Fight for Life
What follows is Friday evening’s sermon marking Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Yesterday, to mark Yom HaShoah, the seventh graders, and I, as well as our dedicated principal, sat outside in Annie’s Garden to talk about the Holocaust. I taught them about Annie and told them some of her extraordinary stories and in particular a few details about how she managed to survive Auschwitz. She used to tell us that she and three other girls would share one cup of the dirty brown water that the Nazis claimed was tea and use it to color their faces so they would not look so pale. Looking healthy meant the promise of being chosen for one more day of life, Annie would say. Then they would divide the remaining three cups of dirty water between the four of them for the morning ration of fluids.
We spoke about how the Nazis only provided those interred in the camps with about 200 calories of food per day, just barely enough to keep them alive. The educator from the Holocaust Center in Glen Cove explained that this is the equivalent of about one to two Oreo cookies. All the students understood that this is less than they eat when they go to the kitchen cabinet for an afternoon or evening snack.
I told them how before reaching Auschwitz, Annie, and her father, jumped out of a moving train when they found out it was headed to a death camp. I will always remember, I told them, how she used to describe the feeling of her mother’s hand pushing her out of the train’s window. That was the last time she saw her mother and sister. They were both murdered by the Nazi death machine. She was supposed to be the first to jump among the girls, but the last boy in line became frightened and she took his place, and he then went after her. But the Nazi guard heard him jump and shot him dead. Annie would always explain that she survived in part because of such luck. If she had jumped when she was supposed to, she would have been the one shot instead.
And she survived because of the occasional kindness of strangers. There was the person who gave her a boiled potato. “It was the best potato I ever tasted,” she would exclaim. And every year, I would add that she also survived because she was blessed with an extraordinary dose of inner strength, or as we say, koach. I hold on to Annie’s memory, as one example among the millions. And now the students hold on to her memory.
I explained how the Nazi’s antisemitism was unique. It was unlike that of Haman’s for example who wanted to murder all Jews because Mordecai would not bow down to him because of his Jewish beliefs. Nazi antisemitism was racial. In their minds it was about blood. It did not matter if you believed in God or went to synagogue or even called yourself a Jew. If you had one Jewish grandparent, then you were a Jew and deserving of elimination. Many of the students shared what they are learning about the Holocaust in school and what they remembered from our sixth-grade curriculum. The Nazis built factories to murder people. Six million Jews. And six million others. Unimaginable numbers that I recently learned are not accurate. Yad VaShem experts continue to uncover evidence that the numbers are at least a million greater.
We then spoke about the Holocaust’s meaning. What does it teach us? The students surprised me. They are afraid. They don’t think what the Nazis did could happen here, but they are keenly aware of the growing threat of antisemitism. They spoke about the war in Israel and what is happening on college campuses. There were bits and pieces of facts and lots and lots of worries.
They peppered me with questions. “What did Israel do?” one asked. “What are they fighting about?” another queried. “Where is Palestine?” one student added. We spent the remaining time unpacking as many of their questions as we could tackle in the remaining time.
And then I said, “Do you see how much time it took us to answer a few of your questions? It took us fifteen minutes. That is far longer than a TikTok video or an Instagram post.” People want you to think that this can all be reduced to black and white. You are for Israel or against Israel. For Palestinians or against them. Nothing is so simple. As you can see it requires a lot of discussion and a lot of asking questions.
I continued. People seem to think that one can be anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, but you cannot. If a person believes that every one of the peoples of the earth deserve sovereignty and a state of their own except the Jews, then that is antisemitic. If one believes that all nation states are wrong and that they only lead to violent bloodshed over borders and deadly arguments about who was there first and that we should live in some sort of utopian borderless world then this is not necessarily antisemitic although terribly naïve. In this world of nation states there must be a Jewish state—and I would add, a Palestinian state. The Jewish people must have power in this violent and dangerous world.
There are many things that one can protest, I explained to the students, about how Israel wields its power. I may disagree with protestors who could criticize Israel’s use of too many bombs in civilian areas or the lack of food getting to ordinary Gazans, but when protestors blame a fellow Jewish student for the decisions of the Israeli government or prevent Jewish students from getting to classes or deface Jewish institutions then that is antisemitic. When protestors commit violence in the name of their struggle then that is wrong, and they should be arrested. Of course, we have to protect free speech but when it crosses those lines in can no longer, and should no longer, be protected.
Israel, and our people, find ourselves again in an existential moment. Hamas states clearly and unequivocally their genocidal intent. In a cruel, and antisemitic, twist protestors contort the discussion by accusing Israel of committing genocide and Israelis of being the new Nazis. They are not. Israel is not. I have misgivings and worries about how Israel is currently conducting the war. I no longer feel its actions will best guarantee Israel’s or the Jewish people’s future security or the release of the precious few hostages who remain alive and continue to be held in inhumane conditions. And yet I stand with the Jewish people and Israel in this moment. It is struggling, albeit under compromised and failed leadership, for its survival. Its purpose is not to kill all Palestinians but to destroy Hamas. Whatever our feelings about Israel’s direction, its decisions, and its actions (may God bless the memories of the World Central Kitchen’s aid workers!), whatever our sentiments about its political leaders, we must always be clear about this point. We must always say, we stand with Israel and the Jewish people.
As the petals of the beautiful cherry blossoms on our synagogue’s front lawn began to swirl in the evening breeze, the students screamed with delight and smiled with excitement. I then told them about the dedication stone in Annie’s Garden that reads “Annie Bleiberg; 1920-2018; Holocaust Survivor; She shared her story and inspired hope.”
“Do you know why the stone is placed on the right side of the garden?” I asked. None of the students could guess the answer. It is because when someone arrived in Auschwitz and got out of those foul smelling, crowded cattle cars, they were inspected by Nazi officers, the most infamous of which was Josef Mengele y”s. If you were deemed healthy enough to work, you went to the right. If not, you were pointed to the left and then to death in the gas chambers.
“To the right meant life,” Annie would tell us. And she would add, “Life is always worth fighting for.”
On this Yom HaShoah, we loudly and once again defiantly declare, may we continue to be blessed with life. And may the memories of our millions continue to offer our students countless lessons.