In Wake of World War II, Jews Spoke about Holocaust
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- In the 1950s, the world was not unaware of the near destruction of European Jewry in the death camps the Nazis established, but the Jews still alive after 1945 didn’t come to an agreement on a term for what had befallen their kin and friends.
They had several terms or phrases they used among themselves, none of which quite captured and communicated the enormity of Hitler’s crime to the non-Jewish world. And they didn’t succeed in establishing mediums or building memorials that caught the popular imagination of their experience, but not for want of trying.
In her address Tuesday night at Youngstown State University, “We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust,” Hasia Diner, professor of Jewish-American history at New York University, sought to dispel the myth of that silence.
The term most use today to capture that enormity, Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jews, the Holocaust, did not gain popular acceptance and usage until sometime in the 1960s, Diner said, but could not be more specific. Despite its worldwide news coverage, the trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, the man who played a major role in creating the logistics of -- transportation to and operation of -- the death camps, did not distinguish “Holocaust,” she said. Nor did the Six-Day War in May 1967, the third Arab-Israeli war.
In the United States, the American Jewish Congress commissioned a study in 1952 to write a prayer that made reference to the Jewish experience in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Its members came up with a prayer three paragraphs long -- one in English, the other in Hebrew -- that mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at Passover 1943. The last paragraph, however, differed considerably, Diner said, “a divergence between English and Hebrew.”
Since then, the American Jewish community “has built a culture of Holocaust remembrance, haphazardly and slowly,” she related. While Jews built memorial projects within their communities, they built nothing that caught the attention of gentiles in the public sphere. They couldn’t agree among themselves on how or where or the medium in which to proceed.
“Holocaust” (from the Greek for “burnt offering”) was among the terms used to describe their experience -- with both a capital and lowercase H -- but so were “the European catastrophe,” “the accursed Hitler period,” and “Hitler’s ghastly program of extermination.”
Still others proposed “The Third Hurban,” the first being the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, the second the Romans’ destruction of the temple in 70 CE and subsequent Diaspora.
Immediately after World War II, as American Jewry learned the plight of their co-religionists in Europe, “they went beyond memorialization,” Diner said, by sending aid to the survivors, many of them refugees. Between 1945 and 1952, the Jewish community in the United States was the only one with the resources to provide aid to the remnants of the European community. American Jews raised “billion and billions of dollars [adjusted for inflation], bringing out the entire energy of their communities,” she said.
Meanwhile, the non-Jewish community was exposed to snippets of the Jewish experience. In May 1953, on the television program ”This Is Your Life,” host Ralph Edwards presented a Jewish Czech survivor of the concentration camps. The half-hour program was broadcast with no advertising, the sponsor, Hazel Bishop, donating what it would have spent to United Jewish Appeal and thousands of Americans contributed as well.
American Jews kept tabs on what was occurring in Germany and raised alarms about what they perceived as efforts to bring about a neo-Nazi revival. Adolph Held, president of the Jewish Labor Committee, wrote Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to protest Nazi publications offered at book fairs in Frankfurt and other West German cities.
During Hitler’s reign, other Jewish leaders complained about U.S. cities such as Cincinnati and Milwaukee establishing ties as “sister cities” with cities in West Germany.
Because of the third hurban, American Jews felt a more pronounced empathy with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, Diner said. Two rabbis spoke before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963, when King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
So the suggestion or premise that Jews did not speak of, or said little about, what happened between 1933 and 1945 until the early 1970s does not stand up to the evidence, Diner said.
Besides Holocaust studies programs being created at many U.S. colleges and universities, a Holocaust curriculum mandated in several states – Ohio is not among them, Diner noted – and the museum devoted to the Holocaust in Washington, D.C., popular awareness of their experiences continues with best-selling serious histories of the period and dramas and documentaries on television.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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