You Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover Ritual

Chapter 1: Passover and the Challenge of Holocaust Memory

9 Chapter 1 Passover and the Challenge of Holocaust Memory
We tell the story not only to preserve the memory. We tell the story because Egypt was not only one physical place. The Exodus was not just one moment in time. We step into this story because it is both our story and the story of all people who have experienced oppression and liberation. —A Night of Questions: A Passover Haggadah Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival of the Lord. . . . And you shall explain to your son on that day ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt’” (Exod. 13:6, 8). These words from the book of Exodus establish the Jewish celebration of Passover as a remembrance of when God redeemed the Israelites from slavery. Mishnah Pesachim, a rabbinic text that elaborates on how to tell the Exodus story during the Passover celebration, further instructs that parents should tell their children according to each child’s level of understanding (Pesachim 10:4). The words from Exodus are reiterated in the haggadah immediately preceding the core section of the telling. To the child “who does not know enough to ask,” who cannot express her wonderment about the strange foods and ritual actions that govern the evening meal; who cannot ask, “why is this night different?” To that child: “You shall explain to your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Eternal One did for me when I went free from Egypt.’”1 The title of this book, You Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover Ritual deliberately evokes these powerful words that resonate with generations of Jews to whom parents and grandparents , aunts and uncles told the story of slavery and redemption year after year. But in this text the subject of our telling includes both Passover and the Holocaust, or—more specifically—the insertion of the Holocaust into American Passover celebrations. 10 You Shall Tell Your Children How do these two tellings fit together: one a story of joyous liberation ; the other a story of unbearable destruction? The tellings are symbolized on the front cover by an image of two glasses: one whole; the other shattering. Glasses filled with wine figure prominently during the Passover meal. The book of Exodus employs four verbs to describe God’s salvific actions: “I will free you (v’hotzati) from the burden of the Egyptians and deliver you (v’hitzalti) from their bondage. I will redeem you (v’galti) with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements . And I will take you (v’lakachti) to be My people, and I will be your God” (Exod. 6:6–7). During the Passover seder, each of these promises of redemption is recalled by a cup of wine drunk at a particular time during the highly structured ritual meal. Like the wine sanctified and drunk during celebration of the Sabbath, these glasses are symbols of joy. A fifth cup filled with wine for the Prophet Elijah occupies a central place on the seder table. In a ritual moment filled with drama, participants fill Elijah’s cup with wine and a child opens the front door to welcome the prophet, who—according to legend—visits every seder on Passover night. On many present-day seder tables, Miriam’s cup resides next to Elijah’s. A glass filled with water, it symbolizes Miriam’s well, which sustained the Israelites during their long journey in the desert. The unbroken glass contains the fullness of joy, freedom, liberation, and redemption experienced at the Passover seder. The broken glass carries other meanings. Kristallnacht. “The Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9, 1938, the Nazis organized and encouraged a wave of violence against Germany’s Jews. Within a few hours, thousands of Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses were destroyed. That night and the following day, Nazis arrested approximately thirty thousand Jews and sent them to concentration camps. These actions signaled a change from the previous five years of discriminatory policies to an adoption of full-scale violence and the end of German Jewry’s hopes that the anti-Semitism directed toward them would be tolerable. Illusions of safety shattered. The event became known as Kristallnacht because shards of glass from broken windows covered the streets of Germany. The broken glass and the whole glass rest ill at ease side by side, and contemporary American Jews...