Observant survivors keep the faith after Holocaust - USATODAY.com
It’s a huge question for observant Jews: How can one still believe in a merciful God after suffering through the worst genocide in history?
As the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, members of Israel’s most devout group will remember the victims with prayer, study of scripture and a deep conviction in a grand plan that is beyond their earthly comprehension.
Many notable survivors, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, have famously questioned where God was during the Holocaust. But survivors from the insular ultra-Orthodox community say they felt a divine presence even in the worst places imaginable.
After years of silence, a small group of pious elderly survivors have begun meeting in a weekly support group at a senior center in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, sharing their thoughts on how they reconcile with a Lord that allowed the destruction of their homes, their families and 6 million of their people.
“We stayed alive. We survived. How could this have happened without the almighty?” said Alex Seidenfeld, an 82-year-old survivor from Hungary, who said he saw “miracles” unfold daily in Nazi concentration camps. “The almighty knows what he is doing. He has a plan that we sometimes don’t understand.”
The ultra-Orthodox support group is the first of its kind, and members say their community’s public silence on the Holocaust has been misunderstood. In the eyes of most secular Israelis, the ultra-Orthodox have, at best, a cavalier approach to the Holocaust.
When Israel holds its own Holocaust commemorations each spring, the ultra-Orthodox do not participate. They ignore the two-minute air raid siren that brings the country to a standstill, calling it a foreign ritual unfit for Jews. They shun the somber songs and speeches of official ceremonies and reject the Israeli ethos of a Zionist state rising out the ashes of the Holocaust.
This has fueled anger toward the ultra-Orthodox from mainstream Israelis, who resent the closed community for avoiding military service, imposing religious restrictions on others and for collecting government subsidies to study in seminaries rather than entering the work force.
There have been street clashes, during which extremists in the ultra-Orthodox community have further antagonized other Israelis by calling policemen and journalists Nazis.
At a recent protest by a fringe group against secular resistance to ultra-Orthodox gender segregation, demonstrators wore yellow Nazi-like Star of David patches with the word “Jude,” German for Jew. They dressed their children in striped black-and-white uniforms associated with Nazi camps, transporting them in the back of a truck. The image of a child mimicking an iconic photo of a terrified Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto appeared on the front of every newspaper.
Most ultra-Orthodox denounced such protests, but that made little difference to mainstream Israelis.
Yet these provocations belie the fact that the ultra-Orthodox community was perhaps the hardest hit of any in World War II. Easily identified by their long beards, sidelocks and distinctive black garb, they were targeted first. Nearly all their seminaries were destroyed, their rabbinical leaders murdered and the community almost entirely obliterated.
Unlike the Zionists, who found comfort in establishing Israel, or communists who sought immersion in the Soviet Union, the ultra-Orthodox largely had no solace in the war’s aftermath, said Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Their spiritual center was destroyed. They were inferior compared to other ideologies like liberal America, which was attractive after the war,” he said. “They were focused on one thing only — rehabilitating their community.”