission – to live and thrive, to build a Jewish world, true?
Not so long ago, my dear wife, Clary, and I were sitting on “our” bench in Yerushalaim’s Keren Hayesod Street. From there we could see the beautiful stained glass windows embracing the Beit Knesset on the ground floor of Rehov Washington 12. As we sat enjoying the Jerusalem breeze, Clary could not take her eyes from those windows.
“What is it?” I asked her.
Slowly, and with tears in her eyes, she recalled the stained glass windows in the bombed-out shul in her native Szerencs, Hungary hometown. Her last memories of the shul was only of those windows. The interior had been destroyed and desecrated by the Nazis.
As I reached across to hold her hand, I could only imagine the image in her mind’s eye and how seeing these beautiful windows in our rebuilt Yerushalaim had caused her memories to be rekindled.
As I looked at her, I could not help but remember my father, Rav Yosef ben Harav Bezalel Ze’ev and his community of fifty thousand. Elected to be chief rabbi at only twenty-seven years of age, an acknowledgement of his deep learning and wisdom, he brought together a community committed to unity, education and tradition. Each member of the community was as a member of his family, dear to him.
As chief rabbi, he together with my mother Esther were witness to the full brutality of the infamous pogrom in Iasi, Romania in June 1941. Three days of terror, described by historians as one of the most horrific and inhumane in Jewish history. He was one of the first to be shot, sustaining wounds to his legs. During those three days, thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand, were brutally and gruesomely slaughtered.
I thought of the horrors that befell the Hungarian Jewish community in those dark days of Shoah and destruction, a dynamic community of hundreds of thousands of good Jews, blessed by rebbes, rabbanim, shuls, yeshivas, centers of Jewish life and lore. A Jewish community in which Clary’s parents Reb Shiya Guttmann and his beloved Alte Rochel Leah were separated, each to another part of hell on earth. He, alone. She, with her five kinderlach. Soon after their arrival in Auschwitz the children were taken from her. In anguish and desperation, she begged the cursed officer, “Where are my children? Where are my children?” He, rasha that he was, held her with the cold, cruel glint in his eye. He nodded up toward the sky. “Your children, look up there at the top of the chimney. Do you see the smoke coming out?” She looked up, confused by his words. He laughed harshly. “That smoke. There are your children!”
