This post comes from Shiri Sandler, the manager of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, which runs the American Service Academies Program. One weekend last month some of the cadets who have participated in the ASAP program went to Greenwich, CT for a weekend of interfaith dialogue. Shiri was asked to give a sermon at Temple Sholom. The following is an excerpt.
When my first cohort of military students heard that my grandmother is a survivor of Auschwitz- Birkenau, they begged me to bring her in to give testimony. I desperately wanted to, not just because we have our students hear testimony to help them focus on the story of the individual, but also because I selfishly wanted them to think of my grandmother when they went to Birkenau. I wanted my students to remember my great grandmother, whose handmade felt flowers hang in the galleries at the Museum in New York, when they saw the place where she was killed. I wanted them to love my grandmother, remember her story, honor her family, because she is a survivor, I’m her grandchild, and who doesn’t want that for their grandma?
My grandmother did come in to give testimony before the students left for Poland. They asked her embarrassing questions about me when I was little but one of them also asked her a question I’d never asked. He asked what drove her to survive. She said to him that she wanted to survive to tell her father, whom she’d been separated from, that she tried to stay with her mother, who went towards death on the ramp at Auschwitz, while she went towards life. I’d never heard her say that before. That was the first of many times that these students reminded me that what I do with them teaches me about myself and my history, too.
If you ask these cadets and midshipmen about the destroyed heritage they have seen, they will tell of synagogues with grass growing in them, of remnants of prayers written on the walls for Jews too poor to buy a prayer book, of headstones righted and cemetery paths swept clean by their hands. This is their inheritance now, too.
From my own perspective, because this is both my work and also deeply personal to me, working with these students is the continuity my grandmother lost. I can’t rebuild her past, but I can help instill it in the minds of my students and make sure that when they have the opportunity to help put an end to an injustice, they remember the sight of the burning Darfuri home from our workshop on Darfur, and what our world community hasn’t done to stop it; they remember the testimony from the Czech Jew who saw her grandfather get taken away; they remember the fact that my grandma wanted to survive to tell her father she tried. This is how we continue our history, our traditions: we teach them.
My grandmother did come in to give testimony before the students left for Poland. They asked her embarrassing questions about me when I was little but one of them also asked her a question I’d never asked. He asked what drove her to survive. She said to him that she wanted to survive to tell her father, whom she’d been separated from, that she tried to stay with her mother, who went towards death on the ramp at Auschwitz, while she went towards life. I’d never heard her say that before. That was the first of many times that these students reminded me that what I do with them teaches me about myself and my history, too.
If you ask these cadets and midshipmen about the destroyed heritage they have seen, they will tell of synagogues with grass growing in them, of remnants of prayers written on the walls for Jews too poor to buy a prayer book, of headstones righted and cemetery paths swept clean by their hands. This is their inheritance now, too.
From my own perspective, because this is both my work and also deeply personal to me, working with these students is the continuity my grandmother lost. I can’t rebuild her past, but I can help instill it in the minds of my students and make sure that when they have the opportunity to help put an end to an injustice, they remember the sight of the burning Darfuri home from our workshop on Darfur, and what our world community hasn’t done to stop it; they remember the testimony from the Czech Jew who saw her grandfather get taken away; they remember the fact that my grandma wanted to survive to tell her father she tried. This is how we continue our history, our traditions: we teach them.
*Photo: Rabbi Mitchell Hurvitz of Temple Sholom, Shiri Sandler, Jesse Faugstad of West Point, Ellyn Creasey of U.S. Naval Academy, Angela Roush of the Naval Academy, Reverend James Lemler of Christ Church.
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1 comments:
The PHOTO tells it all...
Community working and smiling together...The AJC makes important things happen.
Eliane Sandler
Greenwich, CT
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