Yom HaShoah veHaGevurah -- Holocaust Memorial Day

Originally published 5/3/11, 3:50 pm.

Guest Blogger

- Posted with permission from a private email from:
 
Rabbi Benjamin J. Samuels
Congregation Shaarei Tefillah
35 Morseland Avenue
Newton Centre, Massachusetts 02459
www.Shaarei.org
 
Shalom,
RRW
 

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29 Nisan, 5771
Monday, May 1, 2011
13th Day of the Omer
Yom HaShoah veHaGevurah -- Holocaust Memorial Day
 
Chevre,
 
Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day.  Its official name is “Yom

HaShoah veHaGevurah – the Day of (Commemorating) the Holocaust and
Heroism,” so named having been purposely established on the 
anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.   None of us will forget
that this year truly was a day of heroism as last night, at 11:35 pm, 
President Barack Obama announced to the world that Osama Bin Laden 
had been killed earlier that day by a surgical strike of  US Specials 
Forces in Pakistan and that Bin Laden’s body was in the custody of the
United States.  While I would not deny a victory song and dance to the 
families of the victims of 9/11 or to our armed forces and to our 
Commander-in-Chief, my own prayer of thanksgiving was not of 
celebration but of somber relief and satisfaction that no matter how 
dark the times, no matter how dastardly and destructive the crimes, in
the end good will prevail and justice will be served.
 
It is this same sentiment that I gleaned from having read Professor 

Deborah E. Lipstadt’s extraordinary new book on The Eichmann Trial,
whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year.  I had the 

great privilege of travelling to Poland and Budapest on a heritage
tour with the ever amazing Prof. Lipstadt just a few years ago.  Adolf
Eichmann was a transportation specialist who applied and honed his
expertise in commercial shipping to the mass transportation of the
human chattel of Jews to concentration camps during the Shoah.  I was
not yet born in 1961 (I was born in 1968) and have no experience or
memory of the trial.  Upon reading Lipstadt’s riveting account, I was,
at first, but then not really, surprised to learn that Israel was attacked 
in the news media for its own strike against one of the masterminds 
of the Holocaust.   As opposed to a strategic assassination as in the 
case of Bin Laden, Israel apprehended Eichmann from his safe haven 
in Argentina and then brought him to justice through a comprehensive 
trial in Jerusalem.   While many celebrated Israel’s bold capture of one 
of the worst war criminals, Israel was also, at least at first, excoriated 
by significant media outlets in the US and world press, for example, the 
Washington Post and Time Magazine, for “animal vengeance” and the 
administration of “jungle law” (p. 24 ff).   Bin Laden and Eichmann alike 
were buried at sea to prevent their burial sites from becoming sites of 
pilgrimage and veneration (p. 147).  Lipstadt’s book is worth reading
for her gripping narrative of Eichmann’s capture and trial, as well as her 
trenchant analysis and critique of Hannah Arendt’s legacy.  Lipstadt’s 
thesis and contribution to Holocaust studies, however, is that the
Eichmann trial empowered, encouraged and validated survivor testimony
ultimately enabling the survivors themselves to shape the ongoing
memory and memorialization of the Shoah.
 
For more on Prof. Deborah E. Lipstadt’s new book, see her short video
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SziZ4iWTOI 
 
or read a NYT book review of it at
 
 http://tinyurl.com/3g66zzn
 
Last night, our community commemorated Yom HaShoah veHaGevurah 
through survivor memory.  Over 300 people from seven different Orthodox 
synagogues joined together at Shaarei for our annual Community Yom
HaShoah Commemoration.  It was perhaps our strongest Yom HaShoah 
program to date thanks to the moving first person testimony of Mr.Morris 
Hollender, a Holocaust survivor residing in Waltham.  Born  in 1926 in 
Vysni Remety, a small town in the Carpathian region of Czechoslovakia, 
Mr. Hollender shared the fate of Hungarian Jewry, as the area of his 
hometown was under Hungarian control during most of World War II.  
When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, the Jews of the Carpathian 
region were rounded up, forced into ghettos, and sent by cattle-car to the 
Auschwitz death camp.   The Hollender family arrived at Auschwitz on 
May 25, 1944. Though most of his relatives were murdered, Mr. Hollender 
survived selection, starvation, slave labor, and a horrendous death march 
to the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.  After the war, Mr. Hollender 
married Edith Grossman, a fellow survivor.  They immigrated to the United 
States in 1967 and settled in Waltham, where he worked as an electronics 
technician.  Mr. Hollender's remembered songs and prayers from his youth 
in the Carpathians have been collected by the National Yiddish Book Center
and performed by Klezmer music star Hankus Netsky in Boston-area
concerts and on the radio.
 
Mr. Hollender’s moving testimony can be downloaded and heard in full
at http://bit.ly/j9FPDY . 
 
Please do not miss Mr. Hollender’s heart-felt and heart-moving 
“Kel Molei Rachamim” at the end of the recording.
 
Rabbi Benjamin J. Samuels