Affirming life in the Shoa’s shadow 

 (from this week’s NJ Jewish News)

By Andrew Silow-Carroll 

Afew years back I was stunned and saddened 

by a high school student’s report 

on the “March of the Living.� The 

march brings Jewish teens to Poland on Yom 

Hashoa, Holocaust Memorial Day, where 

they walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. 

Leaving Poland, they arrive 

in Israel, where they observe 

Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel 

Independence Day. 

  

The trip is usually 

described in terms of 

redemption and rebirth, 

from the ashes of the concentration 

camps to the 

reflowering of the Jewish 

people in Israel. The student 

I heard, however, focused 

almost exclusively on the grim tour of the 

camps and his disturbing encounters with 

Poles. He saw in each the face of at best a collaborator 

and at worst a murderer. He took 

away from his visit the lesson that our enemies 

are always with us. 

  

I saw this as a monumental educational 

failure, as if the goal of the march was to 

transfer one generation’s pathology to the 

next. It was one student’s reaction, to be sure, 

but it made me wonder how my own kids 

were assimilating the Holocaust into their 

own Jewish identities. 

  

An Israel-based writer who calls himself 

Ahad La’am, whose article appears on page 6 

of this issue, seems to be asking the same 

question. In the essay, which originally 

appeared in the journal Sh’ma, he suggests 

that the Jewish community’s emphasis on 

Holocaust remembrance has distorted its values. 

“In seeking to affirm the value of memory 

around the Shoa,� he writes, “the Jewish 

people have crossed inadvertently over the 

line separating life-affirming civilizations 

from cults of death.� 

  

I hesitated at first to publish the essay, in 

part because he writes under a pseudonym. 

The author should have the courage to face 

the consequences of expressing an opinion 

that is bound to rile and offend many in the 

Jewish community. In the end, however, the 

essay’s strength is indeed its ability to rile and 

offend — and perhaps, like all strong essays, 

help readers clarify their own thoughts on an 

often taboo subject. It certainly worked for 

me; I ended up not only disagreeing with the 

author, but also expanding my own views of 

the role of Shoa remembrance in Jewish life. 

  

La’am takes up an argument 

that began almost as 

soon as the enormity of the 

Holocaust became known in 

the West. Israel’s founding 

generation preferred to 

emphasize the resistance of 

the ghetto fighters and partisans 

over the impotence of 

those led to slaughter. 

Survivors chose for many 

years not to dwell on their 

losses and escape, focusing instead on 

rebuilding their shattered lives, raising families, 

planting roots in their new countries. 

  

Crises in Israel — the ominous prelude to 

the Six-Day War, the shocking setbacks of the 

Yom Kippur War — transformed Holocaust 

memory, and not only among survivors. 

Israel’s vulnerability seemed to release the 

floodgates of both personal and institutional 

memory. Survivors began to tell their stories; 

communities began to erect Holocaust 

memorials and museums. 

  

A backlash of sorts was inevitable, and it 

crystallized around the creation of the 

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

in Washington, starting in the late 1970s. 

Critics, much like La’am, feared the museum 

would signal to the nation that the Holocaust 

— not thousands of years of tradition, culture, 

learning, and peoplehood — defined 

the Jews. Perhaps worse, said critics, the 

memorials and museums were attracting 

money and resources that would be better 

spent on rebuilding Jewish life through ritual, 

education, and social action. 

  

Much of this criticism now strikes me as 

offensive, because the debate has taken place 

within the living memory of the Holocaust 

itself. La’am and others seem prepared to 

“put the Shoa behind us,� even as its last eyewitnesses 

still live and breathe and as the 

world continues to struggle with its legacy. 

  

And what is that legacy? The narrative of 

the major Holocaust museums, including 

Washington’s and Yad Vashem, links the 

Nazis’ attempts to annihilate the Jews with 

the life-affirming response of the Jews themselves. 

They detail the horrors of genocide — 

even understate them, because any attempt 

to grasp the deaths of six million is invariably 

an understatement — but also link the 

Holocaust to the birth of Israel, the resilience 

of the survivors, the courage of the ghetto 

fighters, and the rebirth of Jewish culture 

and charity throughout the Diaspora. Some 

students are bound to emerge from the 

March of the Living with morbid thoughts. 

But it is called the March of the Living, after 

all, and its most moving images are those of 

Jewish teenagers gathered at the gates of 

Auschwitz, mocking Hitler’s dreams of a 

“Final Solution.� 

  

In describing the Jewish genius at “affirming 

life,� La’am appears to be invoking the 

writings of Rabbi Irving “Yitz� Greenberg. 

Greenberg has placed this affirmation at the 

center of his theology, and calls his educational 

outfit the Jewish Life Network. But 

remember too that Greenberg is a former 

chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 

Council. There is no contradiction here. The 

Holocaust, he writes, was “the most total 

assault of death on the people who teach that 

life will triumph.� 

  

In urging Jews to “move on,� La’am is asking 

us to ignore this essential 20th- and 21stcentury 

dialectic — one that repeats as a pattern 

throughout Jewish history. It is not morbid 

or death-obsessed to confront this struggle 

between life and death, especially in the 

light of the awesome Jewish responses to the 

Holocaust. 

  

In his book The Jewish Way, Greenberg 

reminds us that Yom Hashoa occurs one 

week before Israel’s Independence Day. “The 

Jewish people responded to the total assault 

of death by an incredible outpouring of life,� 

he writes. “The survivors came and rebuilt 

their lives. Jewish life was made precious 

again.� 

  

The true cult of death had been vanquished. 

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