{"id":1003,"date":"2016-10-03T20:28:55","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T03:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2016-10-04T07:06:44","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T14:06:44","slug":"rosh-hashanah-zichranot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1003","title":{"rendered":"Rosh Hashanah — Zichronot"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rabbi Fruithandler asked me to speak for a few minutes on the issue of Zichron — Memory, which has long been an interest of mine.\u00a0 Rosh Hashanah is also known as Yom HaZikaron — the Day of Remembrance, and the Zichronot is an essential part of the day\u2019s observance.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a certain movie that I\u2019ve watched about 30 times in the past year or so, and it too has remembrance as one of its main themes.\u00a0 At the very beginning of \u201cWoman in Gold,\u201d Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann says that her object in seeking to recover the portrait of her aunt Adele is \u201cto keep the memories alive.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cBecause people forget,\u201d she warns, \u201cespecially the young.\u201d\u00a0 And at the end of the film, the theme returns with an emotional scene of young Maria leaving her parents in Vienna, as her father pleads, \u201cI ask you one thing: Remember us.\u201d\u00a0 So remembrance is really at the core of the film, and it is one of the reasons that it resonated with so many people. \u00a0It\u2019s a tear-jerker, but I hadn\u2019t given Maria\u2019s farewell scene much serious thought because actually Maria\u2019s father died in the summer of 1938, shortly after the Nazis invaded, while Maria\u2019s husband was imprisoned in Dachau<\/a> (something not shown in the film) and so she never had a farewell scene like that.\u00a0 But then after a talk someone came up to me and said how much she had loved that particular scene, because her mother had also had to leave her parents behind.\u00a0 It was only then that I realized that of course my mother\u2019s father had done the very same thing.\u00a0 He had fled on the day after Kristallnacht and never saw his parents again.\u00a0 That scene had played out for thousands of families, including my own.\u00a0 Even in a fictional scene, the film had managed to memorialize the pain of an entire generation.<\/p>\n

There is another scene in the film about remembrance that is based on something that did happen to me.\u00a0 As a turning point in the film, they have my character go with Maria to see the Holocaust memorial in Vienna, and I have a sort of breakdown.\u00a0 While working on Maria\u2019s case, I was at the unveiling of the memorial by British artist Rachel Whiteread, which is a large white mausoleum-like sculpture with walls made to look like a library of inverted books, with the spines facing inward so you cannot read the titles.\u00a0 I really did not like it very much, and still don\u2019t.\u00a0 For me, the 65,000 Austrian victims of the Holocaust are not a closed book, never to be opened.\u00a0 They have names and stories, each and every one of them, and it upset me a bit that they were being remembered anonymously, as if no one could remember who they were.\u00a0\"01_Judenplatz_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But at the unveiling there was a wonderful speech by President Thomas Klestil.\u00a0 He was describing the history of the location, which is known as the Judenplatz (the Jewish Square) because it is on the location of an old synagogue that was the site of a famous three-day siege during a pogrom in 1421, after which the Jews inside committed suicide by burning down the synagogue with themselves inside.\u00a0 Two hundred surviving Jews were later burned alive at the command of Duke Albrecht.\u00a0 And it was on this very site, atop the ruins of the old synagogue that were found underneath the square that the new Holocaust memorial was being placed.\u00a0 Then the Austrian President said \u201cUnd wie lange dauert die Geschichte.\u201d\u00a0 It was more a statement than a question.\u00a0 And how long does history last.\u00a0 Indeed.\u00a0 Here we were almost 600 years later, and we were still telling the story of those Jewish martyrs.\u00a0 And what of the story of the Holocaust, which was so many times worse, I thought to myself.\u00a0 What of my great-grandfather Siegmund Zeisl, who lived for 70 years in that city, only to be murdered in Treblinka.\u00a0 How long will that story also be told?\u00a0 It will be told forever!\u00a0 And I cried at the thought of it.<\/p>\n

Strange how we can become emotional remembering things that we did not experience.\u00a0 I never met my great-grandfather, nor even his son, my own grandfather, who died of a heart attack at age 53.\u00a0 I only knew his story.\u00a0 But the story is somehow a part of me.\u00a0 And so it is for all of us.\u00a0 We remember our loved ones, and their loved ones, and the ones who came before, in a long chain back to the beginning of time.\u00a0 That remembrance defines us as human beings, as a culture and as a people.\u00a0 That is why Rosh Hashanah is a day of remembrance.<\/p>\n

But the flip side of remembrance is forgetting.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t only the young who forget, as Helen Mirren says, but all of us.\u00a0 I could say, now that I am over 50, especially the old.\u00a0 But forgetting is also important.\u00a0 We say that God knows and remembers everything.\u00a0 But we know that remembering everything is also a curse.\u00a0 Who would want to remember everything?\u00a0 When we pray for remembrance, we pray for selective remembrance, to remember the things that should be remembered and to forget what should be forgotten.\u00a0 Being able to remember, and remember selectively, is a gift.\u00a0 It is what makes us human.\u00a0 But interestingly it is not something we can control.\u00a0 Do we really have a choice what to remember and what to forget?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 There is something divine in remembrance.<\/p>\n

And so, as we go through the Zichranot prayer and meditation, we will concentrate on our memories, of our loved ones, of ourselves, of people who are meaningful to us.\u00a0 Some memories may make us cry, some may make us laugh.\u00a0 But our memories are who we are, and for that we can all say Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rabbi Fruithandler asked me to speak for a few minutes on the issue of Zichron — Memory, which has long been an interest of mine.\u00a0 Rosh Hashanah is also known as Yom HaZikaron — the Day of Remembrance, and the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/1006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}