Three Jewish Anniversaries
Originally published on Gimme Some Torah by Rabbi Eli Garfinkel on September 28, 2023.
The memorial to the Kishinev pogrom. Kishinev is now known by its Moldovan/Romanian name, Chisinau. Public domain image.
Note: This is the Yizkor sermon I delivered on Yom Kippur morning
I love a time machine. Michael J. Fox and that DeLaurean that had to get to 88 miles an hour in order to time travel, now those were some good times. And now I think back and I wonder, “88 miles an hour? You mean the average speed in the Turnpike’s right lane?”
I want you to get into my time machine for a little trip. You can all go first class, but there’s no food or drink on this flight into the past. This year is a major anniversary year for three anti-Jewish events, and we’re going to visit all three of them. Then I’ll talk about how these anniversaries should inform our observance of Yizkor on Yom Kippur today.
Our first stop is April 6th and 7th, 1903, one hundred and twenty years ago. The place is Kishinev, in the Russian province of Bessarabia, now in modern day Moldova. Romania is southwest of our position, and what is now Ukraine is to the northeast.
We are in the heart of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian Czars allowed three million Jews to live in squalid conditions, restricted to certain towns and cities like Kishinev. There are worse places to live, but not many.
You hear a young person yell, “Get the Jews!” A seminarian gleefully encourages his students to throw stones at Jewish homes and businesses. Some Russian police disband the rock throwers, but it’s too late—the fuse has been lit.
You walk down to the poorest section of Kishinev, teeming with ten thousand Jews. That’s when you hear the scream of Moshe Kigel, a local storekeeper. He’s been shot and dies shortly thereafter.
At first, it’s not clear what has started the riot, but it doesn’t take long for you to figure it out. This pogrom has started the way pogroms have started for a millennium or more: A Christian child has died, always at the hands of another Christian. A rumor is then started that it was the Jews who killed the child in order to use his blood to make matzah for Passover.
The pogrom violence swells to a bloody crescendo. But there is a glimmer of hope—250 of the young and strong working class Jews take up what few weapons they can find or improvise and stand up against the Christian invaders. Alas, their 250 don’t stand a chance against this tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred.
You watch helplessly as forty-nine of your brethren are murdered. Six hundred women are raped, and you see a lot of Jewish men cruelly reject their victimized wives. Fifteen hundred Jewish homes have been destroyed.
The Jewish writer and poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, who was there shortly after the pogrom, wrote a long elegy called “In the City of the Slaughter,” Ba’ir Ha-Hareigah.
In that poem, he criticized the passivity of the Jews, whose intolerable weakness had brought them shame. He wrote: “Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs / The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs / Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, / Concealed and cowering, the sons of the Maccabees! / The seed of saints, the scions of the lions! / Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, / So sanctified My name! / It was the flight of mice they fled, / The scurrying of roaches was their flight; / They died like dogs, and they were dead!
This event, known as the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, was far from the first pogrom in the region and, in terms of severity, it really didn’t hold a candle to the pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which were far more ghastly.
But it was a classic example of the straw the broke the camel’s back. Millions of Jews left the Pale of Settlement over the next few years and boarded passenger ships bound for America. Among them was my own grandfather, Benjamin Garfinkel.
The Kishinev pogrom had consequences that can be felt even today, 120 years later. For more than a century, it has steered the political choices of American Jews. Moreover, our ethnic memory the pogrom it helped to start what would become the Israel Defense Force.
Now let’s come back home and then reset the time machine and travel 80 years in the past to 1943. The place is Warsaw, Poland. Here, in a sea of death that makes the Kishinev Pogrom look like a playground fight, the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto have decided that if they are to die, it will not be without a fight.
The first ghetto fighters infiltrate a group of Jews who have obediently gathered at the designated transfer point for Treblinka. Suddenly, these fighters brandish weapons, causing just enough chaos for the Jews who had gathered to flee.
Commanded by Mordecai Anielevich, 700 Jewish fighters stand up against the Nazis. Thousands of others disobey Nazi orders to surrender and instead took shelter in underground bunkers. They hold out against vastly superior forces for five months.
The Jews kill twelve Nazis, two more than would be executed by the Allies after the Nuremberg trials. Though they were all eventually murdered on site or sent to the gas chambers, they died fighting, and for that, they cause us to cry not just out of mourning but out of boundless pride.
Before we leave for the next stop, there is another place in 1943 we need to visit. The place is Sobibor, a notorious death camp. In October of that year, some Jews at Sobibor confronted impossible odds and started a successful revolt. They murdered the camp’s commandant and ten other Nazi SS guards.
Three hundred Jews flee through a break in the barbed wire. Many die in the minefield just outside the camp. Many others are captured and killed. But fifty-eight of these people, formerly marked for slaughter, manage to survive the war. The last of those survivors died in 2019.
And Just like their brothers and sisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, they taught us what it means to have real backbone in the face of tyranny. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the escape from Sobibor both took place 80 years ago, but like the Kishinev Pogrom, their legacy of heroism lives on today.
The Holocaust was, God willing, the last time that Jews would be passive in the face of death. That absolute refusal to be passive was born not after the Shoah but in its very depths. The problem with Holocaust education today is that we only tell the story of the six million. That message gets lost because the number is too big to comprehend.
Instead, Holocaust education should be told from the standpoint of those who threw off the yoke of their oppressors and fought back, to borrow a phrase, by any means necessary. We must change the story from one of victimhood to one of courage and bravery.
Now come home and lets hop back one last time. This time, we’re going fifty years in the past to the Yom Kippur War, 1973. Israel’s victory in the six day war of 1967 caused mass humiliation in the Arab world and a vast increase in Israeli territory.
President Nixon and the Soviet Union engineer an offer of peace with the Arabs in exchange for Israel’s return to the 1949 armistice line. I would have loved to see Golda Meir’s face when that offer was made! “Hello, Golda, Israel has won the past two wars, but how about taking a peace deal that ignores all that?” How ‘bout no!
Those 1949 borders are known in Jewish circles as the Auschwitz borders, borders that are too close to guarantee Israeli security in any meaningful way. Israel rejects the so-called Rogers plan as a non-starter.
On Yom Kippur, October 6th, 1973, the war starts. Egypt and Syria stage a surprise attack on the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Israel is caught unprepared, but ironically, it’s fairly easy to find all the reservists because they’re in shul for Yom Kippur.
Egypt and Syria are joined by Iraq, but the war does not go well for them, and Israel advances far enough to fire artillery at the outskirts of Damascus. The Arabs are on the side of the Soviet Union, while America has Israel’s back.
President Nixon’s airlift of weaponry, delayed until October 14, helps Israel win decisively. But even so, it was not immediately clear that the Jewish State would live to see another Yom Kippur.
The consequences of the Yom Kippur war are well known and include both the peace treaty with Egypt and, twenty years later, with Jordan. Arab warfare transforms from governmental army invasions to terrorist guerilla warfare. The Yom Kippur War also makes it clear that Israel is here to stay.
This time, the Jewish people’s insistence on survival draws the world’s anger. Apparently, the world is happy to see Jews win some battles so long as they lose the war and up as victims.
Seeing Jews actually win against their enemies makes people mad, and so the United Nations in 1975 passes General Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism and discrimination. It remains on the books until it is revoked in 1991.
Okay, you can turn off the time machine and come back to Temple Beth El, Yom Kippur, 2023. Have we learned any thing over the past 120 years, from Kishinev, Warsaw, Sobibor, and the Yom Kippur war? Have we learned that passively accepting whatever life deals us is not a workable plan for Jewish survival?
I think it’s pretty clear that Israelis have certainly internalized the need to stand up for themselves, and the reason is that they have no choice. Every conflict in Israel is existential, there is no such thing as a minor war there.
And what about American Jews? Have we learned anything from Kishinev, Warsaw, Sobibor, and the Arab-Israeli conflict? As the magic eight ball toy says, “Signs point to no.” The leadership of the American Jewish community has a pathological need to be liked, to be praised in the right newspapers, and to get the approval from people who do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.
We have not demonstrated a determination to stand up and demand our rights, our right to be free from anti-Jewish violence. We are two percent of the nation, but 70+ percent of the hate crimes are directed at us.
Today, as I speak on Yom Kippur, a clown car of real antisemites at the University of Pennsylvania is putting on the Palestine Writes festival, and it is sure to be yet another hateful presentation on our holiest holiday. The speakers include the infamous Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who dressed up in a Nazi uniform during a concert in Berlin just to press our buttons.
And just a few days ago, a Jew-hater invaded Penn Hillel yelling antisemitic things and trashing the place. What will our response be? Will we protest? Will Jews stop sending big donation checks to the University of Pennsylvania? I doubt it, there won’t be any real response. And it’s not just Penn—antisemitism is up 41% at college campuses across the nation.
Today is Yizkor, a day to remember. Very few of the people we ourselves remember were actually in Kishinev in 1903. But a great many were alive in 1943, and even more were alive in 1973.
The past 120 years has seen a complete transformation in the nature of anti-Jewish hate. We have gone from victims to rebels to soldiers to victors. Our journey from victim to victor has won us no friends. But that’s okay, we don’t need friends. We need respect. We ask this world for nothing but the right to exist in safety and peace.
Tell your dead loved ones that you won’t let the Jewish community down. Tell them you’ll stand up to the hatred, the assimilation, and the threats.
As we remember them, let us repent for the sin of taking it easy on those who hate us.
Let us repent for the sin of getting bashful and wishy-washy when Israel has the gall to defend itself against attack.
Let us repent for the sin of forgetting the lessons of Kishinev, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Escape from Sobibor, and the Yom Kippur War. And may we and the Jewish people be inscribed and sealed for a year of joy, health, and security.