In 1941, Kalman Chameides—formerly the rabbi of the Polish city of Katowice—left his son Leon in the care of a prominent Ukrainian churchman in the city of Lwów, never to see him again. Kalman died of typhus in the Lwów ghetto, but Leon survived, and has now translated and published a collection of his father’s essays, written between 1932 and 1936. Elisha Russ-Fishbane writes in his review:
These essays, written in a soaring and often prophetic pitch, are a rare testimony of Orthodox rabbinic leadership during these critical years and, not surprisingly, have much to say on the state of Europe, the future of its Jews, and (especially poignantly) the prospects of its children. In an essay from August 1935 entitled “Jewish Children as Martyrs,” Rabbi Chameides urged his community to prepare their children for the deep-seated hatred that soon awaited them and for which they would have to pay a heavy price in their own lives. . . . Yet still, [Chameides wrote], the child is taught never to lose hope, never to give up. . . .
Chameides had sounded a similar note of foreboding two years earlier, in September 1933, when he issued a lament over the current crisis facing German Jewry and its inevitable decline. The exile (or golus, as he put it) of German Jewry had already begun. . . . [This] assessment . . . eerily echoes that voiced by Rabbi Leo Baeck, the one-time believer in German-Jewish symbiosis and the beloved pastor of Theresienstadt, who famously declared in September 1933, that “the thousand-year history of German Jewry is at an end.” It bears repeating that neither Baeck nor Chameides could have imagined the extent of the nightmare that was soon to unfold in Germany and Poland. Yet both were seemingly convinced that the end of a viable Jewish life on German soil was drawing inexorably closer.
If German Jews were reduced to vagabonds and refugees, there was still a bright spot, as Chameides saw it. Many found the refuge they sought in “our new national home,” the envisioned Jewish state in the land of Israel.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2398/a-brand-rescued-from-the-fire/