Interview With Rabbi Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel

The link will take you to my interview with Rabbi Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel. Rabbi Lau talks about his life as a survivor of the Shoah.

A Review of "The Horse Adjutant"

“Son, if you survive, tell the story of everything that happened to us. The world must know. .. you will live longer than any of us.” These are the last words that Leon Schagrin’s father ever said to him. It was to be that last that Schagrin would ever hear from his family before they were separated. At age 12 Leon was alone. The rest of the family died in Belzac, the only camp with a single purpose- to kill everyone who arrived. Leon survived thanks to a miraculous series of twists and turns that would allow him to live to see liberation. Leon Shagrin’s story is told in The Horse Adjutant, co-authored by Stephen Shooster, (2011, Shooster Publishing, www. thehorseadjutant.com) A highly personal narrative, Leon tells us of pre-war Poland- the story of his childhood- in the small town of Grybow in which Jews, Christians, Gypsies, and Russians lived side by side. They went to the same schools, they played together, and they went to market day together. Leon was a rambunctious child who would rather wander the hills and forests than go to school. Leon’s narrative of his childhood recalls a peaceful place, a great place with all kinds of secrets to be discovered. By the time that he was old enough to become a Bar Mitzvah that world would be replaced by a hellish limbo filled with unexplained atrocities. As a boy Leon was always ready to find an excuse to get out of helping his father, a self-taught veterinarian who had a special gift for treating horses. Ironically, it would be the little that he did learn about horses that would save him more than once. Being a coach driver for the SS Leon would be able to get a little food. Caring for an officer’s prize steed would keep him from the gas chamber. But his ability to handle horses also forced him to witness the extermination of his neighbors. After the Nazis killed people on the street just to make a point of their cruelty Leon would be ordered to bring a wagon and take the bodies away. Leon’s narrative records his day to day struggle to live and his desperate hope to escape Auschwitz. He hoped to be assigned to a work camp rather than a death camp. His daily fight to ward of starvation, beatings, and selection punctuate the story of how he lived to tell his story. While I think many of us who study the Holocaust try to deal with the “big picture,” a story like The Horse Adjutant reminds us that it is easy to miss the tree as one tries to understand the forest. None of us can ever comprehend the death of six million. As we try to comprehend that number we lose sight of the loss of six million individual lives- the number is just too great and defies our ability to understand. A highly personal narrative, The Horse Adjutant reminds us that sometimes our greatest understanding is found in the details of a single life. Perhaps the individual stories let us begin the task of recovering the individual faces of a world that was destroyed. The Horse Adjutant is a must read. It will not teach you about the great battles of the war. It will not explain how human beings could kill without remorse. It will not tell you why Leon’s world was destroyed. It will tell you how one single boy managed to survive to tell us how beautiful his world once was.

HOLOCAUST RESPONSA




There are currently two collections of Holocaust response available in English. Respona are questions of Jewish law (Halacha) that are submitted to a rabbi- responsa, the response, is the answer to the question. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, himself a survivor, edited and translated questions that he received in the ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania. His volume is titled Responsa from the Holocaust. The second collection, Rabbinic Responsa from the Holocaust, was edited and translated by Robert Kirschner. This volume contains both responsa from the Holocaust as well as questions that deal with the aftermath of the war as well. Both authors are to be thanked for these important contributions that provide insights into the religious life, bravery, and faith of those who lived and died in the Holocaust.

While these responsa are available in English for the first time, two questions remain: Will people read them and, if they do, what will they understand to be the real message for their own lives? I am unable to answer the first question but I do feel compelled to attempt an answer for the second.

As a Jew I feel obligated to read these volumes carefully. As a human being I feel obligated to read them again. As a rabbi and teacher I feel that I should urge others to read them as well.

I think most readers will immediately perceive (at least to some degree) the human suffering that the responsa reflect, but I think many readers will react by finding the idea behind the responsa completely incredible. Under such circumstances how could anyone be “bothered” to ask a rabbi about ritual and religious obligations? When the world was falling down around them how they could be concerned with minor points of Halacha.

My first answer was “faith.” Yet, as I thought about it, I felt that an appeal to faith was an incomplete answer. Also I knew that a faith that was that strong was something that would demand explanation. How could “faith” serve as an explanation to those who could not imagine a situation in which that faith was the only possession left?

I offer these thoughts in order to share another path toward understanding and teaching these responsa to American Jews. It should be no surprise that I found the answer in the writings of a survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl. A psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, Frankl emerged from the Holocaust to found a new school of psychotherapy which he called Logotherapy. Frankl approach stressed the need for meaning in life. From his experience in Auschwitz Frankl made the claim that the individual can endure anything in life and overcome anything in life if, and only if, life itself has meaning. Freud would have predicted that, deprived of food, freedom, and even life itself, any person would abandon “normal” behavior and would do anything to stay alive. The attitude to life demonstrated in the response proves that Frankl’s “will to meaning” was stronger than Freud’s “will to pleasure.” Moreover, it provides us with a key to understanding the responsa as a struggle to maintain meaning through the observance of Jewish law. That key is the concept of “meaning” in Frankl’s sense of the word. Meaning is this sense of purpose in life, a goal higher than life itself.

Those who suffered during the Holocaust were denied everything that we would, under normal circumstances, consider to be meaningful. Every loved one, every possession, every bit of self-worth was robbed by the Nazis. These brave Jewish souls refused to surrender the very meaning of their existence. That meaning was rooted in the observance of Judaism and it stood firm and unyielding even in the face of a planned extinction. The Jewish soul refused to say that life was meaningless, that purpose and hope had been extinguished in the ovens of Auschwitz.

Perhaps the greatest problem confronting the reader of these response is the challenge to understand how and why a person robbed of all but his last breath would inquire into the status of wet matza or the use of tephillan that had not been checked by a scribe. These are the questions asked within these pages that explain why Jewish prisoners could survive with a purpose that could not be destroyed. As long as one could live as a Jew, even in the most unimaginable of conditions, life was ultimately meaningful and, therefore, worth living.

In his work Rabbi Oshry notes that only three cases of suicide occurred in the ghetto of Kovno. Only three Jews were truly conquered by the Nazis by admitting that life had lost meaning and, in Frankl’s terms, was no longer worth living.

We must read the Holocaust responsa not “simply” as documents attesting to punctilious observance of Jewish law (although that in it would be heroic.) Nor can we be satisfied to say that their faith was greater than our (although, no doubt, it was.) It was not the faith but the meaning of that faith that made the difference. There is an important lesson about survival that should not go unnoted. We stand silent trying to understand how anyone survived. We are at a loss to understand the suffering or the miracle of survival. One thing that we can do is to understand that at least one of the keys to survival was the finding of meaning even in a life that might, at any moment, end. Every survivor is a brave soldier who, in the end, defeated Hitler.

We must teach the facts of the Holocaust, but we must also try, in whatever small inadequate way, to explain what it all means. We must not only be shocked, appalled, and angry at the suffering of our people but we must also be inspired by the lives of those who stood against the Nazis without giving in to despair. We can never forget that Jews died because they were Jews, but we should never forget those who survived because they were Jews.

If we read the responsa as documents of meaning we begin to see a new definition of Jewish resistance. So often it is asked, “Why didn’t they fight back?” The truth is that they did fight back. Those who sought to continue living according to Jewish law were fighting back on the battlefield of life’s basic meaning and worth.

It was because of the meaning that life retained that so many survived conditions that would make death a blessing. The Holocaust responsa are treasures not only for what they teach about the Holocaust or about Jewish law. Their real worth is to be measured in what they teach us about what it “means” to be Jewish.

This article first appeared in the South Florida Jewish Journal