Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

RabbiMiriam Terlinchamp| Special to The Enquirer

Simon returned to Germany several times over the yearssince his escape. He visited the childhood home his mother surrendered to save him. He met with the neighbor, whod been just a boy at the time; both now old men, crying without speaking.

He visited his fathers grave and the train station where his family had been deported. Through Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) and Buchenwald concentration camp and even after his asylum in the United States and returning to Germany as an American soldier Simon never stopped being German.

But the Nazis had little interest in his citizenship.It was his humanity theyquestioned.

Live to tell: A few who survived the Holocaust remember so that others do not forget

This is how Simon spoke about the Holocaust. One moment they were German people. Then, through a democratic election, Hitler came to legal power and created a sub-class of people called untermenschen, personsconsidered racially or socially inferior.

When humans are less than humans, somewhere between animal and property, it is easy to subjugate them, to force them into pens, to systematically destroy them. It helped that eugenic "science" had brought facts to their methods, confirming that there are humans and then there are untermenschen.

And the world was silent for so long, unable to disentangle the rightful claim to power with mass extermination and torture. Then, much later, recoiling in disgust at the images released at liberation, forgetting that though the Nazis behavior was monstrous, they did not start out as monsters. They started out as human.

We allow our humanity to drain through a lack of compassion, over intellectualization, and an ability to categorize some humans as more human than others. Our humanity leaksaway like lifeblood as we justify our actions in the world.

How human we are is directly related to how human we treat others. The untermensch is not a product of Nazi Germany, something that happened once upon a time and now is eradicated. The untermensch is a product of human dominance and colonization that we allow to justify our choices in the world.

On macro-scales, we see the untermensch in our history with Native Americans and land acquisition, with Chinese Americans and our railroads, with Japanese Americans and internment camps and with African Americans and slavery.

In micro-settings, like how we treat our homeless, our housekeepers, our gardeners, our prisoners, our waiters, our teachers, our laborers.

Are we truly striving for equity in our humanity? Are we paying fair wages with vacation and sick time? Are work conditions in the places we shop as safe as the environments we want our children to be working in? Are we utilizing our individual and collective power to be generous and equitable? Or do we allow, like in times of stress or fatigue or hurry or scarcity, the untermensch mentality to take hold, forgetting the humanity of the person before us?

Perhaps it is unfair that the battle cry of Holocaust survivors and their children is never again when the ingredients for a Holocaust remain alive and well, lying in the psychological ability to see some people as less than human.

"Never again" is an individual choice to not look away. To strain against the need to be permissive that allows some of us to be treated as lessThe personal and collective acts of bearing witness, by striving to see the humanity of all humans, might be the best chance we have at never again.

For Simon, after all those decades of active forgiveness and reconciliation, he still dreamed of seeing Germanys prized city, Berlin.So, at 89, he went.

We sat on a bench outside one of the memorials that held the names of all the citizens in Berlin who had been murdered. The space was busy and full of tourists. In wonder, Simon asked, How are there so many Jews from all over the world here? I told him the tourists werent Jews, they were witnesses. He sat stunned, in wonder that people came from all the corners of the earth to bear witness.

We walked down the street to a large synagogue whose domed ceiling stood out resplendently against the sunset. In this house of worship, they kept the destruction intact. Worshippers navigate rumble and ruin as they ascend a staircase to the sanctuary for prayer. I held my grandfathers hand, knowing that I was in a moment that the Nazis worked so hard to prevent. There I was in a half-ruined synagogue in Berlin, a granddaughter, a rabbi nonetheless, of a man who neither as a victim nor as a survivor, accepted the shackles of the mentality of untermensch.

We sat in the back of a room full of strangers connected by a universal liturgy. When we arrived at the prayer Veshamru, the one that celebrates passing the covenant from one generation to the next, Simon sang loudly. The congregation met his gusto, singing the song with a collective clarity for what it meant to be a German-American Jewish man in this context.

The prayer came to an end, but Simon kept singing, his hearing aid batteries failing him. And we, the congregation, kept singing with him chanting words of continuity over and over. Every note an act of resistance.

To learn moreabout the Holocaust and survivors' lives once they arrived safely in Cincinnati, you can visit the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center at Union Terminal. It is open Thursday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Miriam Terlinchamp is senior rabbi of Temple Sholom in Blue Ash.

See original here:

Opinion: A rabbi reflects on the Holocaust and how, in some ways, we have not learned much - The Cincinnati Enquirer

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