How Jews Kept Time During the Holocaust

“Many writers and scholars have taken note of the ways that Holocaust victims experienced an assault on their fundamental sense of time,” the writer Eli Rubin observes in a review of a new book, The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars by Alan Rosen. But Rosen is less interested in the assault itself than in the ways Jews caught up in the Holocaust resisted it. Crucial to maintaining their sense of time was the art of calendar-making, and especially the art of making a Jewish calendar (lu’aḥ).

For Rosen, . . . a mere description of the debilitating impositions of Holocaust time is insufficient. His purpose is not to describe the victimization of the Jews, but rather to describe the ways in which Jews used time as a tool of resistance, as a tool by which to transcend the diabolical tyrannies of the present.

Rosen persuasively argues that the craft of calendar-making served to inscribe this existential aspiration, this optimistic orientation toward the future, in a form that was not only tangible but also of immediate practical use. Access to a Jewish calendar, he writes, “maintained a continuity with the near and distant past and, more audaciously, projected a seamless future wherein Sabbaths and festivals would predictably arrive at their appointed times.”

This is the fundamental insight that undergirds Rosen’s meticulous examination of some 40 Holocaust-era calendars: By keeping track of as many particulars of the lu’aḥ as circumstances allowed, Jews were able to endow these dark days with sacred prescience.

It is not simply that these calendars attest to the resilience of the human spirit in a general way. Rosen repeatedly emphasizes that these are Jewish calendars, and that it was by marking time Jewishly that the authors of these artifacts empowered themselves not merely to resist the foreclosure of time but also to realize their own enduring spiritual freedom.

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Holocaust

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF