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1OPINION

CONTENTS

15

DETROIT

Long Walk

JENNIFER GUBKIN
Environmental awareness
is a 4,000 mile journey.

24

CLOSE-UP

Numbers Games

Detroit,
1990

24

ALAN HITSKY
Records are already falling
for Detroit's youth games.

35

INSIGHT

Mystery Man

'Where Was God?'
Troubles Survivors

p

hilip Slomovitz and
Rabbi Arthur Hertz-
berg (June 8) have
raised many perplexing ques-
tions that trouble survivors
like me and that should trou-
ble all Jews. The "Where Was
God?" query did not begin
with the Holocaust, but cer-
tainly it has assumed greater
proportions since that
catastrophe.
I appreciate Hertzberg's
scholarly discussion, his
midrash on the question of
God's place during the
Holocaust. But I do not want
readers to conclude that there
are simple answers or that
those of us who endured the
worst of the Nazi world have
an undivided opinion on the
question of God.
We davened prayed — in
the camps. On the high
holidays, each of us took a
task. Mine was to write down
the teffilot on whatever I
could find — bags of cement,
scraps of paper. And we
prayed in secret, conducted
our service while less-
observant Jews stood guard
for us. They, too, knew how
deeply we needed to pray to
God.
We, the appliances of
Auschwitz, found weapons in
a siddur or a smuggled
tefillin. They gave us strength
and we believed that the
Nazis feared those weapons.
We cried out to God. Who
else was there? Could I cry
out to my fellow prisoner?
Could I cry out to the SS
guard? We, some of us, had to
talk to someone, some force, to
God. So we davened while we

—

Holocaust survivor Abe
Pasternak lives in Southfield.

stood, while we marched or
worked.
These were not dry prayers,
but purposeful, to lighten our
plight. They did; they gave us
sustenance, and if they did
not save our lives, they helped
us to endure.
When I was in Buchenwald,
one inmate said to me: "Talk
about anything but your
plight." So we prayed and
discussed Talmud and these
things distracted us from our
miseries. One non-religious
man let me borrow a burnt
siddur. He watched me every
moment because the book
was life to him. Perhaps it
was his connection with being
Jewish.
Rabbi Hertzberg cited the
prayer, "for our sins we are
exiled from our land." There
are those who attribute the
Shoah to God's wrath against
his people who had fallen
away from piety. This
misrepresents the text which
is explained in the Talmud.
Those sins were three sorts:
idol worship, murder and pet-
tiness. If pettiness is a cons-
tant with all people, never-
theless murder and idol wor-
ship were not sins of Jews in
the 1930s and '40s.
Rather quote the text which
says that "when hell breaks
loose, it does not distinguish
between good and bad." In
that hell, in Barracks 57 in
the Jewish section of Buchen-
wald, there was always a
minyan.
One rabbi has said that
"everything needs luck, even
the sefer Torah . . ." Survival
in Auschwitz needed luck. It
did not bring us luck, but for
some of us, praying to God
gave us some ineffable means
to go on.
If there were questions for
God, they would have to come
later.

❑

47

PEOPLE

Artist In Blume

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
From building design
to a new prayer book.

51

SPORTS

Team Detroit

51

RICHARD PEARL
Over 200 young athletes
will serve as host squad.

63

FINE ARTS

Artful Aviva

STEVE HARTZ
Paper relief is a new
career for Aviva Robinson.

81

SINGLE LIFE

Just Beachy

DAVID HOLZEL
Rio's sun'n'surf
are set for February.

DEPARTMENTS

29
32
40
44
60

Inside Washington
Background
Synagogues
For Women
Travel

74
84
88
91
122

Cooking
Engagements
Births
Classified Ads
Obituaries

CANDLELIGHTING

63

8:56 p.m.
Friday, June 22, 1990
Sabbath ends June 23 10:08 p.m.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

7

ONTEN T

ABE PASTERNAK

ZE'EV CHAFETS
Israel's David Levy:
Different in style, substance.

