Living through history - The Jewish Standard

On Yom Kippur, my synagogue, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, doesn’t read the traditional Eleh Ezkerah, the Martyrology that tells the story of the torture and execution of rabbis during the Roman Empire, as written during the medieval period, when the Jewish community was facing yet more terror.

Instead of detailing those ancient, gruesome horrors, we listen to the stories from a more recent human-made nightmare, the Holocaust. Every year, someone tells a family story. Years ago, the storytellers on the bimah in the vast, packed, physically lovely, elaborately Moorish, brightly colored shul were survivors. Many years ago, they had lived through the Holocaust as young adults. Once we heard from a Jewish American GI who had helped liberate a death camp. Then the speakers were child survivors, by then themselves growing old. More recently, second- or even third-generation descendants retell their parents’ or grandparents’ survival stories.

Last year, my friend Renee Schlesinger told us about her mother, Ruth Schlesinger, and this year my friend Ruth Jarmul told a similar story about her mother, Lore Prausnitz Jarmul. Ruth Schlesinger and Lore Jarmul had similar stories, and their daughters had similar misgivings about telling them. Ruth prefaced her story by telling us that her mother and her mother’s entire immediate family survived, and none of them were ever imprisoned in a camp, sheltered in an attic or a barn, or hidden by nuns. They got out before any of that happened.

It is of course absolutely true that no one who did not experience a camp, or being hidden, or hiding out in the woods, can imagine the terror, the starvation, the humiliation, the closeness of death, the inability to look away from the hideous face of evil. The people who lived through that have earned the honorific title of survivor.

It is true both that people who escaped the Holocaust were amazingly lucky, and also that if they were to be judged by any other yardstick than the comparison with the survivors, we’d understand that those refugees also had to deal with real trauma. It’s nothing compared with what the survivors endured. Losing your home, your language, your livelihood, your friends, your position in the world as you thought you understood it — it’s a piece of cake compared to what survivors faced, but it’s infinitely more difficult than most of the rest of us ever have had to deal with.

So Renee and Ruth both talked about their mothers, the refugees. Their stories were not dissimilar — both were German, the daughters of families well placed and well respected in the outside world; daughters, too, of formidable mothers. (Both grew up to be formidable themselves.) It seems that many of the Jews who were able to escape the Holocaust came from well-off families who lived in or near big cities; that means that they were able to hear rumors of what was about to happen to Jews early, and that they had the resources to act on it. That was true of both Renee’s and Ruth’s families.

But there was a difference between the two talks, and it was the difference that a year makes.

Both Ruth and Lore loved the country that took them in; they soon spoke unaccented English and lived fully American lives.

But last year, Renee still was able to talk about her mother’s relationship with the country straightforwardly. It was a love story. But Ruth couldn’t do it in the same way this year. Yes, her mother loved this country, but this is no longer the country that had welcomed her.

The antisemitism that Abe Foxman used to describe as a slime that always throbbed below the surface here, and that escaped through carelessly (or, worse, purposely) cast-aside sewer covers in the last decade, has risen. It’s hard to ignore now.

Certainly this is not Germany in the early 1930s. We are not being officially barred from schools or professions; our children don’t have to experience what Lore did when she was a small child, all dressed up for her school play, only to be told that being Jewish disqualified her from the school’s stage. Small, step-by-step toxic humiliations. We are not there yet. With luck or grace or political courage, we won’t ever get anywhere near there.

But we no longer can be sure of that.

This week (weather, of course, permitting), we will spend as much time as we can in our sukkot. They are meant to remind us of the insecurity the Israelites faced as they left Egypt, and that Jews have faced across time and space. Until now they have not represented insecurity that American Jews might feel at home. But now it seems they do.

Despite that grim symbolism, we wish all our readers and their families a happy, dry, and secure Sukkot.

—JP

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