Orthodoxy and the Holocaust

In his book called Sliding to the Right, Samuel Heilman provides a summary of his insights from his previous publications and tries to provide a coherent sociological narrative of how American Orthodoxy became what it is today. One area, and there are many, where I disagree with Heilman’s account of the origins and development of Orthodoxy is the role he attributes to the Holocaust in shaping the attitudes of the community. He uses the Holocaust as a sort of deus- ex- machina to solve the problems that occur in his narrative. Why do charedim have so many children? Answer: the Holocaust. The charedi world was determined not to give Hitler a posthumous victory. Sounds right, except for one thing. Why didn’t all the other Jews that went through the Holocaust have a lot of kids? Even the Orthodox Frankfurt Jews in Washington Heights, who were certainly as familiar as the Hungarians and the American yeshiva people with the Holocaust, did not have large families. Second, each subsequent generation in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish life has more kids than the previous generation. If the grandparents, having lived through the terrible years of the Hitler period, didn’t think the Holocaust were grounds for having ten kids, why did the children need a victory over Nazism? No problem…the parents couldn’t, you see they were 'greener' (new immigrants) , but the children could. Maybe. And why do the grandchildren 60 years later have even more children? Aduh.

Similarly, Heilman uses the Holocaust as a way of giving an account of why charedim were secessionist from American culture and why they work so hard to form a counterculture. He gives scant attention to the fact that charedim were secessionist in Europe. Rabbi S.R. Hirsch used this technique with great success in Frankfurt, the Hungarians picked it up, and it became a dominant idea in Agudah circles. In Eastern Europe, where there wasn’t any reform and the kulturkampf was less severe, there was still a tradition of limited contact with secular Jews and the gentile environment. One doesn’t need a Holocaust to explain why Ultra-Orthodox life is inward looking and xenophobic. If the holocaust was crucial in the self definition of charedim, Reb Moshe Feinstein would never have said flat out, as he did, that a special Holocaust Remembrance Day is unnecessary.

My main objection to using the idea of the Holocaust as an explanation of any aspect of Orthodoxy is that it goes counter to my own experience. I remember, as if it was yesterday, Orthodox Jews after the war shpatzering (strolling) on Shabbus, speaking to each other in German and a mixture of Yiddish Deutsch as if the war had not occurred. Some Oberlander Jews continue to speak a dialect of Judeo- German even today. The Hungarians spoke Ungarish. All these people knew Yiddish. I assume they spoke German and Hungarian because they liked speaking the languages. They knew who the Germans were and what they did. They knew the Hungarian and Romanian fascists were not much better.

Let’s focus on shpatzering, Every attempt was made to carry on life just the way it was before the war. The women were farputzed, the men paid attention to how they looked. Nobody was rich, certainly not by today’s standards. But there was this European tradition of caring about and taking care of clothes. They pulled it off. A little fur trim here, a piece of jewelry there, the ensembles somehow came together. All this took effort and shopping and planning; and pretty much everyone did some of it. How many times did I hear that Budapest was the Paris of the East? (I remember thinking at one point why don’t they call Paris the Budapest of the West.) The idea was to be elegaant. And they were. Very much so. The acting out of this entire fantasy would have been impossible in a population that was traumatized by the Holocaust.

The primary way of dealing with the Holocaust was not denial, but an intense attempt to recreate what they had before the war. They wanted the same clothes, the same language, the same style shuls. They clustered according to regions, gubernias and towns. A favorite conversation piece began ‘’Where are you from? Oh, from Diniv , that’s near Bluzhov, west of Ropschitz ...Yes... I know, I know, I just said its close. Don’t tell me, I’ll remember. You go right just outside Diniv and then after maybe 10 kilometers you turn right again. Yes, yes I know where it is.’’ By the time I was ten I had heard the names of so many European towns and cities I used to play East European geography. Everyone knew what had happened to Diniv and Bluzhov. Everyone knew there was no going back. It was still reassuring to talk about it.

There was no serious talk about the Holocaust for the first fifteen or twenty years after the war. People were actually enjoying life during the Truman and Eisenhower years, not exactly what you expect from a community suffering traumas from the Holocaust. It is true people were hysterical about finding any relatives that might have survived. People searched the HIAS lists to see if anybody they might have known was still alive. They put ads in newspapers, here and in Israel. But the search for relatives was part of the attempt to get on with life. Not the sort of morbid preoccupation we have today with life in the concentration camps and the sadism of the Nazis. Books about the Holocaust didn’t appear in any number until the seventies and eighties. If everyone was so busy with the Holocaust, and if this was the dominating influence in their lives, why were there no publications? If you look at the many Yizkor (Holocaust Remeberance) books of the period, the treatment of the Holocaust is very superficial. Every attempt was to remember life before the Germans came. Everyone knew fully well what happened once they came.

When I was a young child, and the table conversation turned to relatives who perished during the Holocaust, I was told "The Nazis, yimach shemum, came and murdered everybody. Eat your peas."

I think there’s an important difference between Holocaust survivors and their families, and refugees or others who survived Nazism, but not in the camps (e.g. in the forests or behind Soviet lines.) In the case of Holocaust survivors, it is true that some of them, not all, were so traumatized they never fully recovered. Many managed to drive their children ‘crazy.’ There is merit to the idea of treating children of Holocaust survivors as a special psychiatric category when appropriate. The case is totally different with refugees, etc. Their traumas were in the context of the twentieth century not that abnormal, and being the resourceful Jews they were, they were determined to rebuild their lives as quickly as possible. I once heard a psychiatrist say that there’s a special category of children of refugees of the Holocaust. I think the psychiatrist was trying to make a living by inventing new traumas.

The public culture that Orthodox Jews created after the war was not the culture of Holocaust survivors. It was a culture of refugees and religious Jews who came to America before and after the war. Even when Holocaust survivors told their stories, and I remember a few from my youth, they did not linger and repeat the stories endlessly. Public discourse was always about the present and the future, as it should be.