Schechter News | In the Media

The following article on Megillat Hashoah appeared in the Jerusalem Report on April 5, 2004. If you are interested in purchasing the Megillah, you can do so through the United Synagogue Book Service.

Pesah begins a season of emotionally charged commemorations, when we remember some of the brightest and darkest moments in Jewish history. Slavery in Egypt and the Exodus; the Shoah; the creation of Israel and the ongoing Arab ­Israeli war: These are events that are in­tertwined, emotionally if not historically, with one another. The closeness of the ob­servances serves, among other things, to remind us that night must be followed by dawn, but that some of our greatest triumphs have come at a horribly high price.

I have always had some ambivalence about Holocaust Day - or as it's known officially, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, which falls this year on April 19. No doubt we have a responsibility to remember an event of such unspeakable horror, but it's less clear to me why this is. Certainly out of respect for the dead, and for those still alive who endured such suf­fering.

But does remembrance serve anoth­er purpose? Is it a way to prevent future genocides? Maybe, but then it would seem that the people who should be commem­orating Holocaust Day are the perpetrators and their accomplices, not the victims and their descendants.

Is commemoration a call to us as Jews to remain vigilant? Probably, but that also raises the troubling question of whether there are things we could have done as a people to prevent the German attempt to annihilate us. It also leads me to wonder how much we have to gain from dwelling as much as we do on our status as perpetual victims.

I'm not sure I'm up to the task of an­swering those questions. What I can say is that the new liturgical text, "Megillat Hashoah" - the Shoah Scroll - offered to us by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, seems a fitting and also moving document to read on Holocaust Day. Some of it resembles the Book of Lamentations, and its Hebrew text is even marked with cantorial notations so that it can be chanted as that scroll is on Tisha Be'av. For the most part, though, it's a narrative, written in contemporary lan­guage somewhere between poetry and prose, non-Biblical but elevated, compre­hensible but not journalistic.

I spoke with the scroll's author, Avigdor Shinan, professor of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University here, about the creation of the text. He explained that he was part of a committee convened by the Schechter Institute, in response to a call by a Holocaust survivor in Toronto named Alex Eisen, after both the Israeli Chief Rabbinate and Bar-Ilan University turned down Eisen's request that they produce such a text. The Schechter Institute first turned to novelist Aharon Appelfeld to write the scroll, but what he produced wasn't deemed appropriate for a religious ceremony ("It was brilliant and beautiful," says Shinan, "but it was a story").

That's when Shinan himself volun­teered for the task.

"It was written through me, more than by me," he says, explaining that he went home and, as if possessed, turned out a draft within a few days. "I'm not a creator, I'm a scholar, and although I'm the son of Holocaust survivors, my par­ents didn't talk about it at home. But the Eichmann trial had a powerful effect on me as a high school student, and 'Schindler's List,' and literature I read and the ency­clopedia. Also stories from my uncle, who talked to me before his death, 40 years after the events. I didn't know I had all this in me, and then in several days, it came out. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life, a catharsis."

The scroll is divided into six chapters (five would have appeared too much an at­tempt to mimic Lamentations, and the sym­bolic significance of six is fairly clear), which together are intended to give the lis­tener or reader a sense of both the magnitude and relentless cruelty of the Holocaust.

The latter it does through personal testimonies, of a non-Jewish journalist who steals into a ghetto and describes the effects of starvation on the residents; of a woman gathered with others like herself from around Europe in a Nazi labor camp; of a young man who has survived countless horrors only to end up in a death camp ("I became one of the walking dead... when I die again, tear not your gar­ments; mourn not, for there is no death after death," as translated from Shinan's Hebrew by Jules Harlow).

"None of the stories is historical," Shinan told me, "but we checked that they could be." By that, he means that a com­mittee of scholars evaluated the credibility of the characters he created, and the prob­ability of the scenes he described. It was important to Shinan, though, not to refer to specific people, towns or camps. The most challenging issue he and his colleagues con­tended with was the theological explanation for the Holocaust. "Where was God?" he asks rhetorically. "I reject all attempts to give an answer to this. We don't know, we can't ask, and we have to live with it.

"I think you need a liturgical frame­work for remembrance, continued Shinan. "The survivors are disappearing; the oldest ones today were only children when the events took place. You need a religious framework, and the text is required." Shinan's was first published just in time for it to be read at Alex Eisen's synagogue, whose members funded the project, on Holocaust Day last year.

"I was in Toronto, despite SARS, along with some fifteen rabbis from the whole community, including Orthodox. It was very moving. People cried. But will they continue to read it? Will the custom last for more than a few years? That will be the test."

David B. Green