The Afterlife of Religion: Memoirs of the Holocaust and the Haredi Spiritualization of Modernity

Despite the important discussion about the revival of Jewish presence and identity in twenty-first-century eastern Europe,¹ it is clear that the Holocaust was the tragic terminus of life, including of course religious life, for most of the east European Jewish communities and for numerous central and west European communities. In this chapter, I examine what might be considered one form of the afterlife of the religious dimension of some of the Jews who went through the Holocaust and either survived or were remembered by survivors.² My focus is on the literary genre of the Orthodox Holocaust memoir in English and its significance for its primary readership, members of the contemporary haredi community. Obviously great care has to be taken in approaching any Holocaust memoir material or testimony if one is trying to examine factual history,³ but here I am trying to examine a different kind of process, which transports certain aspects of the Holocaust experience from the past into the present. The afterlife which emerges, one might claim, has the power to engender life. Not only, as Michal Shaul explains, because the Orthodox Holocaust memoir validates Orthodox values,⁴ but also because among contemporary haredi Jewry, especially in the diaspora, there is a thirst for spiritual encounters.

This thirst appears, in a late twentieth-century context, to be threatened by increasing routinization and secularization, despite the active maintenance of haredi Orthodox practice, even within insulated enclaves. In the post-war period, the Orthodox Holocaust memoir provides access to the spiritual ideals and values of Judaism in its idealized depictions of the ‘lost Eden’: personal memories of the period before the war;⁵ the ideals of mesirut nefesh al kidush hashem (self-sacrifice for the sanctification of the Divine Name)—an ancient and powerful Jewish martyr-ological theme—during the war and the Holocaust itself; super-rational trust in G-d; dedicated ahavat yisra’el (love of one’s fellow Jew); a sense of the miraculous in daily experience; and other spiritual values. The creation of the Orthodox Holocaust memoir as a genre mediates not only the horror of the Holocaust but also the secularism of modernity. This chapter tries to examine some aspects of this process.

Orthodox writing on the holocaust

After the war there was little Orthodox memoir writing about the Holocaust. Further, Menachem Friedman has chronicled how some haredi figures moved from blaming secularists in general for the Holocaust to blaming the Zionists in particular.⁶ This latter position was adopted by Rabbi Abraham Karelitz, the Hazon Ish (1878–1953). Other haredi leaders, such as Rabbi Yehezkel Sarna (1890–1969), from 1934 head of the (Slobodka) Hebron Keneset Israel Yeshivah in Jerusalem, in a historic talk lasting several hours at the yeshiva in December 1944 expressed a very different view, focusing on repentance and redemption.⁷

Kimmy Caplan has mapped out elements of a new wave, which became pronounced in the 1980s, of the haredi Holocaust story and memoir. The earlier accusations are marginalized and instead the focus is on the spiritual dimension of the experience. Caplan describes how this is present in Israel both in books of ‘memoirs’ and also in the Siḥat hashavua (weekly publications relating to the current Torah reading) genre of Orthodox publications.⁸

The key to this ‘new wave’ can be seen in the work of Moshe Prager (1909–84), whose life and significance have been discussed by, among others, Havi Dreifuss (Ben-Sasson),⁹ Mali Eisenberg,¹⁰ and Gershon Greenberg.¹¹ Before the war, Prager was a haredi journalist in Warsaw, active on behalf of Agudat Yisrael Youth and published in both the religious and secular Yiddish press. In the summer of 1940 he was closely involved with the rescue of Rabbi Abraham Mordecai Alter (1864–1948), the Gerer Rebbe, known as the Imrei Emes. Prager accompanied the rebbe as he travelled to Trieste and then to the Land of Israel, which they reached in July 1940. Immediately Prager began writing newspaper articles on the terrible conditions for the Jews of Poland...