Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz.
From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada.
Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective. The War Against the Jews, — A history of how anti-Semitism evolved into the Holocaust in Germany: Dawidowicz argues that genocide was, to the Nazis, as central a war goal as conquering Europe, and was made possible by a combination of political, social, and technological factors. When Scotland Was Jewish: The popular image of Scotland is dominated by widely recognized elements of Celtic culture.
The authors provide evidence that many of the national heroes, villains, rulers, nobles, traders, merchants, bishops, guild members, burgesses, and ministers of Scotland were of Jewish descent, their ancestors originating in France and Spain. A more accurate and profound understanding of Scottish history has thus been buried.
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream.
At the same time, Schneerson also suggested on occasion that the Holocaust could be compared to surgery. Not all human beings are able to perceive it, but it is very much there.
So it is not impossible for the physical destruction of the Holocaust to be spiritually beneficial. On the contrary, it is quite possible that physical affliction is good for the spirit. As Bauer notes in his article, Chaika Grossman, a former Knesset member, had published an article in Hamishmar on 22 August quoting Schneerson and expressing her profound shock at his surgery analogue. On 28 August , the Rebbe sent her a reply on his personal stationery in which he confirmed the substance of the analogue—albeit not the import drawn by her.
Whether the citation of the analogue, taken out of context and of dubious authority, indicates a "justification of God's ways to man" remains unclear, in any case, especially in light of Schneerson's authorized published works. What systematic scholarly studies of Schneerson's philosophy do show is that such questions in general must be understood in their specifically epistemological character. As the Rebbe explained in his letter to Grossman, it is because we have no understanding why the Holocaust had to happen that we must believe, as a matter of faith or trust in God emunah , that it is ultimately for the benefit for those who perished as well as Jews and humanity at large.
The Rebbe does not attempt to explain what the benefit is. But it is evidently eschatological - messianic. As is the rationale for the "surgery.
(god) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought by Zachary Braiterman
The analogue only works if human beings in their present state of understanding are compared to an unwitting person who has never heard of surgery who suddenly sees, for the first time, surgeons cutting open an apparently "healthy" human being. Somewhat in the spirit in Immanuel Kant 's essay on theodicy, [13] the only "Holocaust theology" clearly propounded and endorsed by the Lubavitcher Rebbe is practical, rather than theoretical, messianism. It is within a pragmatic-messianic framework of thinking that emunah "faith" shows itself to be the transcendental condition of the very questioning and prosecution of God and the indignant revolt against God.
For it could in no way be otherwise. If only the problem is meant with truth, and it is the expression and product of a true feeling of justice and uprightness, then it is logical that such a deep feeling can only come from being convinced that true justice is the justice that stems from a super-human source, that is, from something higher than both human intellect and human feeling.
Moreover, he must—after a rattling outrage and a thorough grieving—ultimately come to the conclusion: Nevertheless I remain confident [ ani maamin ].
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Modern Orthodox rabbis such as Joseph Soloveitchik , Norman Lamm , Randalf Stolzman, Abraham Besdin, Emanuel Rackman , Eliezer Berkovits , and others have written on this issue; many of their works have been collected in a volume published by the Rabbinical Council of America in a volume entitled: Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein 's original piece on this issue, After Auschwitz , held that the only intellectually honest response to the Holocaust is to reject God, and to recognize that all existence is ultimately meaningless.
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There is no divine plan or purpose, no God that reveals His will to mankind, and God does not care about the world. Man must assert and create his own value in life. This view has been rejected by Jews of all religious denominations, but his works were widely read in the Jewish community in the s. Since that time Rubenstein has begun to move away from this view; his later works affirm a form of deism in which one may believe that God may exist as the basis for reality and some also include Kabbalistic notions of the nature of God.
No man can really say that God is dead. How can we know that? Nevertheless, I am compelled to say that we live in the time of the "death of God". This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God. The death of God is a cultural fact When I say we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken Emil Fackenheim is known for his understanding that people must look carefully at the Holocaust, and to find within it a new revelation from God.
For Fackenheim, the Holocaust was an "epoch-making event". In contrast to Richard Rubenstein's views, Fackenheim holds that people must still affirm their belief in God and God's continued role in the world. Fackenheim holds that the Holocaust reveals unto us a new Biblical commandment: He said that rejecting God because of the Holocaust was like giving in to Hitler. In a rare view that has not been adopted by any sizable element of the Jewish or Christian community, Ignaz Maybaum has proposed that the Holocaust is the ultimate form of vicarious atonement.
The Jewish people become in fact the "suffering servant" of Isaiah. The Jewish people suffer for the sins of the world. Eliezer Berkovits held that man's free will depends on God's decision to remain hidden.
If God were to reveal himself in history and hold back the hand of tyrants, man's free will would be rendered non-existent. This is a view that is loosely based on the kabbalistic concept of nahama d'kissufa bread of shame - the idea that greater satisfaction is achieved when one becomes deserving of a blessing rather than when it is given as a gift. Kabbalah teaches that this is one of the reasons God created man with free will and with obligations, and that in order to maintain that free will, God reduces the extent to which he manifests himself in the world tzimtzum.
Harold Kushner , William E. Kaufman and Milton Steinberg believe that God is not omnipotent, and thus is not to blame for mankind's abuse of free will. Thus, there is no contradiction between the existence of a good God and the existence of massive evil by part of mankind. It is claimed that this is also the view expressed by some classical Jewish authorities, such as Abraham ibn Daud , Abraham ibn Ezra , and Gersonides. David Weiss Halivni , a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, says that the effort to associate the Shoah and sin is morally outrageous.
He holds that it is unwarranted on a strict reading of the Tanakh. He claims that it reinforces an alarming tendency among ultra-Orthodox leaders to exploit such arguments on behalf of their own authority. In "Prayer in the Shoah" he gives his response to the idea that the Holocaust was a punishment from God:. What happened in the Shoah is above and beyond measure l'miskpat: There is no transgression that merits such punishment Irving Greenberg is a Modern Orthodox rabbi who has written extensively on how the Holocaust should affect Jewish theology.
Greenberg has an Orthodox understanding of God, he does not believe that God forces people to follow Jewish law; rather he believes that Jewish law is God's will for the Jewish people, and that Jews should follow Jewish law as normative. Greenberg's break with Orthodox theology comes with his analysis of the implications of the Holocaust. He writes that the worst thing that God could do to the Jewish people for failing to follow the law is Holocaust-level devastation, yet this has already occurred.
Greenberg is not claiming that God did use the Holocaust to punish Jews; he is just saying that if God chose to do so, that would be the worst possible thing. There really is nothing worse that God could do. Therefore, since God cannot punish us any worse than what actually has happened, and since God does not force Jews to follow Jewish law, then we cannot claim that these laws are enforceable on us.
Therefore, he argues that the covenant between God and the Jewish people is effectively broken and unenforceable. Greenberg notes that there have been several terrible destructions of the Jewish community, each with the effect of distancing the Jewish people further from God.
According to rabbinic literature, after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the mass-killing of Jerusalem's Jews, the Jews received no more direct prophecy. After the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem and the mass-killing of Jerusalem's Jews, the Jews no longer could present sacrifices at the Temple. This way of reaching God was at an end. After the Holocaust, Greenberg concludes that God does not respond to the prayers of Jews anymore.
Thus, God has unilaterally broken his covenant with the Jewish people. In this view, God no longer has the moral authority to command people to follow his will. Greenberg does not conclude that Jews and God should part ways; rather he holds that we should heal the covenant between Jews and God, and that the Jewish people should accept Jewish law on a voluntary basis. His views on this subject have made him the subject of much criticism within the Orthodox community. A Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel was the author of 57 books, including Night , a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps.
(god) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
Wiesel's play The Trial of God is about a trial in which God is the defendant, and is reportedly based on events that Wiesel himself witnessed as a teenager in Auschwitz. Over the course of the trial, a number of arguments are made, both for and against God's guilt. Wiesel's theological stance, illustrated through the intuitive possibilities of literature, is a theology of existentialist protest, which neither denies God, nor accepts theodicies.
The ending sees the hope of renewed mystical reconciliation with God. Blumenthal, in his book Facing the Abusing God , has drawn on data from the field of child abuse and has proposed "worship of God through protest" as a legitimate response of survivors of both the Holocaust and child abuse. Another writer addressing survivors of the Holocaust and child abuse is John K. Live Options in Theodicy The traditional notion of an impassible unmoved mover had died in those camps and was no longer tenable.
Holocaust theology
Moltmann proposes instead a crucified God who is both a suffering and protesting God. This is in contrast both with the move of theism to justify God's actions and the move of atheism to accuse God. Moltmann's theology of the cross was later developed into liberation theologies from suffering people under Stalinism in Eastern Europe and military dictatorships in South America and South Korea. In the address given on the occasion of his visit to the extermination camp of Auschwitz , Pope Benedict XVI suggested a reading of the events of the Holocaust as motivated by a hatred of God himself.
Nonetheless, he proposes that the actions of the Nazis can be seen as having been motivated by a hatred of God and a desire to exalt human power, with the Holocaust serving as a means by which to erase witness to God and his Law:. Most coverage of the address was positive, with praise from Italian and Polish rabbis. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called the visit historic, and the address and prayers "a repudiation of antisemitism and a repudiation of those A few Jewish commentators have objected to what they perceive as a desire to Christianize the Holocaust.
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