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Radio 4,2 mins

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg - 28/04/2022

Thought for the Day

Available for over a year

Good Morning, Among letters I found after my father died was one on see-through airmail paper. It was dated 10 January 1947 and sent from Berlin by a certain Charlotte Tuch to my grandmother, confirming that her mother, my great-grandmother, had perished in the Nazi Holocaust. Her words move me deeply: 鈥榃e received a farewell note from your dear mother prior to her deportation to Theresienstadt. She wrote: 鈥淚n spite of everything my faith in God remains unshakeable.鈥 鈥楾his thought,鈥 Charlotte continued, 鈥楢ccompanied me through the long years of persecution and bombing, when our life hung by a silken thread鈥︹ Today is Yom HaShoah, the date established by the Israeli Parliament for remembering the horrors of the Holocaust and the courage of those who resisted. Resistance takes many forms. The vast majority of Jews, Roma and victims of Nazism had no means of fighting back physically. They had only the strength of their hearts and spirits, their love and faith. I thought of this when I stood silent by the remains of the crematoria at Birkenau: my great-grandmother sending food to others as long as she could, the young Dutch woman Eti Hilesum helping mothers at Westerbork camp in Holland, before they were forced onto trains going east. This tender bravery came to my mind when I joined a pilgrimage of faith leaders to western Ukraine, arranged by the Elijah Interfaith Institute two weeks ago. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, we went to demonstrate our solidarity with Ukraine and our horror at the wanton aggression of the Russian invasion. Our journey elicited Pope Francis鈥檚 unequivocal message that 鈥榳e may not remain silent before the violence of Cain and the cry of Abel鈥 but must 鈥榮peak out forcefully in the name of God to end these abominable actions.鈥 We visited an orphanage near Chernivtsi which had welcomed a hundred mothers and children fleeing the devastated east. The pain was obvious: 鈥業 worry constantly about my husband in Kharkiv,鈥 one woman said. Yet the place was beautifully run, calm, organised, full of love. This, too, is the heart鈥檚 resistance. Situations can鈥檛 be compared: the Nazi Holocaust was vast, industrially organised, and aimed at the mass murder of my people. But back in London this Yom HaShoah, I鈥檓 thinking of my great-grandmother, and those Ukrainian women I met, and of how to behave so that our faith in God and humanity remains unshakeable, despite the horrors let loose by tyranny.

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