FAITH IN THE DEPTHS OF HELL 1
The order to kill every pregnant Jewish woman had been issued that
morning. So when a Nazi guard patrolling the Jewish ghetto in Kovno noticed a pregnant Jew walking past the local hospital,
he shot her at point-blank range. She died on the spot.
Hoping to save the baby, some passersby rushed the dead woman into
the hospital. An obstetrician determined that she had been in her last weeks of
pregnancy, and said that if surgery were performed immediately, her baby might
be rescued.
But could such surgery be squared with Jewish law, which is
stringent in its concern for the dignity of the dead? If the baby didn't make
it, the mother's body would have been mutilated for nothing.
The question was put to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry,
a young rabbinical scholar. He didn't hesitate. "When saving a life is
involved, we are not concerned with the desecration of the dead," he
ruled. Besides, if the murdered mother could speak, wouldn't she welcome the
"desecration" of her body if it would assure her baby's survival? He
ordered the operation to proceed at once, and the baby was born alive.
Then came a horrifying postscript.
"The cruel murderers . . . came into the hospital to write down the name
of the murdered woman. . . When they found the baby alive, their savage fury
was unleashed. One of the Germans grabbed the infant and cracked its skull
against the wall of the hospital room. Woe unto the eyes that saw this!"
This case from May 1942 was one of many that Rabbi Oshry was called upon to decide during the Nazi occupation
of
More than 90 percent of Kovno's 40,000
Jews were killed in the Holocaust - either by the Germans or by their Christian
Lithuanian collaborators. Rabbi Oshry was one of
those who survived. After the war he retrieved his notes and began writing them
out as full-length rabbinical rulings, or responsa.
These were ultimately published in five Hebrew volumes; in 1983 a book of
excerpts in English - Responsa from the Holocaust - was published by
Judaica Press.
I read Responsa from the Holocaust soon after it came
out, and found it deeply moving. With the approach of Holocaust Remembrance
Day, I took it down from the bookshelf last week - and again found it powerful
and affecting. The questions laid before Rabbi Oshry can reduce you to tears, but what is really
extraordinary, I saw now, was that anyone would care enough to ask such
questions in the first place.
In October 1941, "one of the respected members of the
community" asked Rabbi Oshry if he could commit
suicide. His wife and children had been seized by the Nazis, and he knew that
their murder was imminent. He feared that the Nazis would force him to watch as
his family was killed, and the prospect of witnessing their deaths was a horror
he couldn't bear to face. He begged for permission to take his own life and
avoid seeing his loved ones die.
Later that month, the head of another household came to Rabbi Oshry "with tears of anguish on his face." His
children were starving to death and he was desperate to find food for them. His
query was about a bit of property that had been left behind by the family in
the next apartment. The entire family had been butchered a few days earlier,
and there were no surviving relatives. Under Jewish law, could he take what
remained of their belongings and sell them to raise cash for food?
Next to such questions, answers seem almost superfluous. (The
rabbi did not permit the suicide; he allowed the neighbors' property to be
taken.) What is stunning is that men and women in the throes of such hideous
suffering and brutality were still concerned about adhering to Jewish law. In
the lowest depths of the Nazi hell, in a place of terror and savagery that most
of us cannot fathom, here were human beings who refused to relinquish their
faith - who refused even to violate a religious precept without first asking if
it was allowed.
Violence, humiliation, and hunger will reduce some people to
animals willing to do anything to survive. The Jews who sought out Rabbi Oshry - like Jews in so many other corners of Nazi Europe -
were not reduced but elevated, reinforced in their belief, determined against
crushing odds to walk in the ways of their fathers.
Some Jews fought the Nazis with guns and sabotage, Rabbi Oshry would later say; others fought by persisting in
Jewish life. In the end, Responsa from the Holocaust
is a chronicle of courage and resistance - and a profound inspiration to
believers of every faith.
Footnotes:
1. Published: Sunday,
2.