Defying the Nazis, Jews celebrated High Holy Days at all costs - Adi Hashmonai

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by Adi Hashmonai

New exhibition shows how Jews risked their lives to observe their traditions, even in the darkest of times. "For them, it was all about holding on to the known past, the sane past they had before things turned upside down," says archives director in museum.

Jewish men and women pray during Yom Kippur at the Łódź Ghetto | Photo: Archives Department of the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum

A new exhibition at The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum in northern Israel shows how Jewish traditions of the High Holy Days were preserved despite the horrors of the Holocaust.

The new exhibition features photographs, drawings, and various notes. It underscores the degree to which Jews risked their lives to continue their age-old practices during the intense period between Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, even as the world around them became hell on earth.

"The way in which people celebrated the High Holy Days was different from place to place. It was a function of whether the people were in ghettos, or in hiding, or in a concentration camp.

"In some cases, we have documents showing that people made an effort to celebrate those festivities right after the war," the museum's director of the Archives Department, Anat Bratman-Elhalel, told Israel Hayom.

"What is striking is the degree to which people went out of their way to keep carrying out the mitzvot, to keep the tradition alive under impossible conditions. For them, it was all about holding on to the known past, the sane past they had before things turned upside down," she said.

One of the photos shows men and women in the Łódź Ghetto on Yom Kippur, at a local synagogue. The photographer, Mendel Grossman, worked at the ghetto's Statistical Department and risked his life so that future generations would see what unfolded. He did not survive the Holocaust.

Unlike ghettos, in concentration camps the High Holy Days could not be celebrated in the open and such activity could lead to death.

But nevertheless, one document clearly shows how people observed Yom Kippur at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The document is the prayer of Kol Nidrei in Yiddish.

"Everything they had was taken from them upon arriving in the camp, and they were definitely not allowed to hold on to scripture or prayer books. If they kept something, they did so in secret and risked their lives," Bratman-Elhalel said."This prayer was written from memory; anyone writing this must have had a great deal of courage to do such a risky thing. It shows the degree to which people were determined to survive and how important prayer was to them."


Adi Hashmonai

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/09/29/defying-the-nazis-jews-celebrated-high-holy-days-at-all-costs/

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