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SECOND GENERATION
L O S A N G E LES
Sons and Daughters of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
email: 2ndGen@imeg.com
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G2 Newsletter
Volume, 15, Number 2
Iyar/Sivan 5758
May/June 1998
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
“... The general community, perhaps out of guilt and more likely out of ignorance, has not felt a personal connection to the lives of individual victims, a personal connection that transforms ceremony into a meaningful observance...”
As the Jewish Community in the United States tries to incorporate commemoration of the Shoah into its calendar, several features unique to Jewish practice in North America will need to be addressed. Until recently, commemoration has been considered an exclusive observance for mourners, the Survivors of the Shoah. The general community, perhaps out of guilt and more likely out of ignorance, has not felt a personal connection to the lives of individual victims, a personal connection that transforms ceremony into a meaningful observance. For us, that call to remember is associated with people whose names and distinctive features are known to us, even if through the medium of a transmitted memory. It is a personal sense of loss, not the enormity of suffering, which effects an affiliation with the Survivors and perpetuates a commitment to remember.
A second, and more challenging problem, is to appropriate Memory of the Shoah from those who have used it as a means to champion other projects. Rather than being immediate or direct, the Shoah has been assigned for specific purposes such as support of Israel, investment in Jewish study or ritual, and organized activities to uphold or sustain a variety of institutional or political causes. Although by no means limited to the United States, the Holocaust is often subservient to the welfare of a state, institution, or even our religion. The use of the Holocaust for promotional purposes necessarily dilutes its personal immediacy.
Finally, in an effort to extract a meaning from the incomprehensible, the Holocaust has been generalized to a degree that it may well lose its assigned meaning. In this culture, even the word, spelled with a capital ‘H’, now requires some description. People talk of the Armenian Holocaust, the Rwandan Holocaust, even the Bosnian Holocaust. The first two do qualify as systematic attempts to genocide; the latter is a civil war. This attenuation of meaning is fundamentally a result of ignorance. In an attempt to make everything the same, in an attempt to deliver a simplistic message, memory becomes distorted and observance tawdry. Fortunately, the Survivors have tried to keep the world focused on the particular and human message of the Shoah.
The theme of personal loss and individual resilience, the challenge of Western civilization to confront its inherent evils, the conflict between motivation and personal action, all fall to the side when one hears the personal saga of a Jewish family in the Shoah. Dana Schwartz, a child-survivor, told her story of hiding in Nazi-occupied Poland to a audience of 800 Los Angeles school-children. In a community-wide youth observance of Yom HaShoah, sponsored and organized by this organization, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, and others, children from the diverse ethnic community that is Los Angeles were transported into the emotions of a child in hiding. Older children and young adults then instructed the younger ones in the didactic history of the Shoah. And because they were not preached to, they listened, they felt, and they learned.
Three days later the Jewish community had its Yom HaShoah observance, in the same place as the kids, before the Holocaust monument in Pan Pacific Park. Over two thousand people, not all of them Jewish by the way, heard personal testimony and historical observation, then raised their voices together to memorialize our loss and rejoice in our people's tenacious survival. I believe that this year's observance, with its combination of memorial and rededication, will define our community's observance in the future. This year's event put together the reflections of an octogenarian German-Jew with the memories of a child-survivor with the poetic innocence of a ten year old Polish-Jewish immigrant. With song and words we drew people from the far reaches of the Los Angeles Jewish community, and we accomplished an important goal of this organization- to teach the Shoah emotionally and intellectually, as a personal memory belonging to everyone's Jewish soul, unadorned and unencumbered by a half century of alternative meanings and messages.
-Gary Schiller, M.D.
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