The Yeshivat Frisch community was honored to be addressed virtually by Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel and chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, on April 8, during the school’s annual Yom Hashoah program. Rabbi Lau, is one of the youngest survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated in 1945 at the age of eight.
Rabbi Lau’s remarks focused on the imperative to remember the victims as well as our victory over the Nazis, and to exact “revenge” by remaining steadfast in our Judaism. He emphasized this point by describing Kristallnacht, of November 8-9, 1938, which saw the coordinated Nazi destruction of over 1040 synagogues within Nazi-controlled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, along with murder of approximately 100 Jews and the deportation of 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.
“This [attack] wasn’t against the crystal,” said Rabbi Lau. “It was against Judaism. They wanted to emphasize one point, which some of us forget, that they didn’t declare a war just against the Yiden, against the Jewish people. First of all they declared a war against Judaism…Spiritually and physically they wanted to destroy the name of Judaism…not only the Jewish people. I can see it in every step of their behaviour.” Describing the plea for nekome—revenge—that a prisoner scrawled on a wall in Buchenwald before dying of torture, Rabbi Lau was clear: “We are the nekome. The Jewish existence, a school or yeshiva like Frisch…all the yeshivot in Medinat Yisrael today, following in the footsteps of our father and mothers, observing mitzvot, learning Torah and Talmud, going to the synagogue to pray and all the laws of the Torah, kashrut, Shabbat and Yom Tov, the tallit and tefillin, the siddur and Chumash—this is the nekome that we take. They wanted to destroy it…Nekome. We will never give up. We will never forget who we are and what we are.”
Rabbi Lau also offered an insight into the Torah’s commandment to remember the malicious attack of Amalek, whom Rabbi Lau compared to the Nazis. Regarding the language of “Zachor ve’al tishkach,” Rabbi Lau stated that the pasuk is not only a command, but a warning. The meaning of the pasuk, according to Rabbi Lau is “not only you are not allowed to forget, but you cannot forget; because everywhere, in every place, someone will remind you.” He described being harassed by anti-Semites jeering about the Holocaust in Melbourne in 1982. “Anti-Semitism didn’t pass away at the end of WWII,” he said. “It appears to this day all over the world.”
Rabbi Lau concluded by reminding the community that the Jewish homeland is now free: “The gates are open to every one of you to fulfill the promise and the prophecy that we ask on the night of the Seder: L’shana haba b’yerushalayim habenuyah.”
Frisch Principal Rabbi Eli Ciner said that it was “an honor and experience of a lifetime” to have Rav Lau address the yeshiva, describing him to the Frisch community as “the paradigm of Am Yisrael, Torat Yisrael and Eretz Yisrael, and a living representation of the verse from Tehillim, ‘Even maasu habonim hayta lerosh pina.’”
Following Rabbi Lau’s address, the program continued with a reflection by Frisch English Department Chair Dr. Meryl Feldblum on the life and art of Auschwitz survivor Miriam Weisz Sajovits; moving family recollections by Rabbi Jonathan Spier about his grandfather, Holocaust survivor Walter Spier; reflections by Assistant Principal Rabbi David Goldfischer; and Yizkor candle lighting, a minute of sirens and silence, and the “El Male Rachamim” prayer led by Rabbi Jonathan Schachter.
The program was dedicated in loving memory of Abraham and Fela Kolat z”l, Holocaust survivors who lost almost all their family and rebuilt their lives in America after the war. They raised their children, Frisch librarian Beverly Geller and her brother David, in a home filled with Torah and mitzvot, lovingly doted on their grandchildren and never forgot those who perished.
