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THE SHOAH SCROLL
by Shahar Ilan, Ha'aretz, May 5, 2005
The Orthodox response to the Holocaust is far from uniform. For instance, Haredim object to the officially observed Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day (Yom Hashoah) due to its secular content and the fact that it falls in the month of Nisan, when mourning is forbidden. In addition, there is still no broadly accepted text for Holocaust Day such as exists for Tisha B'Av (the Book of Lamentations), the Passover seder (the Haggada) and Purim (the Book of Esther).
One group that has adopted Holocaust Day and is proposing a unique liturgical text is the Conservative movement, which this year published Megillat Hashoah (the Shoah Scroll), composed by literature professor Avigdor Shinan. The scroll completes the Conservative initiative to formulate an order of unique prayers for Holocaust Day. The introduction to the Shoah Scroll states, in the spirit of the Passover Haggada, that, "The new commandment of Jewish life is that each of us must see himself as if he has witnessed the Shoah with his own flesh."
The scroll contains six chapters, to commemorate the 6 million. Among the chapters: The testimony of a young Jewish man who was employed in a death camp disposing of bodies, and was forced to remove the gold teeth from the mouth of his dead brother, and the testimony of a Christian who sneaked into the Warsaw Ghetto. The scroll contends with the ultimate religious question - where was God in the Holocaust? "Was this thing known in the heavens? Was all decreed by the Merciful God? - There is no voice and no answer, only infuriating silence."
In the same context, one of the Conservatives' prayers for Holocaust Day includes the statement, "We came to ask the questions that have no answer, but they cannot be left without a question."
The president of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Reuven Hammer, writes in the introduction to the scroll, "We must not say or teach that the Shoah was the will of God or a punishment that God imposed on us - it may be that we do not have an answer to the mysteries of the Shoah, but there are answers that we must completely reject."
The scroll ends with the following recommendations: "Do not mourn too much, but do not sink into the forgetfulness of apathy; do not let the Days of Darkness return - cry and also wipe away the tear; do not have mercy and do not forgive, do not try to understand; teach to live without response: by your blood you shall live."
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