The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Faulkner
When I was growing up in the 1970s, Holocaust survivors were all around us–our neighbors, relatives, members of our synagogues. Some of them were willing to talk about their experiences, to show the numbers tattooed in their arms; others were unable or unwilling for their own reasons. Each story of suffering and survival was completely unique, full of horror with glimmers of luck and support to enable them to make it when so many didn’t. These stories were often recounted with sighs, through heavy accents, like scratched recordings from a distant past.
Children were given a sense that, for all of its horror, the Shoah was a unique event, one that taught the world critical lessons about human cruelty and genocide. The more time that moved on since the Shoah, the more that “the world” was “learning the lessons” of that evil, the more that governments were putting in place systems to ensure that “never again” would such hatred and violence be unleashed, against us Jews or anyone else. We needed to believe that people everywhere studied the Holocaust and thought like us that change was necessary and possible.
Alas, recent events are reminding us that antisemitism, hatred and atrocities, far from phenomena in the rearview mirror, are very much present and always capable of resurgence. The ADL just released a report showing that last year set an astounding record for antisemitic incidents, the highest since such 1979 when such incidents started to be tracked. The war in Ukraine has brought pictures, videos, and testimony of atrocities including indiscriminate bombing of civilians, housing and infrastructure, mass rapes, the shooting of bound civilians, and illicit weapons–what some experts are calling genocide–of a scale and barbarity not seen in Europe since WW2. Towns and cities are starting to become bywords of brutality: Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkhiv.
Of course, such atrocities and genocide have occurred repeatedly in recent decades, with “the world” showing little ability or inclination to intervene. Rwanda, Syria, Darfur, Yemen, the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Rohingya… The list is long and grows yearly.
The war in Ukraine has made me think of my own family’s Ukrainian origins. On my father’s side, both of his parents came from the same shtetl, Medzhibozh. Jews were a part of the town from the beginning of its recorded time in the early 16th century, with the first one, a man named Liberman, hired to be… a tax collector! As with the rest of the region, the town was considered part of different countries at various times, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, even Turkey, before becoming officially part of Ukraine.
Medzhibozh had a glorious Jewish past and is still–when not under war–an important Jewish pilgrimage site. Most famously, the Baal Shem Tov established his beit midrash there and is buried in the old cemetery. Other important rabbis also lived there, including the Bach (R. Israel Sirkes, commentator on the Tur), the Besht’s grandson Baruch ben Yechiel and R. Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apta (a namesake of the famous American rabbi). Rebbe Nachman of Breslov was born in Medzhibozh. Both of my father’s parents were from Mezhibozh, although they met in New York at the landsmandschaft after emigrating here before WW1. Although they were not especially religious, they remained in contact with the town’s main religious leader, Rabbi Bick, who moved to New York in the 1920s.
The Jews in the town were wiped out twice, the first time in 1648, in the notorious massacres by the followers of cossack leader Bogdan Khmelnytsky, the second time of course in the Shoah. On one day, September 21, 1941, the remaining 2,000 Jews of Mezhibozh were lined up in a ravine and slaughtered. After the war, only a handful survived and returned; the last Jew of the town, who guarded the cemetery, died in 2014. Somehow, my grandfather’s one sister who had stayed in Medzhibozh survived the war; he returned to visit her in the late 1960s. History and Jewish family lore both record the Ukrainians as barbaric collaborators of the Nazis, and although plenty of Ukrainians also hid Jews and helped them survive, in general our community here (at least) does not remember that country fondly. The fact that the region in which Mezhibozh lies, originally called Khamenets-Podolia, is now named Khmelnitsky, is further proof that the country is one of Jewish bloodshed and sorrow.
All the more so, the recent turn of events is so surprising, shocking, wrenching. We’ve discovered that in the intervening years, Jews in Ukraine have managed not just to survive but to thrive, to rebuild communities, to become welcome citizens, even to become pillars of the country. We discover that Ukraine today is rated the safest country in Europe for Jews to live–before the war–that Jews readily take arms to join the struggle against Russia. Many of us find ourselves identifying with the Ukrainians at many levels, as upholders of democracy, fighters for their own country and ethnic identity against a brutal dictatorship ruled by a madman. The change in perspective is simultaneously terrifying, exhilarating, and dumbfounding. And it calls into question the lessons of the Shoah, some of the certainties we imbibed, that we learned years ago and are still struggling to understand and apply.
May we all come to live in a world that learns the lessons of the Shoah, upholds the sacredness of life, and works together to prevent the spread of hatred, war and genocide.