digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Mark the Holocaust through kinnos, the lamentation poems on Tisha B'Av, because the speaker argues that survivors' experiences cannot be expressed in ordinary language and these texts give words to the screams. The talk uses the speaker's wife's grandmother's account of Auschwitz to show why such words are needed.
Key Points
- The Holocaust is placed on Tisha B'Av because new days are not added to the calendar, and all tragedies are linked to the churban (destruction of the Temple).
- The speaker says the Holocaust still feels raw because survivors, including the speaker's wife's grandmother, were alive within living memory.
- After the war, great rabbis composed kinnos, since ordinary language could not express the scale of the loss.
- The speaker argues that Holocaust numbers, museums, and visits to camps still do not let people grasp the destruction.
- The grandmother's testimony gives the speaker's main example: her last-words account of Jews calling out that God is One.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Tie the Holocaust to Tisha B'Av, the day the speaker says all such tragedies are placed on the calendar.
- Read a post-war kinnah, naming the two the speaker cites: the one by Baba Varba (the speaker's name for the Bobover Rebbe's composition) and the one by Rav Shimon Schwab, rabbi of German Jewry.
- Keep saying the Shema, as the speaker urges, in memory of the last words the victims cried out, which the grandmother said were always that God is One.
- The grandmother was 15 when she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, after being deported from Soya, a town the speaker says was officially Hungary during World War II.
- The speaker says Hungary was drawn into the Holocaust only in summer 1944, but the destruction in those months was immense.
- The speaker says nearly all of the Bobov community in southern Poland, roughly 90 to nearly 100 percent, was killed.
- The grandmother said she heard the victims' cries and songs, including the Czech anthem and Hatikvah, from near the gas chambers.
Bottom Line
The talk's core message is that the Holocaust cannot be fully comprehended, so the only available response is to use the words of kinnos and the Shema to carry the cries of its victims forward.
