Journey to Jerusalem- Christian Responses to the Holocaust
Fr Chris Jackson from St Mary’s, Sunderland, has recently taken part in a seminar organised by the UK Council of Christians and Jews, at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. Here he writes movingly about the experience and reflects on what we can learn.
‘Jerusalem, the mountains surround her’ so runs the psalm, and on one of those hills stands Yad Vashem. The words, Yad Vashem, meaning ‘a monument and a name’, come from Isaiah 56:5 for this is the State of Israel’s memorial to 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
On Easter Tuesday a group of twenty-one clergy and ministers from the UK travelled to Jerusalem. We were there to take part in an eight day seminar organised by the Council of Christians and Jews, and hosted by the School for Holocaust Studies which is an integral part of Yad Vashem. As the solitary Catholic in the group I soon found that labels were not important since the one thing we all had in common was a passion to understand how the Holocaust could have happened, and to learn from those terrible events.
The programme was intensive and there was little free time: each day we listened to; academics and rabbis, asked questions, talked, pondered. Four images brought home to me the enormity that Yad Vashem commemorates:
The memorial
A dark, bunker-like hall; an eternal flame burns on a floor inscribed with the names of the Nazi death camps. On Monday 16th April, Israel’s Holocaust memorial day,; a queue of people formed in the hall. One by one they stepped forward to read the names of those who had perished; many of those who read were elderly, many in tears as they struggled to name their parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, who had been murdered.
The Hall of Names
The memorial to one and a half million children
Yes, they were among the victims. This too, is a dark building but with a few candles and mirrors so arranged that the visitor is surrounded by an infinite number of tiny lights. God’s promise to Abraham that he would make his descendants as many as the stars of heaven comes to mind as one hears a recording of the names and ages of the children known to have perished. The Nazi ‘Final Solution’ was an attempt to negate God’s promise.
The museum of Yad Vashem
As you enter there is a film: a series of scenes of Jewish life in Europe before Hitler’s rise to power. Ordinary people getting on with their lives – laughing, talking, dancing, making music, praying. All projected onto a map of Europe indicating places where there was once a significant Jewish population; the majority of those communities no longer exist. The museum ends with the Hall of Names: row upon row of box files containing the names of the dead, while from the dome of the hall pictures of some of them gaze down. Their images are reflected in water at the bottom of a rough hewn stone pit.
Looking at the wagons
A meeting with a survivor
Having been liberated from Bergen Belsen by British troops at the end of the war, this lady had grown up in Germany and later Holland before being rounded up with the rest of her family. Now an ‘active grandmother’ as she described herself, she lives in Israel where she and many other survivors have made their home.
A monument and a name
Ordinary lives were shattered and torn apart by the evil which Jews tend to call Shoah meaning ‘destruction’, rather than Holocaust which means ‘sacrifice.’ A sustained attempt to annihilate a whole race almost succeeded. Yad Vashem gives a memorial and a name to those who perished and leaves us with two questions:
Why?
During the eight days of the seminar we placed the years of destruction under a microscope, as it were. Easy explanations are impossible and while we Christians might use expressions like ‘the power of evil’ and ‘the Fall’, what can anyone say in the face of this obscenity? More than one of the Jewish people said that attempting to rule a line under the Shoah with ‘religious’ answers made them angry. So the answer to the fundamental question ‘Why’ might only be silence. This was certainly the reaction of our group after listening to someone who had survived.
Avenue of the Righteous
And now?
‘Where was God?’ might be answered with another question: ‘Where was humanity?’ Indeed, where are we now in places where justice is denied? We have a responsibility to see that every one of our fellow human beings is treated with the dignity that is theirs as people made in God’s image. Exploited migrant workers in our own country, people in Darfur whose lives are at risk because they belong to the ‘wrong’ race – the list is endless. The memory of the Holocaust prompts us to do all we can to mend our broken world.
Fr Chris Jackson
St Mary’s, Sunderland