“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.
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