Remember the horrors of the Holocaust
Indeed, it does offer a measure of consolation that American rabbis representing American Jewry as spiritual leaders did not keep silent, raising their agonizing voices when their European brethren were being slaughtered en masse in “civilized” Christian Europe. Not to have spoken would have constituted not only a sin of omission but also one of commission.
However, what remains disturbing and perhaps sinful, if not unpardonable, is that the well-intended pulpit messages of swelling pain could not stop the vast tragedy from unfolding into the destruction of no less than two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of world Jewry.
Prolific author Dr. Marc Saperstein, professor emeritus of Jewish history at George Washington University, offers us a wide window into that dark period with his latest exhaustive tome, “Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder, 19331945.” America, however, was silent to our bitter cry for help, which was denied and delayed, rendering it mere words blowing in the wind as if unspoken. We, who have elevated language to divine heights, discovered that Adolf Hitler’s hateful rhetoric proved more persuasive.
The voluminous pulpit sermons serve to glaringly highlight the inability to translate them into concrete action to save fellow Jews, so many, and they relied on us.
The failure of rabbinic preaching in the absence of a corresponding successful political campaign to arouse American leaders and particularly President Franklin Roosevelt toward redemptive action as our people went up in smoke, cannot be eradicated from our collective consciousness and guilty conscience; nor from American colossal failure to stand by basic morality when assailed by barbaric forces aimed at subverting and uprooting the Judeo-Christian heritage of human and humane values that Nazism declared, with good reason, adversarial to Hitler’s new “Chosen People” and “Aryan Commandments.”
Celebrated Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s lobbying efforts before FDR, his trusted friend, and some organized mass rallies and appeals proved futile even as the Allies were aware of the “Final Solution”
being actualized. While American anti-Semitism, anti- immigration/refugees and isolationism reigned supreme and presented FDR with tough challenges, he failed to assert presidential moral leadership allowing the Jewish people to undergo a crippling genocide, threatening its future potential and even survivability.
Bombing the railroads leading to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp where 1.1 million Jews of a total of 1.5 million victims were murdered, was deemed by FDR a diversion from fighting Nazi Germany even while the Allies’ planes, including American ones, were bombing chemical installations nearby. Davis S. Wyman’s monumental classic, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” (what an apt and shaking title!) is a must read. The New York Times, under Jewish ownership, buried Holocaust related events of mass murder in its back pages.
There is a sense of a high conspiracy early on if not to deny the Holocaust, to diminish it, thus reducing rescue efforts and success. Dare we remember that in 2017 in Charlottesville, white supremacists marched Nazi-like with torches without bothering to cover their heads with hoods, shouting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the scene in 2018 of the worst crime against Jews committed on American soil with 11 Jewish worshipers murdered on Shabbat. Other deadly anti-Semitic violence has followed.
Scapegoating anti-Semitism, racism, hatred and xenophobia concerning immigrants and refugees from “certain” backgrounds have resurfaced. The dreadful reference to “Auschwitz” does not shockingly resonate to an American public’s large segment only 70-some years following such grave historical events, despite multiple Holocaust museums.
Holocaust education and world history are essential tools in the never-ending struggle against forgetfulness, ignorance and prejudice with new genocides rising, each unique and the same.
Democracy, any democracy, is but a fragile institution as we witnessed so tragically in Germany, and its essential safeguards are demanding.