A Jewish Bahá’í at Yad Vashem: Have We Learned Nothing?
Pilgrimage is common to most religions, and tales of pilgrims’ journeys resound throughout our sacred and secular records, from Canterbury to Mecca. I have had the great privilege of visiting the Holy Land to make my own pilgrimage to the Bahá’í holy places in ‘Akká and Haifa, the spiritual and administrative headquarters of the Bahá’í world. This was my primary goal, and the majority of my time was spent in visits to Bahá’í historic spots in these localities, and most importantly, in prayer and meditation at the incomparably beautiful Bahá’í Shrines.
There was another aspect to my journey that, while subsidiary to the overarching Bahá’í focus, informed it with a special significance. I am of Jewish descent, and the land of Israel is invested with a personal resonance. My complete, uncompromising allegiance to the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh in no way contradicts this Jewish identity, for Bahá’u’lláh tells us that all religions issue from the same Source. Also, Jewish identity is as cultural and historical as it is religious. It enhanced my pilgrimage and deepened its significance.
While I was in Israel, I visited Jerusalem. For me, this was in a sense part of my pilgrimage. There I felt as a concrete reality the ageless faith of the one true God. I felt my Jewish and Bahá’í identities being forged into a single, overriding identification with all of humankind. Located in one of the newer sections of Jerusalem is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. It was an appropriately grim though graceful assemblage of structures, low and somber, made grimmer by the cold rain pouring from a dark gray sky the day of my visit. It has been remodeled since I went, but the message remains compelling and still urgently necessary.
The museum exhibit consisted mostly of photographs accompanied by text from various sources. There were a few telling items on display: canisters of Zyklon B, clothing worn by camp inmates, some rusted tools. It was a devastatingly thorough document of a horror that should never have happened.
The greatest power of the images for me lay in that these people looked my family. My family emigrated from eastern Europe long before the war, but undoubtedly relatives of mine, unknown to me but family nonetheless, died in the Holocaust. The people in these pictures were not anonymous blurs for me; they had names — not literally, of course, but the faces were hauntingly familiar. There was the face of my Bubby, of my grandfather Sidney, my sister Patricia, my mother Judy, my cousin Andrea, my friend Elisa.
Two images in particular have stayed with me. In one well known picture, a group of Jews have been stopped at gun-point in a ghetto street by German soldiers. In the foreground, the Jews — men, women, and children — are frozen in place, their faces taut masks, mostly facing away from the soldiers. Closest to the camera is a dark-haired boy of perhaps seven or eight. He is dressed as if for school: short pants, jacket, cap. Like the rest of the Jews, the boy’s hands are raised over his head, which makes his jacket bunch awkwardly at the shoulders. He is facing away from the soldiers, staring off to the right. His face is stiff, expressionless. His eyes are blank and unseeing. His little mouth is slightly open, his lips pulled back in a faint grimace. It is the face of a child in blind shock from terror. No child should ever look like that little boy. Ever.
The other image that remains with me is of a youth standing over a mass grave. In this photo, a teenage boy holding a shovel stands on a mound of dirt over a pit filled with neatly stacked corpses. His expression is difficult to ascertain. His mouth seems almost to be smiling, but his eyes are dark with pain. The contrast between the smiling lips and despair-filled eyes is shocking. But what drove this image into my heart like a stake was that this boy looked just like my father at 16, but so damaged and stunned that he no longer knew how to smile.
There were hundreds of pictures, reams of text — and one can only assume that this is but a fraction of the existing records. It was all extremely well documented. Too well. For if there was so much proof of what was going on, why was it allowed to happen? How can the world claim not to have known? One cannot escape the conclusion that the world did know. And yet six million Jews died anyway. Why?
“Never again!” was the cry of the world when it was finally forced to acknowledge the atrocity. Never again would the world sit by and let people be massacred. But it has happened again, and is happening still: Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor… the list continues to grow. And now we have Nazis marching in the streets of small-town America — and what is worse, people defending them. Have we learned nothing? Have the millions died in vain?
The horror of the Holocaust is proof of the crying need for unity, for the absolute eradication of all forms of prejudice. It is not enough to love one’s country, to defend one’s tribe, to protect one’s family. It is only when we expand our definition of country, tribe, and family to embrace everyone that a genuine end to such atrocity is possible, for as long as we consider ourselves to be separate from one another, we will stand by and let others be exterminated. Ultimately, I found Yad Vashem to be a powerful confirmation of the reality of the oneness of humanity. “Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country;” Bahá’u’lláh said, “let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.” Humanity is our kind. Let us never forget this. Never again.