Obituaries

The staff of Holocaust and Genocide Studies reports with great sadness the passing of Professor Emil Fackenheim on September 19, 2003, and of Rabbi Ephraim Oshry on September 28, 2003.

In Memoriam: Professor Emil Fackenheim

Professor Emil Ludwig Fackenheim, who died at age 87 in Jerusalem, was a distinguished philosopher and Jewish theologian. His most significant and influential work dealt with the meaning of Judaism in the post-Holocaust era. Fackenheim was perhaps best known for formulating a "614th mitzvah" or commandment that admonished: "Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories" by forgetting or by assimilating.

Fackenheim was born in Halle, Germany, on June 22, 1916. He studied with Leo Baeck at the Hochschule f¸r die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, and in 1937 he was the last Jewish student to be accepted at Martin Luther University (fifty-five years later, he was the first Jew to return and lecture there). On Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen, but was freed after three months on condition that he leave Germany immediately. However, he remained in Berlin for another two months, in which time he passed his rabbinical examination. He then fled to Scotland, where, after the outbreak of World War II, he was detained as an enemy alien. Fackenheim was eventually deported to Canada, where he was held for approximately a year and a half in a prison camp in Quebec.

Fackenheim earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1945, and served as rabbi to a congregation in Hamilton, Ontario, before he joined the university faculty in 1948. From 1981 to 1984, Fackenheim divided his teaching between Toronto and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He finally settled in Israel in 1984, where he continued teaching at the Hebrew University and later at Hebrew Union College for more than a decade.

Fackenheim's many books explored the relationship between the Jewish people and God in the wake of the Holocaust. His works include What Is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age (1999); Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy (1996); The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity (1996); The Jewish Bible After the Holocaust: A Re-Reading (1991); To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (1982); The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (1982), Jewish Return Into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (1978); Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (1973), and God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (1970). Fackenheim's most recent book, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (2003) is an autobiography. In addition, Fackenheim was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

In Memoriam: Rabbi Ephraim Oshry

Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, one of the only rabbinical authorities to survive the Kovno ghetto, is recognized for his halachic interpretation of Jewish law. His judgments helped Jews continue practicing their religious beliefs under Nazi occupation.

Born in 1914 in Kupishok, near Ponevezh, Oshry studied at the Slobodka yeshiva under some of the most renowned rabbis of twentieth-century Lithuanian Jewry. Oshry was working as a rabbinical scholar in Kovno when the Nazis invaded in 1941. During the occupation, officials ordered him to guard a warehouse where Jewish books and manuscripts were being gathered for future exhibition by the Nazis. As one of the few remaining rabbis in the ghetto, Oshry used these books to interpret Jewish legal problems faced by the Jews in daily life. Oshry recorded all of these questions and answers on paper and buried them in tin cans. After the war, he recovered his judgments, which were later published in five volumes (in Hebrew), and for which he was awarded two National Jewish Book awards. Extracts appear in his English-language book Responsa from the Holocaust (1983). He was also the author of The Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry (1995).

Oshry assisted efforts to restore the postwar Kovno Jewish community. Later he resided in Rome and in Montreal, where he organized yeshivas for children orphaned during the Holocaust...