Last week, in honor of Yom HaShoah, Yavneh Academy hosted Rabbi Jacob Jungreis, a survivor of the Holocaust. From Szeged, Hungary, Rabbi Jungreis is heir to a two-thousand-year-old rabbinic dynasty. (His sister is the famed Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis.) Rabbi Jungreis described growing up in an anti-Semitic environment amidst a loving and chessed- based home.
The rabbi’s parents shepherded one of the largest of Hungary’s Jewish communities outside of Budapest, in the decades before the Holocaust. He described the forced labor that faced Jewish young men during the earlier years of the war, and the cruel deception that was practiced by the Nazis to lull the Jews into submissive behavior during the time of the mass deportations.
The Jungreis family was among the group of over one-thousand Jews who were transported on the well-known “Kastner Train.” That transport was sent first to Bergen-Belsen, before being allowed to travel to freedom, in Switzerland. He lovingly described the enormous risk Jews took to blow the shofar in Bergen-Belsen, and how Jews stopped their slave labor to hear the sounds of the shofar.
The rabbi responded to the great many questions students had after his talk. One of the questions he fielded inquired about how he chose “Faith” and observance after witnessing the suffering of our people during the Shoah. He answered by contrasting the abject despair and hopelessness of the Holocaust to the miraculous rebirth of our people “only three years” (which he emphasized) after the Shoah. He emphasized the importance of seeing the Divine message in the existence of the State of Israel, and the miracle of the Six Day War.
These, he explained, are Hashem’s response to Am Yisrael, the light after the darkness. He sees these polar-opposite events portrayed in the Torah, at the end of Sefer Devarim. Jungreis then dramatically described the joy, the thrill he feels “when I pass between Exits 13 and 14 on the New Jersey Turnpike.” He asked if any of the students could guess what he had in mind. One of the young ladies correctly guessed “Newark Airport.” But it still remained for Rabbi Jungreis to explain further: “If anyone would have told me, during the war, and during my time in Bergen-Belsen, that one day there would be a blue and white airplane with the Star of David on it, in an American airport, I would not have believed it! Impossible! Each time I pass the airport I give thanks to Hashem for the miracle of the State [of Israel].”
