On Yom HaShoah 5780, offering you this collective prayer poem that weaves in words from numerous sources, reflecting the wisdom that exists collectively — be sure to see who is credited and linked at the bottom. Poem woven by Rae Abileah with song by Joti Shephi.
Yom HaShoah 5780
We will not gather in synagogues to say Kaddish for you this year.
We light candles in our homes instead.
“We are sheltering in a collective shiva with people we are trying to remember,” says Ian.
We say your names:
Eddy Wynshenk, Helen Farkas, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum
And perhaps, we sit still at last with the grief of recalling the Holocaust.
I remember my maternal grandmother, my Oma, hiding in the root cellar.
Nazi boots overhead. The moment they shot her dog.
I remember how my father’s father’s father knew to flee Warsaw and Vienna before it got too bad
carrying his piano and his children
and his songs across the sea.
We didn’t talk about all this when I was growing up.
But the wounds were still fresh
below the facade of assimilation into a country
that told my parents to stop speaking their mother tongues.
The word genocide is built from
-cide, killing,
of a genos, a race or tribe or kind of people,
which comes from the root word, gene,
which means to give birth.
Even our ancestors who survived the Holocaust did not escape the gene-o-cide
The killing
embedded
in their genes
passed down to us
into our nightmares,
our waking actions,
our bones.
In these pandemic times
trauma awakens like the sleeping bear
emerging from winter hibernation.
The bear was never gone, just lumbering in our caves.
Trauma awakens... (beating heart like Al Chet, Confession)
We worry constantly
We hoard toilet paper and canned food
We feel an insatiable hunger that rattles around even when our bellies are full
We panic and over-react
We can’t slow down
We drive after perfection even when dayenu, it would be enough
We assume that bad things will happen
We become numb to the death toll
We feel guilty if we are okay, healthy, employed
We are seduced by power
We know there are families in modern-day concentration camps just down the road and feel powerless…
“The pandemic is a portal,” says Arundhati.
A doorway that asks us to let go of our baggage before passing through.
So we can move forward.
About the Shoah: They only taught me the pain, how we were victims.
They didn’t tell me about the hidden gems sparkling just below the surface.
I dive deep now to resurrect them:
The resilience.
The courage.
The creativity.
The songs.
“I touch my own skin and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle,” says adrienne maree.
I excavate the voices of my people who cry out in hopeful chorus.
The ancestors plead with me to remember:
We weren’t only extinguished.
We laughed.
We worked hard.
We danced.
Come out, they say. Get loud, they say. Join the clamor:
The nightly singing from the balconies of Italy
The banging of pots and pans from India to NYC to Brazil
The howling from porches across the rural Rocky Mountains and the California coast.
The opposite of genocide is not just surviving, not just tolerance.
It is kindness, love, justice, collective liberation.
Observing Yom HaShoah is not only remembering the 6 million Jews.
It’s remembering the 11 million people murdered.
Oh disabled ancestors who were among the first to be killed by the Nazis, we remember you.
Oh queer ancestors, we remember you.
Oh Roma people, Catholics, Baha’is, African and Asian residents of Nazi Germany,
Soviets and Poles and Serbs and people who spoke Esperanto
and sex workers and people struggling from addiction and anarchists, we remember you.
Resistance fighters like my Dutch grandfather Jan Musegaas
and civilian activists like the White Rose, we remember you.
Socialists and communists who envisioned a new economy, we remember you.
April 19th: the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland, 1943
The uprising sparked the imagination of Jews in France
Who organized Jews, Muslims, Christians to fight fascism
and offer mutual aid
and help Jews get into hiding.
Here we are on April 19, 2020 fighting fascism and offering collective care
“Countering white supremacists
doing anti-physical-distancing demonstrations in our cities
as we protect each other from a virus
made genocidal because of how structures
of domination put certain already targeted people -
indigenous, black, brown, undocumented, poor, disabled -
more at risk of sickness and death.
Leave it to the brave nurses who are seeing this loss and trauma of Coronavirus up close
to take direct action blocking racist Far Right folks here in Denver
on the very anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” (paraphrased from Cindy Milstein)
Those who fought and died in Warsaw may their memory be a blessing.
We chant in hashtags as we demonstrate online,
“#NursesNotNazis! #RebelliousCaring! #SocialSolidarity!”
Transcending trauma is not just getting over our own headtrip;
it’s showing up for the most vulnerable among us now:
those with compromised immune systems, disabilities, the elderly, the precariously employed, those in prisons & detention centers, immigrants, those who are houseless, refugees from war, those who suffer from environmental injustice, those facing martial law and brutal repression during this pandemic, those on other margins of social care, and those already battling poverty, war, and occupation.
Let’s protect those on the frontlines of this health crisis: the nurses, doctors, health care providers, grocery store clerks, food service employees, farm workers, sanitation workers, and so many more.
Let’s call the neighbor we never met and offer a warm meal.
Let’s notice the patterns of trauma and then decide
to sew a new stitch,
to prepare a new table,
to cast a new spell.
May “our grief connect us to others’ grief.”
May “our terror connect us to others’ terror.”
May “the trauma Jews have experienced not make us separate from other Peoples.”
May “it connect us to other Peoples,” says Dove.
May it move us to care and act for all peoples, and for the Earth.
May the source of liberation for our ancestors protect us as we reach across isolation, borders, and fear to tell stories, sing songs, and imagine – nay, realize – freedom. (Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb)
This Holocaust Memorial Day, let us not only grieve for the millions murdered in the brutal Holocaust, but also call on the resourcefulness, resilience, and deep wisdom that got our people through to not only survive but thrive, and let this resilience support us as we travel through this narrow place, this mitzrayim, of the pandemic and care for each other well.
Notes:
This poem is inspired by the newly-released Map of Internalized Anti-Semitism for Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. by Jo Kent Katz, available for download with a resource booklet at: www.transcendingjewishtrauma.com
The quote from Dove Kent is also from this new healing and organizing resource.
Hallmarks of trauma derived from Wounds into Wisdom: Transcending Jewish Trauma, by Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone (Monkfish Press, 2019). www.tirzahfirestone.com
Quote from adrienne maree brown from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.
Quote from Arundhati Roy from “The Pandemic is a Portal” in Financial Times.
Selected lines of prayer from Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb from the “Preparing for Passover during a Plague Ritual Guide.”
Quote from Ian Schiffer about collective shiva.
Listen to the Transparent musical finale, “Joyocaust.”
Read Hope into Practice: Jewish Women Choosing Justice Despite Our Fears by Penny Rosenwasser.
Check out Jewish Ancestral Healing and Taya Mâ Shere’s trauma healing work, shifting from survive to thrive, an inspiration for this piece.
Excerpt about nurses taking direct action in Denver from an Instagram post by @cindymilstein.
Etty Hillesum “was a Dutch Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz at the age of 29 years old. This year, during those difficult times, Etty is an inspiration on how to find inner freedom while feeling locked at home. Her diaries of the last two years of her life mark a process of a young woman who explored the definitions of the different topics such as; love, hatred, connection to God, and freedom. Check out these cards of 100 quotes from her diaries and letters in the three languages English, Arabic and Hebrew, created by Emma ShamBa (an Israeli peace activist) and Dina Awwad (a Palestinian peace activist).” www.ettyhillesumcards.com/
