When the Last Survivors Are Gone, Who will Bear Witness?

Robert Eli Rubinstein reflects on his mother’s recollections of the Holocaust, the difficulty of speaking of its horrors, and the future of Holocaust memory as the number of living survivors dwindles:

According to Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, survivors fall into two categories: those who talk and those who do not. He was surely describing my parents.

My mother’s memories surged out of her in a mighty torrent, and this had a cathartic and healing effect on her. The passionate eloquence of her words enabled her to impose meaning on what would otherwise have been unbearably meaningless. But she was quite exceptional among survivors in her ability to talk about the past.

Far more characteristic was my father, Bill Rubinstein, who never talked about the past. Not only did he steadfastly refuse to discuss his own wartime experiences: Whenever a conversation drifted toward pre-history—that is, the period before his arrival in Canada— he would try his best to change the subject. If this did not work, he would find a pretext to leave the room. This was my father’s way of coping with his intensely private pain. And really, who could argue when the strategy seemed to work so well for him? This decent and beloved gentleman was able to build a remarkably successful new life in Canada by banishing his demons—at least at the conscious level. When he was adrift in the helplessness of sleep, the nightmares held sway, every night without mercy until the end of his nearly 99 years.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Auschwitz, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, Hungarian Jewry, Primo Levi

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society