Last week I was granted a privilege that will hopefully stay with me for the rest of my life. Together with my JRoots co-founder, Zvi Sperber, I travelled to Poland with the JRoots team to take care of 120 survivors and their families who were making the journey to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. During these memorable days, which we organised in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, the JRoots team gained new perspectives on a story we each thought we already knew.
Over the last20 years that I have been actively involved in Holocaust education, I have met and interviewed hundreds of survivors. Most of these meetings have taken place in the comfort of their own homes or at family simchas. JRoots has also been privileged to take tens of survivors back to Poland with groups of students. But many on the JRoots team remarked that nothing had prepared them for the experience of standing shoulder to shoulder with a thousand people, in a place where over a thousand times this number met their end in the now crumbling crematoria.
Perhaps then, more than any other time in my life, I felt connected to the soul of the Jewish people. A hundred and twenty survivors, together with family members from across the entire religious spectrum, were all enveloped with a palpable sense of unity and camaraderie. Emotions ran high as the survivors blessed the crowd with the traditional Jewish blessing of yevarechecha at the gates of death at the entrance to Birkenau. As each of us listened to story after story, we experienced in extremis the unbelievable ability for the Jewish people to unite without judgement. One can never really know what any other human being has endured- even more so in this context, where the survivors’ experiences are so far beyond anything we could possibly imagine.
As a Rabbi and an educator, for many years I have had a mini pair of shoes sitting on my desk as a poignant reminder; never judge another person until you stand in their place or can stand in their shoes.
As I roamed through the crowd, meeting and greeting this remarkable cadre of individuals, I noticed a real paradox. On the one hand, there was an intense sadness as people both recalled their trauma and the loved ones that they lost. These are people who have carried such pain and alienation for so long that it is impossible to fathom how they are able to come back to this dark place. Yet, at the same time, there was an incredible sense of connection, warmth, love and positivity in the room. There was a real sense of triumph and heroism that was especially evident from those who returned with their grandchildren.
As someone who grew up in with the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, I am engrained with the mantra ‘Let my People Go’, however, last week was a call to ‘Let my People know’. We are charged now not only with the mission of retelling their story to the world, but also to keep standing together as One People, connected by far more than anything that divides us.
This legacy is encapsulated in two words, words that were heard more than any others, just75 years ago in that very place- Shema Yisrael. Shema, we have to listen to each other, unreservedly, with no agenda. Yisrael, realising that each and every Jew is worthy of love and respect, never with judgement.
Rabbi Naftali Schiff, Co-Founder and Director of JRoots, Partner of Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation for Auschwitz 75 and member of Jewish Futures.
