This past Tuesday, the 27th day of Nisan, was Yom Ha’Shoa. Most people don’t know that the entire proper name for this day is Yom Hashoa V’hagevurah which I will translate as “The day commemorating the Holocaust and the Resistance.” What is left out when we say just Yom Ha’shoa is the important concept of “Resistance.” Yet, when Israel’s Knesset added this commemoration to the Jewish calendar, it did so with the idea of resistance very much on its mind. It was during Nisan that the most famous rebellion against the Germans, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, graphically shown in the recent Roman Polanski film, “The Pianist,” was launched by a small group of Jewish fighters.

It is vital that we keep in mind that the day established to recall the holocaust was purposely named Yom Hashoa V’hagevurah so that we would not only remember those who perished but those who valiantly fought the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jews and Judaism. Astonishingly, the poorly armed and untrained fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto resisted the Germans longer than the army of France. Their heroism totally amazed the Germans whose propaganda had led them to believe that the Jews were members of a weak and inferior race.

Having just mentioned the incredible act of defiance that took place in the Warsaw Ghetto, I want to strongly emphasize that as important and courageous as armed opposition to the enemy was, it wasn’t the only kind of resistance. There was also spiritual resistance. Jews who despite the Germans’ attempts to dehumanize them, kept their humanity and kept up their practice of Judaism, were spiritual resisters. Spiritual resistance was attempting to stay alive another day; it was singing a Yiddish or Hebrew song, giving birth to a child, or surreptitiously studying the Bible and Talmud. Resistance was keeping careful records and diaries of what was happening in the ghettos and hiding them in the hope that some day they would be found and read so that the outside world would know how six million Jewish men, women and children lived and died under the Nazis.

Resistance was trying to maintain normalcy even as people perished in the streets or were rounded up for deportation. In the Vilna Ghetto, schools were established and youth groups were formed. Choirs and theater groups gave performances. On a day that five thousand Jews were rounded up and packed into cattle cars bound for the death camps, the archivist of the Vilna ghetto noted that four hundred people stood outside the library waiting for it to open its doors and allow them access to books.

Spiritual resistance occurred even in the death camps as Jews defiantly went to gas chambers singing “ani ma’amin” - I believe.” Even under the most dire of circumstances many Jews tried to govern their lives by the torah they loved so dearly. The rabbis in the camp were asked halachic, religious, questions about how to act in circumstances that the questioner never thought he or she would ever have to face. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, who served the community of Kovno before W.W. ll, survived the holocaust and published a volume of sh’aylot and teshuvot describing religious questions he was asked and the answers he gave. For example, one pious Jew asked whether there was an appropriate prayer he could recite at the moment of his death. Rabbi Oshry was able to provide him with a blessing that a rabbi known as the Hafetz Hayim had instructed his students to recite if they should be attacked during pogroms which ravished the Jews of Russia in the early 1900's. The words are:

“Praised are you Lord our God, king of the universe, who has sanctified us by your commandment and has commanded us to sanctify your name in the presence of many.”

There were questions from those who not only wanted to know how to die as Jews but how to live as Jews in the camps. For example, one man who somehow had managed to smuggle tefilin into his barrack, had this question. According to Jewish practice, tefilin are only layn, or worn, on weekday mornings. However, if he were to put them on in the morning, he would be observed by the German guards. He wanted to know if he could put them on at night when it would go undetected. Rabbi Oshry was aware of the great scholar, Moses Maimonides’ opinion that the torah prohibited wearing tefilin at night. But Rabbi Oshry disagreed with Maimonides stating that it was only a custom not to put them on at night - it was not a law. Since it was custom and not law, Rabbi Oshry decided that given the special circumstances prevailing in the concentration camp, it was permissible to be lenient and allow a person to don tefilin at night and say the blessings over them.

One eye witness tells about a similar situation in another camp where four hundred men would line each night and wait to put on and say the blessing over the one pair of tefilin a Jew from Munkacz, Czechoslovakia smuggled into Auschwitz.

Another interesting inquiry came from a slave laborer in a German factory as to whether it was permissible for him to steal wool fabric from the factory so that he could make himself a talit. There is a principle in Jewish law that one cannot perform a mitzvah with something that one has stolen. Rabbi Oshry did some creative thinking in order to permit the making of a talit from the purloined fabric. He based his reasoning on the assumption that the wool material in the factory most likely was not imported all the way from Germany but was confiscated from local merchants who had given up all hope of every getting the material back. In the eyes of Jewish law, the fabric did not belong to the Germans who took it from the rightful owner, nor did it any longer belong to the rightful owner who, it is presumed, had given up hope of getting it back. That made the material at this point ownerless and, therefore, taking it would not be stealing.

As the concluding illustration, I have selected a question asked of Rabbi Oshry that I find especially moving. Moshe Siegel asked if he could say kaddish, the memorial prayer, for a gentile woman. Moshe Siegel explained to the rabbi that he and ten other Jews were hidden in a cellar by a gentile neighbor at great risk to herself. She fed them and brought them water daily. After the war, they reestablished themselves and wanted to repay the woman for all that she had done for them. To their sorrow, they learned that she had died. They decided something should be done to honor her memory, and they arrived at the idea of saying kaddish for her.

Rabbi Oshry searched for a precedent and found it in a book of Jewish law called Sefer Hasidim. The author of this volume states that it is permissible to pray to God that He judge favorably in the hereafter a gentile who had rendered favors for Jews. Based on this precedent, Rabbi Oshry gave permission to Moshe Siegel and his friends to say kaddish for the woman who saved their lives during the holocaust. Rabbi Oshry concluded his opinion with a prayer that God repay with loving kindness the righteous ones of the nations of the world who risked their lives to save the people of Israel.

The questions brought to Rabbi Oshry magnificently illustrate the religious piety of the Jewish world destroyed by the Germans and their supporters in Europe and Eastern Europe. May our recollection this morning of Jewish life tenaciously adhered to even in extremis, even in the most horrible of circumstances, enable us to realize how much that was precious was lost because of the holocaust. May it also motivate us, who can live Jewishly with ease and without fear, to redouble our efforts to uphold the principles, values and religious observances of our heritage and of our faith.

Shabbat Shalom