“תפילת טל“ (Prayer for Dew), Yossele Rosenblatt
30 de novembro de 2015
How the Light Gets In (Vayetse 5776), Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Why Jacob? That is the question we find ourselves asking repeatedly as we read the narratives of Genesis. Jacob is not what Noah was: righteous, perfect in his generations, one who walked with God. He did not, like Abraham, leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house in response to a Divine call. He did not, like Isaac, offer himself up as a sacrifice. Nor did he have the burning sense of justice and willingness to intervene that we see in the vignettes of Moses’ early life. Yet we are defined for all time as the descendants of Jacob, the children of Israel. Hence the force of the question: Why Jacob?
The answer, it seems to me, is intimated in the beginning of this
week’s parsha. Jacob was in the middle of a journey from one danger to
another. He had left home because Esau had vowed to kill him when Isaac
died. He was about to enter the household of his uncle Laban, which
would itself present other dangers. Far from home, alone, he was at a
point of maximum vulnerability. The sun set. Night fell. Jacob lay down
to sleep, and then saw this majestic vision:
He dreamed and, look, there was a
ladder set on the earth, with its top reaching heaven; and, look, angels
of God were ascending and descending on it. And,
look, the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of
Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I
will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like
the dust of the earth, and you shall spread forth to the west and to
the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the
earth shall be blessed through you and through your offspring. And
look, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring
you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I
have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from
his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know
it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is
none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen.
28:12-17)
Note the fourfold “and look,” in Hebrew ve-hinei, an
expression of surprise. Nothing has prepared Jacob for this encounter, a
point emphasized in his own words when he says, “the Lord is in this
place – and I did not know it.” The very verb used at the beginning of
the passage, “He came upon a place,” in Hebrew vayifga ba-makom, also means an unexpected encounter. Later, in rabbinic Hebrew, the word ha-Makom, “the Place,” came to mean “God.” Hence in a poetic way the phrase vayifga ba-makom could be read as, “Jacob happened on, had an unexpected encounter with, God.”
Add to this Jacob’s night-time wrestling match with the angel in next week’s parsha and we have an answer to our question. Jacob is the man who has his deepest spiritual experiences alone, at night, in the face of danger and far from home.
He is the man who meets God when he least expects to, when his mind is
on other things, when he is in a state of fear and possibly on the brink
of despair. Jacob is the man who, in liminal space, in the middle of
the journey, discovers that “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did
not know it!”
Jacob thus became the father of the people who had their closest
encounter with God in what Moses was later to describe as “the howling
wasteland of a wilderness” (Deut. 32:10). Uniquely, Jews survived a
whole series of exiles, and though at first they said, “How can we sing
the Lord’s song in a strange land?” they discovered that the Shekhinah,
the Divine presence, was still with them. Though they had lost
everything else, they had not lost contact with God. They could still
discover that “the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”
Abraham gave Jews the courage to challenge the idols of the age.
Isaac gave them the capacity for self-sacrifice. Moses taught them to be
passionate fighters for justice. But Jacob gave them the knowledge that
precisely when you feel most alone, God is still with you, giving you
the courage to hope and the strength to dream.
The man who gave the most profound poetic expression to this was
undoubtedly David in the book of Psalms. Time and again he calls to God
from the heart of darkness, afflicted, alone, pained, afraid:
Save me, O God,
for the floodwaters are up to my neck.
Deeper and deeper I sink into the mire;
I can’t find a foothold.
I am in deep water,
and the floods overwhelm me. (Ps. 69:2-3)
From the depths, O Lord,
I call for your help. (Ps. 130:1)
Sometimes our deepest spiritual experiences come when we least expect
them, when we are closest to despair. It is then that the masks we wear
are stripped away. We are at our point of maximum vulnerability – and
it is when we are most fully open to God that God is most fully open to
us. “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are
crushed in spirit” (Ps.34:18). “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise”(Ps. 51:17). God
“heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3).
Rav Nahman of Bratslav used to say; “A person needs to cry to his
Father in heaven with a powerful voice from the depths of his heart.
Then God will listen to his voice and turn to his cry. And it may be
that from this act itself, all doubts and obstacles that are keeping him
back from true service of Hashem will fall from him and be completely
nullified.”[1]
We find God not only in holy or familiar places but also in the midst
of a journey, alone at night. “Though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death I will fear no evil for You are with me.” The most
profound of all spiritual experiences, the base of all others, is the
knowledge that we are not alone. God is holding us by the hand,
sheltering us, lifting us when we fall, forgiving us when we fail,
healing the wounds in our soul through the power of His love.
My late father of blessed memory was not a learned Jew. He did not
have the chance to become one. He came to Britain as a child and a
refugee. He had to leave school young, and besides, the possibilities of
Jewish education in those days were limited. Merely surviving took up
most of the family’s time. But I saw him walk tall as a Jew, unafraid,
even defiant at times, because when he prayed or read the Psalms he felt
intensely that God was with him. That simple faith gave him immense
dignity and strength of mind.
That was his heritage from Jacob, as it is ours. Though we may fall,
we fall into the arms of God. Though others may lose faith in us, and
though we may even lose faith in ourselves, God never loses faith in us.
And though we may feel utterly alone, we are not. God is there, beside
us, within us, urging us to stand and move on, for there is a task to do
that we have not yet done and that we were created to fulfil. A singer
of our time wrote, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light
gets in.” The broken heart lets in the light of God, and becomes the
gate of heaven.
[1] Likkutei Maharan 2:46.
29 de novembro de 2015
28 de novembro de 2015
Listen, you who are deaf;
You blind ones, look up and see!
Who is so blind as My servant,
So deaf as the messenger I send?
Who is so blind as the chosen one,
So blind as the the servant of the LORD?
Seeing many things, he gives no heed;
With ears open, he hears nothing.
The LORD desires His [servant's] vindication,
That he may magnify and glorify [His] Teaching.
Isaiah 42:18-21
(JPS)
Perdoar
"To Forgive Is Human: Jewish Reflections on the Meaning and Practice of Forgiveness", Louis Newman
26 de novembro de 2015
Shema
Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
(JPS)
25 de novembro de 2015
24 de novembro de 2015
Roma
Pasta alla Carbonara alla Giudea (adapted from the recipe of Umberto Pavoncello)
Serves 4
Ingredients:
1 lb. spaghetti or tagliolini or penne
1 small onion, very finely diced
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 medium zucchini (1 1/2 lbs.), cut vertically into quarters, then thinly sliced
4 egg yolks, room temperature
4 heaping tablespoons grated Pecorino Romano cheese
Pinch of salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Directions:
1. Put water on to boil for pasta.
2. In a saucepan large enough to accommodate all of the pasta when it is cooked, heat the olive oil.
3. Saute the onion in the olive oil until soft, then add the finely sliced pieces of zucchini and sauté until it starts to turn golden. Turn off the heat.
4. Add the pasta to the boiling water and while it is cooking, put the egg yolks, grated pecorino, a pinch of salt, and the black pepper into a bowl and beat the mixture until blended.
5. When the pasta is just short of al dente, drain it, reserving 1/4 cup of the water it was cooked in.
6. Quickly reheat the zucchini and onion mixture in the saucepan, then add the drained pasta, and the 1/4 cup of cooking water, and toss briefly.
7. Turn off the heat, and quickly pour in the egg mixture, stirring just until the sauce is thoroughly cooked and the pasta is coated. Do not let the sauce harden and coagulate so the eggs it contains scramble.
8. Serve immediately, accompanied by a bowl of grated Pecorino Romano and the pepper grinder so that your guests can add as much extra cheese and pepper as they wish.
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/154402/a-thanksgiving-pasta-inspired-by-roman-jews?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=9c4c573270-Tuesday_November_24_201511_24_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-9c4c573270-206801785
Vida
Peter Allinson, from Maryland, US, was on holiday with his family in the Dominican Republic
when he went diving and took this amazing shot of a sperm whale smiling for the camera
23 de novembro de 2015
Refugiados
Refugiados chegam à ilha grega de Lesbos depois de cruzarem o mar Egeu, vindos da Turquia
22 de novembro de 2015
Vida
Keepers at Bristol Zoo Gardens are celebrating the arrival of an adorable baby pygmy hippo.
The calf, which has not yet been named or sexed, was born almost three weeks ago.
Kabbalat Shabbat
The Beautiful Nusach of Cantor Moshe Ganchoff
00:14 - ישמחו השמים
01:10 - שמעה ותשמח ציון
04:56 - זמרו לד' בכינור
06:27 - בעמוד ענן
08:25 - קול ד' בכח
14:12 - לכה דודי
16:50 - לא תבושי
22:40 - טוב להודות לד'
21 de novembro de 2015
You stand this day, all of you, before the LORD your God - your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to water drawer - to enter into the covenant of the LORD your God, which the LORD your God is concluding with you this day, with its sanctions; to the end that He may establish you this day as His people and be your God, as He promised you and as He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the LORD our God and those who are not with us here this day.
Deuteronomy 29:9-14
(JPS)
Vida
A 4-month old female giant panda cub poses for the cameras at the Giant
Panda Conservation Center at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
19 de novembro de 2015
18 de novembro de 2015
Vida
Nurses at Bodmin Hospital in Cornwall granted Frank Keat his dying wish when they arranged for his favourite horse to visit him days before he passed away.
17 de novembro de 2015
16 de novembro de 2015
15 de novembro de 2015
What Suffering Does
Over
the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in
which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to
maximize happiness. That’s normal. When people plan for the future, they
often talk about all the good times and good experiences they hope to
have. We live in a culture awash in talk about happiness. In one
three-month period last year, more than 1,000 books were released on
Amazon on that subject.
But
notice this phenomenon. When people remember the past, they don’t only
talk about happiness. It is often the ordeals that seem most
significant. People shoot for happiness but feel formed through
suffering.
Now,
of course, it should be said that there is nothing intrinsically
ennobling about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure
(and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is
sometimes just destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible.
But
some people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of the way Franklin
Roosevelt came back deeper and more empathetic after being struck with
polio. Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s
perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring.
But
the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely
that logic that the happiness mentality encourages. Happiness wants you
to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends
you on a different course.
First,
suffering drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich
wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of
life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The
agony involved in, say, composing a great piece of music or the grief of
having lost a loved one smashes through what they thought was the
bottom floor of their personality, revealing an area below, and then it
smashes through that floor revealing another area.
Then,
suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations,
what they can control and cannot control. When people are thrust down
into these deeper zones, they are forced to confront the fact they can’t
determine what goes on there. Try as they might, they just can’t tell
themselves to stop feeling pain, or to stop missing the one who has died
or gone. And even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those
moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from.
The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or
divine process beyond individual control.
People
in this circumstance often have the sense that they are swept up in
some larger providence. Abraham Lincoln suffered through the pain of
conducting a civil war, and he came out of that with the Second
Inaugural. He emerged with this sense that there were deep currents of
agony and redemption sweeping not just through him but through the
nation as a whole, and that he was just an instrument for transcendent
tasks.
It’s
at this point that people in the midst of difficulty begin to feel a
call. They are not masters of the situation, but neither are they
helpless. They can’t determine the course of their pain, but they can
participate in responding to it. They often feel an overwhelming moral
responsibility to respond well to it. People who seek this proper
rejoinder to ordeal sense that they are at a deeper level than the level
of happiness and individual utility. They don’t say, “Well, I’m feeling
a lot of pain over the loss of my child. I should try to balance my
hedonic account by going to a lot of parties and whooping it up.”
The
right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I
don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense. It means seeing life
as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and
trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.
Parents who’ve lost a child start foundations. Lincoln sacrificed
himself for the Union. Prisoners in the concentration camp with
psychologist Viktor Frankl rededicated themselves to living up to the
hopes and expectations of their loved ones, even though those loved ones
might themselves already be dead.
Recovering
from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t
come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic
of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling
from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve
suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while
experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people
double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully
into their art, loved ones and commitments.
The
suffering involved in their tasks becomes a fearful gift and very
different than that equal and other gift, happiness, conventionally
defined.
14 de novembro de 2015
12 de novembro de 2015
11 de novembro de 2015
10 de novembro de 2015
9 de novembro de 2015
8 de novembro de 2015
Shoah
A new project at Yad Vashem analyzes the first
letters that survivors wrote after the Holocaust, letting their loved
ones know that they were alive
By Yardena Schwartz, Tablet Magazine
By Yardena Schwartz, Tablet Magazine
When Tzipora Shapiro walked out the gates of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, the first thing she felt was guilt. Her father, grandfather, brothers, aunts, and uncles all died in the Lodz Ghetto, and when the Nazis transferred Shapiro and her mother to Auschwitz, she watched as they sent her mother to the gas chambers. As a young, able-bodied woman, Shapiro was put to work in the camp—and was the only member of her immediate family to survive. After being liberated, Shapiro stayed in Poland, hoping to find a distant relative who may have survived the war. Thirteen months later, she finally found the address of a cousin who had fled to British Mandate Palestine before the ghettos of Poland gave way to genocide. “At long last,” Shapiro wrote on Feb. 15, 1946, in her first letter as a free woman, “I’m hurrying to send you a living word from a dead world.” After telling her cousin, Rhuze, that she had survived while her parents and the rest of her family had died, Shapiro wrote:
How could I justify to you that I left the lions’ den intact, that I saw fiery furnaces, red flames in the skies? That I saw thousands of people led daily to the gas chambers, not knowing what awaited them in ten minutes; that I saw sheaves of sparks and tongues of fire, and sometimes even part of a roasted hand bursting forth from a gigantic chimney; that I stood naked daily at roll call for the Selektion, and the SS man, as if to anger me, sent me back to the camp and didn’t take me to the oven … and a huge prayer, a stubborn prayer for divine benevolence, for death.
Shapiro’s letter, written in Polish on a piece of paper that has
since turned yellow and wrinkled, peppered with the brown stains of
time, is one of thousands being pored over by historians in Jerusalem
who are searching for clues to better understand a people and a period
of time that to many seems over-studied, but to historians remains full
of holes. Researchers at Yad Vashem have embarked on an unprecedented
project called “First Letters,” examining the very first dispatches sent
by Holocaust survivors in the days, weeks, and months after liberation
to let their loved ones know they were alive. There is of course no shortage of books, films, and millions of words
devoted to the Holocaust and those who lived through it. Yet most
personal accounts emerged only years and even decades after the war,
when survivors were finally ready to revisit their horrifying memories
through the mollifying filter of time. “First Letters” is unparalleled
in that its messages reveal the very real and complex emotions of
Holocaust victims who were just coming to terms with the atrocities they
faced. In essence, these letters represent the most original source
Holocaust scholars have ever had.
“These letters bring us their first personal voice,” said Iael Nidam-Orvieto, the leader of the project and director of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research. “They give us an intense glance at the way survivors felt and thought about themselves, their situation, and their future exactly at the time of liberation. We’ve never had that before.” Nidam-Orvieto, an Israeli Jew of Italian descent who lost some of her own family members to the Holocaust, first thought of the project six years ago, after coming across a note in the Yad Vashem archives. It was written by an Italian survivor to his family in Palestine, describing all he had suffered during the war. Over the next few years she saw similar correspondence trickle into the Yad Vashem archive through another project, “Gathering the Fragments,” which began in 2011. “Gathering the Fragments” called on survivors and their descendants to submit Holocaust-related artifacts, photographs, and documents to Yad Vashem; many of these time-stained pieces of paper had been sitting in attics, boxes, and old suitcases throughout Israel. So far 150,000 items have come in, including 83,000 documents, 60,000 photos, 3,150 artifacts, and 500 pieces of art. This material adds to Yad Vashem’s database of 4.5 million victims’ names, 125,000 testimonies, and 179 million pages of documents. After looking through the piles of material she and her research team received, Nidam-Orvieto realized that these letters weren’t just an interesting side note to “Gathering the Fragments.” Taken together, they represented a new historical treasure trove. While there was no single bombshell of information gleaned from the letters, such as a previously unreported concentration camp, these documents tell us more about Holocaust survivors, what they went through, and their immediate feelings after the war, than we have ever known before. “I never thought so many of these letters had been written,” said Nidam-Orvieto, adding that when she spoke to other Holocaust scholars around the world, they too were shocked to hear how many of these dispatches she was finding. Scholars weren’t the only ones who didn’t know these letters existed. Even family members who had these notes in their possession for decades had no idea what they were, as most of them were written in Yiddish, Polish, Czech, and other European languages. Nidam-Orvieto kept her idea for a separate project around these letters tucked away until November 2014, when Yad Vashem decided that its theme for 2015 would commemorate 70 years since liberation. It was then that she initiated the “First Letters” project. Since then, she and other researchers have been furiously translating and analyzing the messages, trying to learn as much as they can about their authors and what happened to them. Yad Vashem plans to publish dozens of the letters in a book that will be published in the coming year. While they differ vastly in the feelings they convey, many of the dispatches begin the same way: “I survived and I’m alive,” as if these were two entirely different states of being. Bernard Zucker had been a free man for 28 days when he wrote his first letter from a refugee camp in Austria to his sisters, who had survived the war by fleeing to Palestine. They were the only other surviving members of his family.
“These letters bring us their first personal voice,” said Iael Nidam-Orvieto, the leader of the project and director of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research. “They give us an intense glance at the way survivors felt and thought about themselves, their situation, and their future exactly at the time of liberation. We’ve never had that before.” Nidam-Orvieto, an Israeli Jew of Italian descent who lost some of her own family members to the Holocaust, first thought of the project six years ago, after coming across a note in the Yad Vashem archives. It was written by an Italian survivor to his family in Palestine, describing all he had suffered during the war. Over the next few years she saw similar correspondence trickle into the Yad Vashem archive through another project, “Gathering the Fragments,” which began in 2011. “Gathering the Fragments” called on survivors and their descendants to submit Holocaust-related artifacts, photographs, and documents to Yad Vashem; many of these time-stained pieces of paper had been sitting in attics, boxes, and old suitcases throughout Israel. So far 150,000 items have come in, including 83,000 documents, 60,000 photos, 3,150 artifacts, and 500 pieces of art. This material adds to Yad Vashem’s database of 4.5 million victims’ names, 125,000 testimonies, and 179 million pages of documents. After looking through the piles of material she and her research team received, Nidam-Orvieto realized that these letters weren’t just an interesting side note to “Gathering the Fragments.” Taken together, they represented a new historical treasure trove. While there was no single bombshell of information gleaned from the letters, such as a previously unreported concentration camp, these documents tell us more about Holocaust survivors, what they went through, and their immediate feelings after the war, than we have ever known before. “I never thought so many of these letters had been written,” said Nidam-Orvieto, adding that when she spoke to other Holocaust scholars around the world, they too were shocked to hear how many of these dispatches she was finding. Scholars weren’t the only ones who didn’t know these letters existed. Even family members who had these notes in their possession for decades had no idea what they were, as most of them were written in Yiddish, Polish, Czech, and other European languages. Nidam-Orvieto kept her idea for a separate project around these letters tucked away until November 2014, when Yad Vashem decided that its theme for 2015 would commemorate 70 years since liberation. It was then that she initiated the “First Letters” project. Since then, she and other researchers have been furiously translating and analyzing the messages, trying to learn as much as they can about their authors and what happened to them. Yad Vashem plans to publish dozens of the letters in a book that will be published in the coming year. While they differ vastly in the feelings they convey, many of the dispatches begin the same way: “I survived and I’m alive,” as if these were two entirely different states of being. Bernard Zucker had been a free man for 28 days when he wrote his first letter from a refugee camp in Austria to his sisters, who had survived the war by fleeing to Palestine. They were the only other surviving members of his family.
I, who four weeks ago existed only as #87292 in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and was intended like all the rest for the crematorium, have survived and I’m alive! I’m alive and I’m healthy! It’s really unbelievable! Your brother is a human being born anew! I have the ability to write a letter, my first in so many years, to you!That they had survived the Final Solution and could now begin a new life was something survivors were only beginning to realize through the process of writing these messages to their families, explained Nidam-Orvieto. “It was a way for them to declare to themselves that they had made it,” she said. In a note written in Yiddish on Sept. 1, 1944, Hirsch Brik wrote from Kovno, Lithuania, to friends in Palestine.
I’m alive and I’m free. After three torturous years, I am back to being a man like all other men. The German bastards have murdered my entire family. … There isn’t a long enough paper to list all the names of our common friends who have been savagely murdered.In another letter, Brik voiced his wish to “make aliyah,” or immigrate to the not-yet-established State of Israel. It was a desire expressed in many letters, as more than half of all Holocaust survivors moved to what was then Palestine after liberation. Brik did immigrate in 1947, changing has last name to Barak, a practice of “Israelization” that was common among early immigrants. His son Aharon Barak later became a legal adviser to the Israeli government, participated in the 1979 peace negotiations with Egypt, and served as chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. Yet another common theme pervasive in these letters is a morbid sense of guilt. Tzipora Shapiro, the Auschwitz survivor who detailed to her cousin how regretful she was for surviving when everyone she loved had perished, also apologized for what she called “the unpleasantness” she had shared with her cousin:
Forgive me for this bitter letter. I will never talk about it again. From now on I will write you only happy letters, filled with hope for the future. … You see, you cannot go through all of this without it leaving a deep scar that manifests in terrible memories and feelings of guilt.Others also carried this complex weight of shame and regret. Olga, whose letter is without a last name, survived Auschwitz but lost her only child, an 11-year-old boy, to the gas chambers. “Believe me, it would be a blessing if I wouldn’t remain alive,” Olga wrote to her aunt. Some survivors hesitated to tell their loved ones what they had been through out of fear that they wouldn’t be believed. “They felt that what they experienced was so painful and horrible that they have to tell their family members it’s true,” said Nidam-Orvieto, noting the widespread skepticism surrounding news of the Holocaust at the time. With each letter they analyze, the historians at Yad Vashem are not only translating the words, but investigating the past and future of each author in order to learn more about the Holocaust and the human beings who were reduced to numbers. “We’ve become detectives with these letters,” said Robert Rozett, the director of Yad Vashem Libraries who is leading the project with Nidam-Orvieto. For instance, there’s the story of Syme Rysavy, who wrote to her brother Ned eight months after her liberation from Auschwitz, informing him that their mother and her own husband had died in the gas chambers:
You will never be able to understand it, even if, God forbid, you were there. … You will not be able to comprehend the sadism and lack of humanity.By matching the information in her letter with names, testimonies, and documents in Yad Vashem’s database, Rozett was able to piece together the letter-writer’s heroic life story. In 1939, Syme’s whole family, including her parents and her husband Fritz, were all living in Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. The Nazis had just invaded, and Brno was annexed by Germany. On March 18, Syme invited her parents and younger brothers, Ned and Michael, over to her house for a special family dinner. Syme, then 31, had asked Ned to bring his violin and a suitcase packed with his and Michael’s belongings. It had seemed to Ned an unusual request. Around noon, the family gathered at Syme’s house, where Syme told her brothers to flee Brno immediately. Their parents, she said, would stay with her and Fritz, as they were too old and frail to run and hide. She gave Ned and Michael some money, and told them to leave as soon as possible. The brothers listened to their older sister, and despite the Nazi invasion, they managed to flee Brno for Krakow, Poland. As a gifted violinist, Ned began performing around the city. One night, after hearing Ned play, a British Consulate official offered him a visa and a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Music in London. Ned convinced the official to give Michael a visa too, and the brothers survived the war in London, later moving to Palestine. Syme was imprisoned at Auschwitz with her parents and husband but miraculously escaped during a death march to another camp in 1945. After the war, she moved to Toronto, where she remarried. The letters contain information that survivors rarely spoke about otherwise. “Survivors were able to write things that they were unable to say orally,” said Nidam-Orvieto. Bernard Zucker, who wrote to his sisters in Palestine, went from the refugee camp in Austria to Italy, where he rescued Jewish children and brought them to Palestine with him. There he reunited with and married the woman he had proposed to before the war, who was also a Holocaust survivor. Together they settled on a kibbutz and had eight children, eventually changing their last name to Tzur. Eli Tzur, their now-67-year-old son, is one of 7,000 Israelis who has donated Holocaust artifacts to Yad Vashem since 2011. Like many children of survivors, he grew up in a home where the subject of the Holocaust was untouchable. “They barely ever spoke about their experience in the war, and I didn’t ask,” Tzur said. “Many children didn’t ask their parents what happened. They were silent and so were we. We didn’t want to hurt them by opening their wounds.” Before his father died in 2001, Tzur returned to Poland with him to visit the various camps where he had been a prisoner. Even there, he said, he was afraid to hurt his father, and so he didn’t ask many questions. Only after reading his father’s letters did he finally discover all he had witnessed and felt during the five horrific years of his life that he had tried so hard to forget. Still, there are some stories and people that have simply been lost to history. Some letters just don’t have enough clues. Zahavit, whose letter contains only her first name, is one of many elusive survivors whose story is and may always be a mystery. All we learn from her message is that she survived both Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. In her note, written soon after British troops liberated Bergen Belsen, Zahavit writes in Hebrew:
You may not understand me, better us, who went through all of Germany’s savageries. While we were imprisoned, we forgot that we’re people, human beings. We were no more than a number and we didn’t matter to anyone.Rozett has come close to discovering Zahavit’s roots, but without her last name, any hint of where she’s from and who she sent her letter to, she is merely a name on a piece of paper. “This is something almost every Jewish family can relate to. It’s like, ‘Why didn’t I ask grandma before she passed away?’ ” said Rozett. “Reading these letters rescues these people from oblivion, but there are pieces of them that you just can’t know. That’s part of what the Holocaust did. It left fragments. We spend a lot of time looking at those fragments and building an understanding, but we’re always going to be missing fragments.”
7 de novembro de 2015
A prayer of the lowly man when he is faint and pours forth his plea before the LORD.
O LORD, hear my prayer;
let my cry come before You.
Do not hide Your face from me
in my time of trouble;
turn Your ear to me;
when I cry, answer me speedily.
For my days have vanished like smoke
and my bones are charred like a hearth.
My body is stricken and withered like grass;
too wasted to eat my food;
on account of my vehement groaning
my bones show through my skin.
I am like a great owl in the wilderness,
an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake; I am like
a lone bird upon a roof.
All day long my enemies revile me;
my deriders use my name to curse.
For I have eaten ashes like bread
and mixed my drink with tears,
because of Your wrath and Your fury;
for You have cast me far away.
My days are like a lengthening shadow;
I wither like a grass.
But You, O LORD, are enthroned forever;
Your fame endures throughout the ages.
You will surely arise and take pity on Zion,
for it is time to be gracious to her;
the appointed time has come.
Your servants take delight in its stones,
and cherish its dust.
The nations will fear the name of the LORD,
all the kings of the earth, Your glory.
For the LORD has built Zion;
He has appeared in all His glory.
He has turned to the prayer of the destitute
and has not spurned their prayer.
May this be written down for a coming generation,
that people yet to be created may praise the LORD.
For He looks down from His holy height;
the LORD beholds the earth from heaven
to hear the groans of the prisoner,
to release those condemned to death;
that the fame of the LORD may be recounted in Zion,
His praises in Jerusalem,
when te nations gather together,
the kingdoms to serve the LORD.
He drained my strength in mid-course,
He shortened my days.
I say, "O my God, do not take me away
in the midst of my days,
You whose years go on for generations on end.
Of old You established the earth;
the heavens are the work of Your hands.
They shall perish, but You shall endure;
they shall all wear out like a garment;
You change them like clothing and they pass away.
But You are the same, and Your years never end.
May the children of Your servants dwell securely
and their offspring endure in Your presence.
Psalm 102
(JPS)
5 de novembro de 2015
When God created man, God said (Genesis 1:26), "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Traditionally, it is understood that God was speaking to the angels. If so, the plan was not very successful; we are not like angels. According to another interpretation, God was speaking to the whole of creation, to all of nature. In that case, "Let us make man in our image" means, "Let each of you contribute something." The fox and the dove, the tiger and the sheep, the spider and the bee each contributed a small part - as did the angels and the devils.
We humans contain all the parts. Some of us are foxier than others, or more sheepish than others, but altogether, we contain all the traits found in nature. In that way, we are the sum total of nature, containing the macrocosm in our own microcosm. Somehow, we have to learn from all our partners, and perhaps pray that the extra part - that "Divine spark" contributed by God - will help us make the right choices.
"Simple Words", Adin Steinsaltz, p.39
4 de novembro de 2015
3 de novembro de 2015
2 de novembro de 2015
1 de novembro de 2015
Vida
A great white pelican keeps his eyes on his dinner as he dives underwater at Jurong Bird Park, in Singapore.
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