This is one of the more difficult things to understand when studying the Holocaust. Many Jews survived the horrors of Nazi Germany and concentration camps such as Auschwitz and remained strong in their belief in a loving God! However, for some Jews God has remained impossible.

The Bible stories about the ancient Israelites make it clear that in the past Jews were God’s chosen people –he parted the Red Sea for them, stopped the sun from rising in order that they might win a battle, etc.

But questions arise from the Holocaust: Where was he when the Nazis slaughtered the Jews in their millions? Why did not God provide a ‘Moses’ to lead them out of the death camps as he had previously led them out of slavery in Egypt?

This line of questioning is similar to the questions posed when we study the problem of evil. And we can ask, ‘If God is Good and Loving then he should have stopped the Holocaust of his chosen people’.

Jewish religious thinkers are left with several options: -

God is not all loving
God is not all-powerful
Jews are not the chosen people
There is no God
There has to be some other explanation

For most Jewish religious thinkers only the last option is acceptable. Many have spent their lives trying to provide an acceptable answer to the question: ‘Where was God of the Jews during the Holocaust?’

The first response we shall examine is from a man called Eliezer Berkowits, an Auschwitz survivor. He said that it is possible to believe in God after the Holocaust because despite all the sufferings that people endured there were still great testimonies of faith. He told the story of a rabbi who was walking to the gas chambers of Auschwitz when he asked for a glass of water. Knowing that he and his companions were going to die he nonetheless took the water and poured it over his hands as a sign of preparation for the confession of sins before death. Such individual strength of courage and faith, said Berkowitz was an example to the world of the loving power of God.

Emil Fackenheim was a survivor of several death camps. He stated that Jews must believe in God so as “not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory”, for if Jews give up on their religion then in effect Hitler has won –he has made the world Jew free. Fackenheim invented the 614^th Commandment –all Jews must survive as religious Jews –as a compulsory commandment just like the other 613 that Jews must follow.

Richard Rubenstein, however, completely denied the existence of God after the holocaust, at least the idea of the sort of God found in the Jewish Bible. He said man has become too powerful for God and He no longer has any control over what happens in the world.

Primo Levi was a poet, a chemist and an Auschwitz survivor. He found it very hard to reconcile religion with what had happened to him during the Holocaust. He killed himself, in 1987, after he became more and more distressed by the number of people who denied the holocaust ever happened. One of his more famous poems was “Shema”.

Shema

You who live secure

In your warm houses

Who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,

Who labours in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for a crust of bread

Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider whether this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house crumble,

Disease render you powerless,

Your offspring avert their faces from you.

The Shema is the most important Jewish statement of faith “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One”: It is the first and last words that a Jew should ever speak each day, the prayer is attached to their doorposts in the mezuzah and worn on the forehead and arm in Tefillah boxes while praying.

There are some Jews who have dedicated their whole life to finding the Nazis who have committed the crimes during the Second World War. One of these is Simon Wiesenthal. Before the war he was an architect. He secretly drew pictures of the Nazis and the horrors he witnessed in Janwska concentration camp on paper stolen from the factory he worked in. Having narrowly escaped death in Mauthausen camp, he dedicated the rest of his life to finding Nazi criminals and bringing them to justice. Shortly after the war many of them had escaped to Argentina and America where they had taken on new identities. Even today there are still men in their eighties who are being accused of war crimes and being brought to trial. When asked why he chose his unique course, Wiesenthal explains, "When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it."

The most famous Nazi war criminal Wiesenthal found was Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the organisation of the Final Solution to kill all the remaining Jews in Europe in the death camps. He had escaped to Argentina and even changed his name. However, in the 1950s his true identity was eventually unmasked. He was kidnapped by Israeli agents whilst in Argentina and taken to Israel where he was put on trial and in 1962 executed by hanging for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity.

Simon Weisenthal