JEWISH CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS: BRIAN TRAUB FROM CONGREGATION B'NAI JESHURUN
Shalom Aleichem was born in 1859, near Kiev in the Ukraine. To Shalom, writing was the world. He used writing to express his innermost feelings. He wrote about how he fell in love with a woman. His soon to be father-in-law would not allow the wedding to take place. Eventually, his father-in-law softened up, allowing the two to become a couple. In his writing he expressed how he felt and turned these feelings into his most famous work; the stories of Tevye. These stories were later popularized as the famous movie and musical, "Fiddler on the Roof."
I am Banuch Nuchem Ben Yakov, born in 1991 in Staten Island, New York. Just like Shalom Aleichem, I am going to express my innermost feelings regarding the worst story of pain and suffering in human history.
Prior to the Holocaust, the Jewish people embraced a culture that dictates that knowledge is strength and knowledge is power. Throughout Europe the Jewish people held many prominent positions. Considering their small numbers in the population, the percentage of doctors, lawyers, and scientists who were Jewish, was extremely high. Imagine the world without Albert Einstein (who discovered the theory of relativity); Jonas Salk (who discovered the polio vaccine); Herman J. Muller (for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of x-ray radiation). This is just the tip of the iceberg.
After going through a depression, Hitler could not bear to recognize the prominence and success that Jews were achieving in Europe. Hitler also needed a scapegoat for Germany's ravaged economy. The Jews became the target of Hitler's ire and were slated to be eliminated under Hitler's "final solution." Why this occurred, I will never understand. To me, the Holocaust is a story, a legacy passed down from Jews, our ancestors, who have suffered the pain, agony, torment, hurt, sorrow, mourning, and grieving that the Nazis inflicted upon them.If history were to be rewritten and the holocaust never occurred, the world would be a better place. With the knowledge and skills that the Jews possessed, perhaps some of the life threatening diseases that plague our society would have already been conquered. Think of our world today without cancer, aids, or Alzheimer's. How many loved ones would you still have around? Perhaps the six million is really smaller than we realize.
To me it is baffling, how humanity can cause so much pain and suffering. To me it still feels like out of a fiction book. How can such a monstrous act be true?
I was not a witness to the Holocaust. I did not see the Jewish men, women and children being herded into cattle cars like animals. I did not see the Jewish men, women and children enter the concentration camps where the Jews were shot, tortured and starved. I did not see the Jewish men, women and children being led into the gas chambers to be engulfed with toxic fumes. But, I have come face to face with another act of hatred. When the World Trade Centers were attacked by a Muslim terrorist group called Al Qaeda, 3,000 people were killed. When my friend's mom picked me up early from school, I learned of the tragedy. I gazed upon the black smoke pouring into the clear blue sky on that crisp September morning. At home, on my T.V. I watched as people jumped out of the towering building because the thought of dying in fiery flames seemed overwhelmingly worse than jumping to then-death. Months later came a memorial service to honor the dead. I listened for hours as the names of the fewer than 3,000 victims were read one by one by one. Imagine if the names of all the 6,000,000 Jews who died in the holocaust were to be read aloud. Would it take days? Weeks? Months? I wonder.
I live in America; It states in the first amendment that all people have the right to practice whatever religion they choose. I wonder, after all the suffering that the Jewish people have withstood, how come we are still the object of prejudice. What makes students in my own classroom go out of their way to call me a "dirty Jew"? Perhaps we will one day find peace. Perhaps not. We will just have to wait and see.