Excavating One of the Holocaust’s Most Horrific Mass Graves

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered some 70,000 Jews in a clearing in the forest of Ponar (now Paneriai), not far from the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Using advanced technology to explore the mass graves, an ongoing project has discovered a tunnel, previously known only from the accounts of survivors, by which some Jewish prisoners managed to escape. Nicholas St. Fleur writes:

In 1943, when it became clear the Soviets were going to take over Lithuania, the Nazis began to cover up the evidence of the mass killings. They forced a group of 80 Jews to exhume the bodies, burn them, and bury the ashes. . . .

About half of the group spent 76 days digging a tunnel in their holding pit by hand and with spoons they found among the bodies. On April 15, 1944—the last night of Passover, when they knew the night would be darkest—[they] crawled through the two-foot-square tunnel entrance and through to the forest.

The noise alerted the guards, who pursued the prisoners with guns and dogs. Of the 80, twelve managed to escape; eleven of them survived the war and went on to tell their stories, according to the researchers.

The archaeologist Richard Freund and his team used the information from survivors’ accounts to search for the tunnel. Rather than excavate and disturb the remains, he and his team used two non-invasive tools—electrical-resistivity tomography and ground-penetrating radar.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Archaeology, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Lithuania, Vilna

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