Jewish Journeys

Yom Hashoah Ceremony
Fairchild Air Force Base
May 7, 2024

The following is an address for a Holocaust Memorial Ceremony I was invited to give at FAB. 

Honored to be here—thank you for having me

The importance of remembrance:  I thought I’d begin by sharing with you some of the ways our Spokane Jewish community remembers the Holocaust. It is intimate, personal, and constant.  First of all, we have a beautiful memorial art piece on our grounds, created by Russian Jewish artist Simon Kogan and installed in 2005.  It stands just next to our Education Center, where our children and families pass by it when they enter twice a week for religious school.   It was vandalized a few years ago by a self-identified white supremacist neo-Nazi, and fortunately was able to be restored. 

Every time our community gathers for a worship service, when we reach the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer reserved for those who have lost an immediate family member to stand and recite it, I announce that we remember the 6 million who have no family members remaining to recite it for them. They are all our extended family. 

And as I say it, I often watch our amazing 100 year-old survivor Carla Peperzak, stand, and offer up her heart in that moment.  If you haven’t read about her—Carla was born in Amsterdam, was friendly with Anne Frank’s sister Margo, and served in the Dutch resistance during the war.  It is estimated that she saved at least 40 individuals, but most of her friends and community were dead by the end of the war. There are several documentaries that contain her story, and just this past year a Spokane middle school was named after her.  She still teaches about her experiences regularly. Carla is beloved by the adults in our community, as well as the children, who hug her often.

This spring, our community participated in The Daffodil Project, a national program dedicated to planting a million daffodils around the country to represent the one million children who died in the Shoah.  The daffodils represent the yellow star. The project was driven partly by a 13-year old student preparing for his Bar mitzvah ceremony, the coming of age moment for Jewish youth.  Our high school students learn about the Shoah in our education program, and are encouraged to read memoirs of people they feel connected to.

And just last evening we had our annual Spokane Community Observance of the Holocaust—a city-wide memorial service lovingly created by members of our community, several of whom are children and grandchildren of survivors.  The ceremony involves the children of our congregation in a candle procession, along with the reading of passionate essays and display of artwork from high school and middle school MS students, Jewish and non-Jewish from all over the city.  The mayor and governor’s representative often attend.  We are intent on helping Spokane remember. 

As I said, this remembrance is intimate, a collective Jewish memory and a personal one.  Educating about the Holocaust is part of our continued fight for survival in the face of the antisemitism that permeates our world.  I am so grateful for your time today in contributing to this effort.

Now I want to go beyond remembrance talking about resistance and resilience. Echo some of what Eddie Jaku said by talking about two of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Most people don’t know that the full name of this day is on the Jewish calendar is

יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה

The Day of Remembrance of the Destruction (Shoah) and the Heroism. Its date was established on the Hebrew calendar near the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place from April 16-May 19th, 1943.

Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, more than 400,000 Jews in Warsaw, the capital city, were confined to an area of the city that was little more than 1 square mile. 

In November 1940, this Jewish ghetto was sealed off by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards, and anyone caught leaving was shot on sight. The Nazis controlled the amount of food that was brought into the ghetto, and disease and starvation killed thousands each month.

The Jews of Warsaw resisted the Nazi humiliation and violence by creating a vibrant cultural and religious life in the ghetto.

For example, at a time when most educational activities were banned for Jews, underground high schools, rabbinical seminaries, and even a secret, full-fledged medical school existed in the ghetto.

As hundreds of thousands of Jews were taken from the Ghetto and sent to the camps, a man named Mordecai Anielewicz organized an armed resistance to the Nazis.  He emphasized discipline, the construction of bunkers as and the acquisition of arms.  His force succeeded in holding off at least one deportation in January of 1943, but then eventually lost the month-long battle in May 1943.

As he wrote in a now-famous letter:  “Jews, the hour is near.  You must be prepared to resist, not to give yourselves up like sheep to slaughter.  Not even one Jew must go to the train.  People who cannot resist actively, by shooting, must offer passive resistance by hiding.  Let everyone be ready to die like a man!  Let every mother be a lioness defending her young!”

In a final letter, he wrote, “My life’s dream has now been realized:  Jewish self-defense in the ghetto is now an accomplished fact…I have been witness to the magnificent, heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters.”   

He and his fellow fighters died with self-respect and dignity. 

And another model was that of spiritual resistance and resilience.

The greatest representative--was Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Rabbi Shapira was a gifted rabbi, spiritual leader, and practitioner of meditation.  He was a highly regarded leader and teacher before the war, and he became the spiritual leader of the ghetto, sustaining parts of the community by maintaining as much religious practice as possible.

He wrote and hid his teachings in a metal milk cannister and buried them during the last days before the liquidation of the ghetto.  Rabbi Shapira had included with his writings a letter in Polish, asking that whoever discovered his manuscripts have them sent to Tel Aviv.  They were discovered by a Polish construction worker in 1960 who complied, and Rabbi Shapira’s writings were published the following year, along with other works of his from before the war, under the title Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire). 

His fate was to shepherd his community through hell, to their death, and his own. His resistance was to not let the Nazis pollute his soul.  His work written during the war was entitled, Hiddushei Torah mi-Shnot Haza’am, Insights into the Bible from the Years of Wrath.  In it he did not mention Germany or the Nazis.  He would not hate them.  True to the roots of Jewish mystical teachings, he insisted that “even the demons of Hell have sparks of the Holy One, however unrealized.”   At the end of the uprising, he refused the leave the remaining few survivors, and was transported with them to Trawniki labor camp, where he died in November of 1943.

He did not let hatred and horrible suffering corrupt his soul.  Among his teachings, which we learned from a survivor of Auschwitz who had studied in the school of Rabbi Shapira, is the following.  The man remembered that the Rabbi would repeated enjoin his students “The greatest thing in the world is to do somebody else a favor.” He said that so often the man could still hear the voice in his head years later.  He remembered the teachings, and when he told his own story, he said, “Do you know how many favors you can do for others in Auschwitz?”  Rabbi Shapira and his disciple lived and died what Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the camps and a famous psychologist wrote after the war:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

May we honor the memories of those lost in the Holocaust and learn from them how to be resilient in the face of suffering, how to fight when we need to, how to be kind when we need to, and how to be the best human beings we can be.

I’d like to conclude with a traditional Hebrew memorial prayer sung in remembrance of those lost.  (Sim Shalom p. 466).

Sources:

https://simonkogan.com/wp/gallery-monuments/holocaust-memorial-spokane/

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/warsaw-ghetto-uprising

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/torah-from-the-holy-fire/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-they-kick-in-your-front-door-how-you-gonna-come/

https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/2017/02/17/Life_Death_and_Spiritual_Resistance_in_the_Warsaw_Ghetto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Anielewicz

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl