Thumbing Our Nose at Hitler

The announcement of Felice and Alan Feldstein’s 1955 wedding at the Eagle’s Nest, the Nazis’ former mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

Tisha B’Av or Yom Hashoah? That is the question in some parts of the Orthodox community.

In 1951, the Knesset passed a resolution declaring 27 Nisan as Yom Hashoah V’hagevurah, the day to commemorate the Holocaust along with the heroism of those who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which started on Pesach 1943. In 1957, this annual day was enshrined in the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day Law, instituting an annual "commemoration of the disaster which the Nazis and their collaborators brought upon the Jewish people and the acts of heroism and revolt performed."

There was significant discussion and debate as to the best time to commemorate the Holocaust. Some in the Orthodox community felt that Tisha B’Av is the only date to commemorate all Jewish tragedy. They also objected to instituting a sad day in the joyous month of Nisan. In particular, the opposition to a separate Yom Hashoah by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein limited the embrace of this day by the Orthodox community.

We need Yom Hashoah. The Holocaust is too big a topic to be relegated to Tisha B’Av – or any one day in particular. Yom Hashoah is a day to reinforce the dual themes of recounting the horrors of the Holocaust and our obligation to move forward.

Remembering, commemorating, or learning lessons from the Holocaust can be very personal. It transcends the calendar and defies ritualization. Each person – survivor, children of survivors, relatives, everyone else – will bring their own experiences, opinions, and worldviews. Expressions like “Never again” or “Remember the Six Million” offer some context, but we will each respond differently to the horror of the Shoah. That’s the nature of tragedy.

This week, we read of the death of Aaron’s two sons. Aaron, famously, is silent – “Vayidom Aharon.” (Vayikra 10:3) Moshe, on the other hand, calls on the remaining sons of Aaron to get back to work despite their loss. We see that those most directly impacted have the right to respond in whatever way moves them. At the same time, there is an obligation to move forward.

We must seek out the stories of survivors while also rededicating ourselves to our obligation to ensure the Jewish people remain strong. Each of us can do this in our own way.

In February, the JTA reported on one couple’s response.

Felice Jacobs and Alan Feldstein could have tied the knot in Phoenix, where they met and where his mother worked at the local Reform synagogue. Or they could have held their wedding on the U.S. Army base in Austria where Alan was stationed at the time. Instead, they chose the Eagle’s Nest, the Nazis’ former mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps - a location that, as far as anyone knew, had never before hosted a Jewish wedding. “We got married there because my husband wanted to thumb his nose at Hitler,” Felice Feldstein recalled last week. Taking place just 10 years after Hitler’s defeat and death, the Feldsteins’ August 1955 nuptials were so notable that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency covered them at the time, identifying the event as “the first Orthodox Jewish wedding celebrated in the town of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat and to this day a hotbed of Nazism…”
 

According to family lore, Mark Feldstein recalled, his father’s mother was critical when the couple announced their third pregnancy. She asked why they were having so many children. “Well, Hitler murdered 6 million,” his father responded. “She shot back, ‘You don’t have to make up for all of them, do you?’”

This is the story of one couple’s response to Hitler. They couldn’t dance on his grave, but they could dance at their wedding at his vacation home.

Remembering the stories and the atrocities is essential, and it must be accompanied by what we are doing to ensure Jewish strength, survival, and continuity.

In 1965, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, wrote to a survivor:

...To remember is indeed an imperative and a duty - particularly in light of the growing campaign to forget and to make forgotten. And yet, remembering is only one part of the task that rests upon us. The other, and far more crucial, part is to actively counteract Hitler's so-called 'final solution'...Your first duty is to live: to assume an ordered life, a married life, to establish a Jewish home and a Jewish family. This will most definitively underscore Hitler's defeat: that not only did he not succeed in eliminating a certain Vishnitzer Chassid, but that this Vishnitzer Chassid will raise up children and grandchildren, generations upon generations of Vishnitzer Chassidim…

The dual obligation to grapple with memory while committing to move forward is appropriately captured by Israel’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah. Everyone is going about their day. Suddenly the country halts for two minutes as the siren blares. People spend time with their own emotions and reactions. Then, the country gets back to the task of living.

How will we commemorate Yom Hashoah? What can we do to remember the Holocaust? What are we doing to ensure the continued strength and vitality of the Jewish people?