The bonds that connect us

Each week the Chronicle poses a poll question and gives readers an opportunity to comment in addition to selecting one of the provided answers. Two weeks ago, we asked our readers how they would primarily categorize Judaism. The choices were: a religion, a people, an ethnicity or a civilization.

One reader commented: “the truth is, it’s a family.”

That comment resonated with me. This summer I thought a lot about the idea of Jews being a family as I traveled to the Czech Republic to visit friends, and to France on a Jewish heritage trip.

Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

After touring several magnificent synagogues in Prague — some of which are now used primarily as museums recalling the vibrancy of the city’s pre-war Jewish community — we took a tour of Terezin, a concentration camp located about 30 miles away. It was the first time I had visited a Nazi camp.

Terezin was not an extermination camp per se; rather, more than 140,000 Jews were sent there before being transferred to death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. Still, because Terezin was so overcrowded and the living conditions were so deplorable, about 34,000 Jews died there. A crematory was built to help dispose of the bodies.

Terezin was unique among the Nazis’ concentration camps; it was, in fact, a propaganda camp. Before visits from the Danish king and the Red Cross, the Nazis “beautified” the camp, building fake shops and cafés, and staging musical performances and sporting matches to demonstrate how well the Jews were being treated. It was all a ruse.

Most of the people on our tour of Terezin were not Jewish. They were there for various reasons: to learn the history, to bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust, to reflect on the consequences of unchecked hate.
I was there for those reasons, too. But as I walked through the barracks and looked into the faces of the victims in photographs, I had the distinct feeling that I was paying my respects to family members.

These were not my blood relatives. And yet.

That same feeling hit me while in Normandy, at the American Cemetery, where our Jewish heritage tour group learned about Operation Benjamin, a project led by Rabbi Shalom Lamm. Operation Benjamin identifies Jewish soldiers whose graves are incorrectly marked with Latin cross headstones and replaces them with Stars of David.

While at the cemetery, we visited the grave of Pittsburgher Nathan Baskind, an Army first lieutenant, who was captured by enemy forces in 1944 and died at a hospital for German air force personnel (and whose story we have told in these pages). Baskind was interred in a mass grave with German soldiers and his remains were positively identified a few years ago through DNA analysis.

Operation Benjamin arranged to transfer Baskind’s remains to the American Cemetery in Normandy, and erected a Star of David to mark his final resting place.

As our small group gathered around Baskind’s grave, we recited the Kaddish prayer and one member of our party chanted El Maleh Rachamim. None of us had met Baskind, but all of us felt an unmistakable connection to him. As if we were family.

The work of Lamm and his team is sacred, and underscores the deep responsibility and love that Jews around the world can and do feel for one another — a beautiful example of taking care each other even decades after death.

I know that not every one of our people feels a connection and responsibility to other Jews, that not everyone has that sense of family belonging. But it seems to me that many of us do.

Family members don’t always get along. Not everyone agrees with everyone else on every issue. But disagreements need not erase the bonds that connect us. Like in a family, what matters most is respecting, caring and showing up for one another.

We are experiencing a period of deep polarization, and at times it has surfaced in our own community. But perhaps as Rosh Hashanah approaches, as we look back on where we’ve been this past year and where we are headed, we can lean into this sense of Jews being a family to help us persevere when times are uncertain at best and
terrifying at worst.

I felt that sense of family in Terezin, looking into the faces of people I had never known. I felt it again at Nathan Baskind’s grave, surrounded by people who had never met him but honored him nonetheless. That connection may be difficult to define, but it is real and I am grateful for it.

And as we enter a new year, I hope we can hold onto that connection — and to one another — a little more tightly.

May 5787 be a year of peace and joy for all of us. L’shana tova. PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.