| | Print | Email

Yom Hashoah VeHagevurah, April 27, 2003


Jeanette Friedman,
New York , USA
Chief of Staff, Jewish War Veterans Auxiliary, Department of New Jersey

A Speech presented at Liberty State Park, Jersey City New Jersey

Mir Zeynen du. We are here.

In this truly amazing space-with the world open before us, and so many symbols of what life is like in the 21st century spread before us in a glorious land and seascape.

So many symbols, so many lessons, so many lives…

Zug nisht kein mol as du geist dem letzten veyg
Chost himlen blyeneh frashtellen bloya teg
Cumen vet unz inzer oisgebenkte shu
Tsvet a pyog tun unzer trot
Mir zeynen du.

Never say that you are on your final road
Even when blue skies are obscured by grey clouds
The hour of salvation we have asked for will arrive
Our marching steps will sound like thunder
We are here.


 

Every year, we sing these words, as around the world, we remember the losses the Jews suffered during the Holocaust, an event so huge, despite the genocides committed since, that we cannot wrap our brains around it. We try to understand the nature of man and why so many thrive on destruction and hate. Perhaps it is because they are entombed in the past, locked into their palaces and fortresses, their history and their bloodshed.

A recent trip to the Dalmatian coastline and Croatia, where Diocletian was the first Holy Roman Emperor and his son Constantine lifted his bloody sword against the Jews, proved to me that if you love the past too much and don't let go, you cannot find your way into the future.

Good people attempt to beat swords into ploughshares, to be a light unto the nations, by teaching people to stop the hate-but these days, they feel they might be tilting at windmills.

Look at what hate has wrought!

Hate created the hole in skyline behind me, where the World Trade Center once stood and three thousand souls were lost. Hate created the Holocaust, the pogroms and Crusades against the Jews in Europe, a hate that goes back to the Jewish chutzpah of refusing to worship Moloch and participate in other death cults.

Instead, the Jews became the human sacrifices for xenophobia. First in the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin and then in Europe. Europe is a place, where even after the Holocaust, Polish citizens and other Europeans still felt the need to slaughter Jews. In light of Europe's behavior concerning restitutions to the victims, its behavior during the war in the Balkans, its positions on the Israeli Peace Process and again as America fought in Iraq, would we be wrong to say that Europe is morally bankrupt and that nothing much has changed in the last 60 years?

Today European antisemitism has been married to Islamic Jew hatred. European-created right-wing and left-wing antisemitism have evolved into a new virus spreading through Asia and Africa that result in death for Americans in Beirut, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and in New York City, Pennsylvania and Washington DC. Jews have died in America, in Israel and Europe.

Hate and genocide go hand in everywhere we look: Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor, Yemen, the Sudan, Lebanon, the Former Yugoslavia. We live in a world where the words "ethnic cleansing" hint at "sanitation engineers" cleaning up garbage instead of murdering people.

There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in a hour, how much time must pass before the world changes? This year marks the 60th anniversary of a seminal event, the Jewish Uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the fiercest battles the Nazis encountered in the course of the war.

So you might ask, what does this have to do with me? Why do we bother remembering the Holocaust? Who cares about Six Million Dead Jews?

Ah, but the Holocaust is not about six million dead Jews. It is about what people can do to each other if hatred is allowed to fester.

Today, Yom Hashoah VeHagevurah is the day we also remember that a handful of brave Jews, men women and even children, chose life-and gave the Nazis a hard time that began with Molotov cocktails and rusty guns on the first night of Passover 1943. That battle lasted for four long weeks, and 7,000 people were slaughtered before the remaining 49,000 were deported to Treblinka and other hell holes.

There are all kinds of riffs one could offer on the Passover theme--including that of generals preparing for war against the pagan Romans and Greeks--but choosing life is the strongest of them. It is the basis of Judaism. Passover is the festival of the rejection of pagan gods that demanded human sacrifices.
Each of the ten plagues was a direct negation of such Egyptian gods.

Did you know that the Uprising was the true Torah answer to Nazism and the SS Death Cult? The fierce Ghetto Fighters chose life, as did Abraham and Moses before them.

Among them was a Chassidic young man, my uncle, Yaakov Rabinowicz, scion of a great family of well-known rabbis, who was taken from Landau's Brush Factory to the Umschalgplatz and shoved into a cattle car headed for Treblinka. Among those stuffed in the car with him were infants crying for water, old people and the young.

Because he was in no hurry to undress and hung back once they arrived at the death camp, Yaakov was assigned to load the cattle car they'd just left. The Jews were suffocating in the gas chambers as he loaded their shoes and clothing into the wagon. He describes in meticulous detail all the different kinds of shoes, the smell of burning flesh and how he learns that his fellow travelers are all already dead. His description is found in Hillel Siedman's Warsaw Diary.

To escape certain death, my uncle jumped into the cattle car and hid under the clothes of the damned. The Germans came to look for him with their bayonets, but did not find him. The train headed back to Warsaw, and he jumped off to make his way back into the ghetto, where he began his mission to tell everyone what he saw and why they had to fight for their lives.

He hooked up with Emmanuel Ringleblum, an organizer of the uprising. We have witnesses today who still remember Yaakov as a haunted man, who went from bunker to bunker, urging people to choose life, to fight those who wanted us dead.

On the first night of the uprising, on the first Seder night, Yaakov was killed by Germans as he tried to choose life in the Ghetto. It is said he died with a Molotov cocktail in his hands.

And now we ask: Why is this Yom Hashoah different from other Yimei Hashoah?

And the answer is: In every generation, we consider ourselves as if we ourselves came out of Egypt. Here we stand, at a site directly linked to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto by the work of the artist Nathan Rappaport, who shows the love of the liberator, right here in Liberty State Park, and the heroism of the Ghetto Fighters in the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, in the monument he created there to honor their courage. We are linked by his creations from this site to that one in Poland.

Behind his work here, is that gaping hole in Manhattan's skyline, blown there by religious hatred. It stands directly over the place where the Jews of Brazil, fleeing from the Portuguese Inquisition, landed in 1654, their quest for religious freedom granted--but not without a fight. That landing is but a few hundred meters from where the Museum of Jewish Heritage stands, burning as a beacon of life, The Living Memorial to the Holocaust, where the LIVES of our antecedents are examined and celebrated.

We stand here, in the aptly named Liberty State Park, ironically, within sight of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to remember what it is like to live without liberty, without the love of our neighbors, without peace, without prosperity, without the pursuit of happiness. And we can see with our own eyes, how a phoenix can rise from ashes, just as America rose from the ashes of a hate-ripped Europe, as Israel rose from the ashes of Auschwitz and the other death camps and the sand and ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

We stand here and we thank the liberators, we thank all people of good will who understand democracy and know that freedom is a privilege, not a right. We stand firm with those who choose life and are willing to lay their lives on the line to preserve the freedoms that have cost us all so dearly. We will do more than survive. We will build and rebuild. Examine again the skyline in front of you.

On that Manhattan skyline are buildings built by the Reichman brothers, Holocaust Survivors Soon the hole Osama Bin Laden blew into our skyline will be filled by the realization of a soaring concept that comes from the mind of a child of Holocaust Survivors, Daniel Libeskind. The Survivors didn't go away. They choose life, a vibrant and dynamic life.

Those Survivors and their descendants, and others like them have moved on, they have walked through the valley of death and emerged on the other side to create and become givers of life, to be alive and to give of themselves. They have enriched our lives, emboldened us to stand up for what we believe in and to fight for truth and justice in the true Jewish and American ways.

Our message to the world is to choose life; to choose good, to be ethical, to teach our children to love and respect each other, to take responsibility for each other. For in the end, after all, we are our brother's keepers.