(Jay originally wrote this when the MCJC was attempting to raise money to purchase the building for our shul. We are indeed fortunate that we now have a shul in Caspar)
All of us, who are Jews, are survivors of the Holocaust. Some of us are survivors because we've been to the camps and somehow came out alive. Some of us are survivors because we went into hiding and hid so well and so long that we weren't caught. Some of us are survivors because we fled in 1939 before the slaughter began. And some of us are survivors because we were lucky enough to be born on the other side of the conflagration. Survivors just the same.
Up here in Mendocino (northern California) we have an active Jewish community. A few years ago some people came up from L.A. and it was the High Holy days. They attended our service and noticed that we were using a borrowed Torah. When they returned to L.A. they wrote a letter saying that, when their daughter was Bat Mitzvah they had pledged that they would obtain a holocaust Torah from England and donate it to a deserving Jewish community and they couldn't think of a more deserving Jewish community than ours.
So it was that some time later the Torah came to us. It had served for many years in a small Jewish town in Tchekoslovakia and in 1939 the Nazis closed the temple, took all the religious items and numbered them. They were collected from Jewish communities all over Europe and were destined for a museum to be called "Artifacts from a defunct people". The Nazis then proceeded to make it a reality and the entire Jewish population of that small Tchek village was exterminated in the camps.
When Judith Meisel, a local resident and a survivor of the camps, went back for the 50th anniversary memorial, she told us something that moved us to tears. She said that, upon leaving, she stood by the barbed wire fence and turned and faced the camp where she had been interned and where her mother had been murdered and whispered to her dead mother: "I want you to know that I survived. You have children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. We are here. You have survived through us."
When our small Jewish community opened that precious Torah, that Torah that had been sealed in 1939, that Torah that had been numbered, like concentration camp inmates had been tattooed, and destined for the morgue of a museum, when we freed that Torah you could almost hear it whisper back in time to those Tchek Jews who had held it and cherished it and perished: You are alive. You have a whole congregation here in Mendocino, in Northern California because your Torah is a survivor.
No matter what your beliefs, a Jew is whatever the Nazis said a Jew is. If your parents were half Jewish and half Gentile, or one fourth, or one eighth, or one sixteenth, the Nazis considered you a Jew and you were marked for death. You couldn't deny it by saying "I'm not a believer" or "I'm not a practitioner" or "I've converted to Christianity". In their eyes you were a Jew and you were condemned.
So we have a statement to make, a loud affirmation of our existence. Like Judith Meisel to her dead mother, like that Tchek Torah to its murdered congregation We are alive. We are still here. And here we will stay.
Copyright 1997 Jay Frankston
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