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In `A Survivors' Haggadah," the traditional Passover liturgy is
interwoven with the modern-day story of the Jews
enslaved and liberated from Hitler's Europe.
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recently published Passover
Haggada doesn't tell the
story of the Exodus from
Egypt.
Instead, A Survivors' Haggadah
(Jewish Publication Society; $50),
written by a Holocaust survivor in
Germany in 1945 and 1946 and
republished this year, uses the lan-
guage of the traditional Exodus story
to talk about the Holocaust and the
revival of Jewish life in displaced per-
sons camps after World War II.
The role of Pharaoh is played by
Hitler, who "sets his hungry dogs at
the babes of Israel."
Some of the Jews, in their familiar
role of victims, hand their children
over to Christians — some of whom
hide the Jews out of conviction; others
do so for money and later "bring them
out to be killed."
The Allies exert the retribution
exacted by God in the original
Passover story, subjecting the Germans
to 250 plagues.
The displaced person camps are cel-
ebrated for being the place where the
shaarit haplayta, the saved remnant of
European Jewry, began to rebuild. But
the Haggada shines a critical light on
the conflicts among competing groups
in the D.P. camps: "And so it happens
that the non-Orthodox snatch the
children of the Orthodox, and the
Orthodox snatch the children of the
non-Orthodox."
Yosef Dov Sheinson, a Holocaust
survivor from Kovno, Lithuania, creat-
ed the Haggada.
Sheinson, a Hebrew teacher and
Zionist before the war, survived the
war in slave labor camps, including a
sub-camp of Dachau. After the libera-
tion, he left Theresienstadt, which by -
that time was in Soviet hands, and
crawled to a farmer's home.
After a short stint in the Landsberg
D.P. camp, Sheinson moved to a private
house in Munich, where he worked on
a Jewish newspaper. There he compiled
this Hagadda, which was printed by a
German publishing house in return for
cigarettes and food rations.
The traditional Four Questions are
bordered with extra question marks,
perhaps representing the underlying ,
questions of how the Holocaust could
have been allowed to occur.
Saul Touster, a retired professor of
law at Brandeis University, discovered
the Haggada in 1996, when he was
cleaning out his late father's papers.
The book was inscribed to his father, a
longtime executive with the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, who received
it when he visited the camps in 1952.
Touster decided to publish the
Hagadda — he had it translated from
Hebrew and Yiddish and compiled his
own commentary — in part to honor
his father.
"In a way, my work in recovering
this is a testimony to him and what he
had done," says Touster, adding that
he considers himself a Holocaust vic-
tim who luckily survived by being
born in the United States.
Touster, who used the Haggada last
year, admits that it changes the seder
mood.
"It's not about do-goodism. You go
away feeling the experience. And it
tempers your spirit," he says, recom-
mending that it be used as a supple-
ment to a more traditional Haggada.
Each two pages of this Haggada are
a couplet. The left side is a copy of the
original Haggada; the right carries an
English translation, plus commentary
and selected readings. -
With the help of 16 woodcuts creat-
ed during the war by Hungarian sur-
vivor Miklos Adler, the Haggada brings
the burden of the Holocaust onto the
relatively joyous Passover story.
What comes through most clearly
is Sheinson's struggle to find an answer
to the questions of the existence of
God and of Jewish survival in the
wake of the Holocaust.
The traditional Four Questions are
bordered with extra question marks,
which Touster interprets as represent-
ing the underlying questions of how
the Holocaust could have been
allowed to occur. On another page,
Sheinson included a fragment of the
Torah that reads " Vehi emunateynu, or
"This is our faith."
Sheinson's answer appears to lie in
Zionism. Indeed, much of the
Haggada is framed as a Zionist
polemic.
The story of the Four Sons, like
much of the Haggada, is reframed in
Zionist terms. Each of the sons, who
question why the Jews want to move
to their own land, is told why the Jews
should move to Palestine. For exam-
ple, the Wise Son is told: "Who
knows how long their charity and
their protective arm shall be extended
to us? A home and a country should
not come out of the charity but by
right."
Despite these strong Zionist lean-
ings, Sheinson never moved to Israel.
In 1948 he moved to Montreal,
where he worked in Hebrew education
until he died in the mid-1990s.
One of the most moving parts of
the Haggada comes from one of
Touster's commentaries. He notes that
a survivor who attended a Munich
seder recalled that when it came time
to ask the Four Questions, traditional-
ly asked by the youngest participant at
the table, the seder participants began
to weep because there were no chil-
dren present.
Then, the survivor recalls, one man
began asking the first question. The
rest of the survivors joined in. ❑