Eleh Ezkerah for Minyan Maat

Yom Kippur 5784 / September 25, 2023

These I recall and my soul melts with sorrow; for the bitter course of our history, tears pour from my eyes. 

The pages of Eleh Ezkarah contain a portrait of Jewish suffering over the course of two millennia, from the martyrdom of ten great sages which is set during the Hadrianic persecutions, to the massacres and expulsions of medieval Europe, to the vast realm of suffering, the Shoah. On this Yom Kippur, we also recall the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria on our holiest day. It is difficult not to connect the dots and feel the enormity of Jewish persecution through the millennia.

We know that this string of calamities is not a full portrait of Jewish life–there were glorious centuries in each of these lands and enduring masterpieces of culture and scholarship remain. But today we dare to look at the darkest shadows of our collective experience, linking our lives to those that were so cruelly shattered. 

Yom Kippur is often referred to in the plural, as Yom Ha-Kippurim, the day of atonements, because Jewish sources claim that the living can atone for both themselves and for the dead by giving tzedakah in their memory and thus adding to their merit. As we say, bara mizakei abba, the child adds merit to the parent. On this day, the living act on behalf of the dead.

But it goes the other way too. On Yom Ha-Kippurim, the dead, and especially the martyred dead, perform a spiritual service for the living. I am NOT referring to some sort of sacrificial service. I am not saying that somehow their suffering was productive, or even necessary. No, I see these stories of martyrdom as a lesson for the living, a warning not to take contemporary antisemitism lightly, never to feel either powerless or impervious to the attacks of our enemies. 

One month ago in Poland, traveling with my father and some of our family to the little northeastern town called Dabrowa from which my great-grandparents came in the 1890s, we engaged in an extended Eleh Ezkerah. In Warsaw we stood at the site of the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, now home to the magnificent Polin museum that pays tribute to the efflorescence of Jewish life in Poland for some seven centuries prior to its ruin. 

The next day in Treblinka we learned about the only extensive uprising in a Nazi death camp. In August 1943 some 700 prisoners in Treblinka used a grenade and stolen weapons to start an insurgency that lasted about 30 minutes before reinforcements arrived. Some 200 prisoners escaped from Treblinka, and although most were caught and killed, 70 are known to have survived to the end of the war. 

The day after that we were in Białystok to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the ghetto uprising there on August 16, 1943. In Mordejai Tanenbaum Square we stood with Polish officials and soldiers, ambassadors from Israel, America and Germany, and a few survivors to commemorate this brave uprising, which held the Germans off for a few hours until they returned with a tank and crushed the resistance. As the fighters said, it was not a matter of life or death, but only what manner of death they would face. 

I am not saying that only those who rose in rebellion deserve our attention and respect. Resistance comes in many forms–sometimes simply in standing a bit taller or refusing to be defined by the oppressor. Most acts of resistance went unrecorded, but still we try to imagine and honor those moments when our people rejected the hateful ideology of our oppressors, and stood somehow for human dignity.

What I am saying is that our act of remembering the Kedoshim, the martyrs of Jewish history, is not only an act of kindness, a hesed shel emet. It is also an inoculation against complacency. When the massacre at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh occurred 5 years ago, we were not surprised, and we were not unprepared to respond. We expected something like this, and we still do. We all wish things were different, that we didn’t have to have guards here at Ansche Chesed, that I didn’t have to respond to a threatening incident at my school in NJ just this week.

But we must not allow our awareness of evil to prevent us from witnessing the redemptive acts of concern and protection that have come even in our darkest hours. After the Pittsburgh shooting I stood outside Tree of Life and realized that a nun was praying by my side, and that friends from every faith community were standing vigil in solidarity with the Jewish community. As the modified Steelers logo put it, “Stronger than Hate.”

And in Poland, my enduring experience was that of appreciation for the righteous gentiles–not only of 80 years ago, but of today, who have dedicated themselves to preserving Jewish memory. In the old cemetery of Dabrowa, our family stood by the toppled graves as I chanted El Malei Rahamim. We were not alone. We were surrounded by Polish teens and their teachers who have made preserving Jewish memory their community responsibility. 

These do I recall–how we have sometimes suffered alone, and how we have also recovered together with kind and righteous people of all faiths and backgrounds. May that loyalty across borders of faith and ethnicity strengthen us when we are challenged, to stand up for ourselves and for others who suffer from persecution.