Yad Vashem and Shabbat
By Jacob Witten
This Friday morning, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.It was a guided tour, with an incredibly knowledgeable guide – he has lived in both Israel and the US and has been in education for a long time, so he was able to
connect with everyone. Unlike most of my museum/memorial experiences, where I tend to try to at least skim everything with the result that I don’t feel like I have the time to go deeply into one story, the visit was structured as a series of vignettes. It
worked really well. The Holocaust was such an unfathomably, tragic event that the mind can’t really encompass it, like the quote from Stalin about how one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. It helped me understand the magnitude
of the Holocaust to hear about it on community-level stories like life and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, or individual stories like the Jewish artist in a slave labor camp who managed to steal enough supplies to make a beautiful book for his child, but was then killed for smuggling out paintings depicting the terrible life in the camp. Those individual stories helped me understand how the Holocaust was a mosaic of millions of stories like that: beautiful, tragic, but almost invisible if not for the work of Yad Vashem and other keepers of Holocaust history.
Certainly the most meaningful moment of the trip, and a useful reminder of how important it is to have a true home where Jews can live without fear of persecution.The thing that stuck with me most was the guide’s description of the planning of the Holocaust. He pointed out that we emphasize education quite a bit, sometimes as though it’s a panacea for all the world’s problems, but the Holocaust didn’t come about as a result of lack of education. It was planned by highly intelligent people with elite educations, who just happened to utterly lack a moral compass. It was a useful reminder that all the technical know-how in the world is meaningless if we don’t couple that with a moral education.
After that, we wandered around neighborhoods and a market, and then went back to the hotel for Shabbat dinner. Before the actual dinner, we sang some songs and did the traditional Shabbat prayers, which was a fun way to get in the mood and a nice communal Jewish experience. Our resident Israelis set up a great series of games that night, a group competition in everything from identifying Israeli logos to singing Israeli songs (yours truly’s group came in third out of five).
