“Where was God during the Shoah ?’’ asked soul-searching survivors in DP camps. Three rabbis came together to provide some answers.
By Michel Levine
At the end of the Second World War, the defeat of Nazism was celebrated worldwide with outpourings of joy. At the same time, thousands of Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps were being gathered in Germany, Austria, and Italy in temporary structures known as “Displaced Persons” camps (DP camps). Their material situation there was deeply precarious, as evidenced by the letter that American President Harry Truman sent to General Dwight Eisenhower on August 31, 1945, addressing more specifically the DP camps located in the American occupation zone in Germany. The President expressed outrage at the deplorable living conditions of the Jewish residents — some of whom were even housed in the very places where they had suffered persecution, such as Bergen-Belsen.
While their material situation in these camps gradually improved, many suffered from isolation, a lack of any vision for their future, and ignorance of the fate of their loved ones. They were also burdened by the feeling that their own survival constituted an injustice toward the companions who had died at their side. The belief that God had abandoned them — which had tormented them during their detention — remained powerful. Some asked themselves:
What had God done throughout all these trials? Why had He remained so silent, so distant? And, more desperately: how could one still believe in His existence?
Confronted with this distress, three rabbis began to consider how they might help these troubled souls. Who were these three men of faith? Two were Lithuanian: the first, Samuel Abba Snieg, Chief Rabbi of the American occupation zone, had served as a chaplain during the war. His wife had died at Dachau, where he himself had also been deported.
The second, Samuel Jakob Rose, likewise a survivor of Dachau, held the delicate position of mediator between the Jewish populations of the DP camps and the American administrative authorities. Both men had persuaded a third, an American — Philip Sidney Bernstein — to join their project. This Reform rabbi of the American zone served as adviser to the Military Governor (Militar Gouverneur). During the war, he had overseen the activities of some 300 of his colleagues embedded within the armed forces. The guiding idea behind the three rabbis’ initiative was to invoke emunah — a Hebrew term expressing deep and living trust in God. It is less an abstract or dogmatic assertion than an inner conviction that guides the actions of daily life. And the best means of strengthening Jewish consciences was to reinforce their faith by offering them the reading of holy books (seforim).
But where were such books to be found?
Hundreds of thousands had been dispersed, destroyed, or burned. Contact was made with two organizations active in the camps: the JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), which, in addition to organizing the distribution of food and medicine, was contributing to the creation of Jewish schools; and the Vaad Hatzalah, an Orthodox organization founded in 1939 to assist rabbis and yeshiva students from Poland and Lithuania. One of its innovations had been the creation of “traveling synagogues” circulating through the displaced persons camps. Both organizations were already printing a modest number of prayer books, and their experience would prove valuable. During their meetings, the question arose:
Which work should be printed?
The answer came to them almost immediately: the Talmud.
Much as the Shoah represented a catastrophe of historic proportions, the Talmud — literally “study” or “learning” in Hebrew — was itself born of a catastrophe: the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, marking the beginning of nineteen centuries of diaspora. The rabbinic authorities of the time decided, in the interest of the survival of their faith, to commit to writing the various laws and precepts that governed it, which had until then been transmitted orally. Thus, was constituted a “portable temple” in the form of a book, enabling the Jewish people — despite their dispersion and wherever they might find themselves — to continue living according to their religion.
The first complete edition of the Talmud was produced in Venice between 1519 and 1523 by the Antwerp printer Daniel Bomberg. It comprised 63 tractates across 2,711 double-sided folios, and was subsequently enriched by the Vilna edition (1880–1886), which established a universal standard.
Under Nazi rule, possession of such books was forbidden in Germany and in the occupied countries. They fed the bonfires, alongside the works of great thinkers deemed contrary to the dominant ideology — whether or not their authors were Jewish.
But where was a copy of the Vilna edition to be found that could serve as a model? After considerable searching, word came of two volumes printed in that city in the nineteenth century, said to have been hidden in 1945 in the Benedictine monastery of Sankt Ottilien, southwest of Munich. Upon investigation, it emerged that these two copies were now… in New York. Not without difficulty, they were eventually brought back to Germany. The work could now begin.
Paper had first to be found — vast quantities of paper — at a time when this commodity was rationed across Europe and in extremely high demand, particularly by governments seeking to resume the production of schoolbooks to replace those the Nazis had imposed. Special attention had to be paid to the quality of the paper that could be obtained, in order to ensure the quality of the printing. There was also a shortage of the materials required for printing — inks, and especially collodion. The latter was indispensable for the transfer of images onto zinc photographic plates, of which 1,800 were needed for each complete volume. Banned during the war, collodion was available only in the city of Zwickau, in the Soviet occupation zone. Since the Cold War had already begun, Zwickau refused all assistance, and the precious substance ultimately had to be ordered from the United States. At the same time, finding a printing house in Germany proved arduous. Those that had survived the bombing raids were few, closely monitored, and already prioritized — they too — for administrative and educational needs. Eventually, the American military authorities authorized access to a printing establishment — one of the rare facilities, complicating matters further, capable of producing large-format works. There was a certain irony in the outcome: this firm was located in Heidelberg, cradle of German culture but also a cultural stronghold of Nazism. As for the printing itself, it proved far from straightforward. Nearly one million Hebrew characters were required, obliging the typesetters — some of whom had worked on the production of antisemitic books — to undertake extensive searches for surviving old matrices, and in some cases to fabricate new ones. They also had to respect the distinctive layout of the Talmud — a central text surrounded by commentaries. Pagination, justification, spacing, and notes each presented their own set of problems.
The work was carried out under the watchful eye of a rabbinical committee. During the proofreading of the galley proofs, numerous errors were corrected; those that remained would be eliminated in subsequent editions. As for the photogravure reproduction, it too proceeded with difficulty, not least on account of the incessant power cuts. Approximately 500 complete folio sets, each comprising 19 volumes, eventually came off the presses.
This Talmud would henceforth bear the Hebrew name Talmud She’erit ha-Pletah, which might be translated as the “Talmud of the Survivors.” The cover page of each volume depicts a Nazi labor camp surrounded by barbed wire alongside an idyllic Mediterranean landscape evoking the Land of Israel. A few words in Hebrew give meaning to these images: “From slavery to freedom, from darkness to a great light.” The Joint Distribution Committee, bringing together the various organizations that had participated in the endeavor, decided — with the agreement of the German government — to allocate 40 copies to German Jewish libraries and institutions, and to send the remainder to those throughout the world, including in Mandatory Palestine. Paradoxically, those for whom it had originally been intended numbered no more than 10,000 to 15,000 by 1950, as the displaced persons camps had gradually emptied.
Today, the standard reference Talmud (nussach, or authoritative text) remains the Vilna edition of the nineteenth century. It is readily accessible to all, benefiting from the contributions of scholarly research and the most modern techniques, including digital technology. The “Talmud of the Survivors,” by contrast, is now found only in a handful of museums and private collections. And yet the memory of the work accomplished remains vivid. This transmission of knowledge embodies the resilience of the “People of the Book” in the face of the Shoah, and stands as a testament to its rebirth from the very ruins of its suffering.
About the writer:
Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)
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