From the Depths of a Death Camp, Relics of Jewish Faith

Located in what is now eastern Poland, the Sobibor death camp—along with Treblinka and Belzec—was created by the Nazis solely for the purpose of murdering Polish Jewry as efficiently as possible. To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) publicized three items discovered on its grounds. JNS reports:

Three pendants inscribed with the sh’ma Yisra’el prayer and depictions of Moses and the Ten Commandments have been discovered in archaeological excavations in the Sobibor extermination camp over the past decade. . . . The metal pendants, each of which differs from the others, are from Lviv in Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic, according to researchers.

“The personal and human aspect of the discovery of these pendants is chilling,” said the IAA’s director, Eli Eskozido. “They represent a thread running between generations of Jews—actually a thick thread, thousands of years old, of prayer and faith. This moving discovery reminds us once again of the importance of settlement in our land and our obligation to reveal the past, to know it, and to learn from it.”

One pendant was found in the archaeological excavations in the remains of the building where victims were undressed before being led to the gas chambers. A second was discovered in the area where victims were undressed. . . . The final piece was discovered next to a mass grave.

Read more at JNS

More about: Archaeology, Holocaust, Judaism, Sobibor

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