Echoes

Last week I had the gift of vacation, and we traveled, as we often do, with close friends. This year’s adventure found us cruising on the Danube River, seeing sites from Budapest to Passau, Germany and points in between. It is a beautiful countryside, and each stop was filled with history and culture. We took in everything from a winery with buildings that date back nearly 2000 years to a private Mozart concert in Vienna and so much more.

Our guides in each place fully acknowledged the war and the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish population of each area. We toured the synagogues in Budapest, both with rich histories and both struggling to meet the needs of those Jews that remain in their community. The number of lives lost, the decline in the Jewish population, these are things that we know, and they are, as we know, staggering.

But what has stayed with me was on our final day, the one we spent in Munich before we flew home. The only spot in Germany we had visited was Passau and that was for the day before disembarking. We headed to the Jewish Museum and Munich’s only synagogue.

It is a small museum, clearly designed as part of a campus that incorporates the synagogue and a community center. The bottom floor, below ground, houses their permanent collection and there are two floors for temporary exhibits. While we were there, the temporary exhibit was “The Third Generation: The Holocaust in Family Memory.”

As I walked through the “Third Generation” exhibit, there were so many things that were striking, the reflection of long term, multi-generational trauma in art. There were paintings, films, writing and more. But what gave me the most pause was the project undertaken by two individuals in search of traces of the past, Helena Czernak and Aleksander Prugar. They traveled throughout Eastern Europe and found something both simple and profoundly meaningful. In many places, they came across door frames upon which mezuzot had clearly once been in place. The wooden frames bore the imprints of these long removed religious items, and the pair developed a special method to make bronze casts from these imprints and to recreate the mezuzah that had once been in that location. Today, they have both a small museum in Warsaw and also sell these reproductions, complete with the address of the home where they were found.

For me, the removal of this small but vital symbol of Jewish identity says, without words, how much was lost. It reinforced for me what I already knew, that killing was not enough, that the goal was complete eradication—of a people, of a religion, of a history, of a culture.

My father’s family were among the fortunate ones who left Poland before leaving became impossible. The shtetl where he grew up had a significant percentage of Jewish population. Today there is none. There are no remnants of what had, by all accounts, been a thriving and connected community. There are no mezuzot in the collection that come from that shtetl, no echoes of the lives that were there and are there no longer.

In the lingering shadow of October 7, however, there are many echoes, echoes of the Holocaust, echoes of lives lost and lives shattered, echoes of the doorframes now, not only empty of mezuzot, but nonexistent, evidence of yet another attempt to destroy our people. Like the preservation of the mezuzot of the past, we must continue to carry on, to stand strong, to hold firm to our existence and our right to exist. Like the re-casting of the missing mezuzot, may we continue to fill the voids left by terror and destruction with life and determination and a commitment to both survive and thrive.

I love it! My only comment is the ending left me wanting more punch. Maybe continue the metaphor of the casting of the empty indentations from the removed mezuzot – how we seek now to fill the void left by the forced erasure with joy and thriving and life.