Sermon: Yom Kippur Yizkor

Metuchen 2008/5769

Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer

The Greeks invented the Fates. The Persians created the tale of Serendipity.

Greek mythology tells us that the Fates were three daughters of Zeus. The first daughter was Clotho who spun the thread of life. The second daughter was Lachesis who measured the thread it to its allotted length. The third daughter was Atropos who snipped it off at the appropriate time. I prefer the Persian Serendipity, the opposite of fate and predetermination. Serendipity gave us the notion by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. Nothing is fated.

The word serendipity also derives from mythology – Persian mythology. It is described in letters that passed between the writer Horace Walpole and education reformer Horace Mann. It is called The Travels and Adventures of the Three Princes of Sarendip. The three princes are three sons of a philosopher – king of Sarendip. The king sends his three sons on a journey to learn the customs of people other than their own.

As the princes were riding along, they met a camel driver who had lost one of his camels and asked if they had seen it. The princes ask three questions: Was the animal blind in one eye? Was it missing a tooth? Was it lame? The camel driver answers “yes” to all three questions. The princes tell him that they had passed his animal and that it must have gone quite far by now.

The camel driver searched the road for twenty miles without finding his missing animal, so he returned and again to the three princes. The princes make three more observations about the camel. The camel was laden with butter on one side and honey on the other; it was being ridden by a woman; and the woman was pregnant. The driver was sure that the princes must have stolen the camel so he had them brought to justice before the Emperor. The princes confessed that they had never really seen the camel and that they had only reported on inferences drawn from the clues they had observed, which happened to coincide with the facts.

All ends well when the camel is found. The emperor, vastly impressed, wants to know how the princes had so accurately inferred its characteristics. They explain to him their guess that the camel must be blind in the right eye because the grass had been trodden on the left side of the road, where it was worse than on the right; a tooth was missing because they found evidence in chewed grass with missing gaps by the side of the road; its footprints showed that it was lame and was dragging one foot; that its load of honey and butter could be inferred from the trail of ants on one side of the road, because ants love butter, and of flies on the other, because flies love honey; at one place they saw footprints that they attributed to a woman rather than a child because they also felt carnal desires there; and finally, that this woman must be pregnant, because they had seen the imprints of her hands on the ground, where, in her heavy state, she had used them to get to her feet again.

And so the word serendipity entered our vocabulary, describing various enterprises from the discovery of Penicillin to an ice cream store in New York City.

Serendipity struck our shul this year. Let me tell you how. In 1973 I was contacted by the Westminster synagogue in London re: Torah scrolls rescued from Czechoslovakia and offered to synagogues by permanent loan. What we knew then was that the Torah was used in Czechoslovakia, hidden during the Shoah, rescued, stored, in London and loaned permanently to us. And that brief history is what I recalled to you at every YK Yizkor all these years.

This past year though, I was contacted by a researcher Ellen Yassky from Fairfield, Connecticut. The full history of our Torah is even more compelling. It is a history spun not by the Greek notion of predetermination, but by the Persian notion of Serendipity. I would like to share the serendipitous history with you.

Sixty-five years ago, a cataclysmic event took place in a Bohemian town known as Kladno, in what was then known as Czechoslovakia. 1,634 Czechoslovakian Jews boarded trains known as “Transport Y” and “Transport Z.” About 116 were from Kladno a mining town located about 12 miles west of Prague. It was a journey whose first stop was Terezin, then for the most part, onto Auschwitz. Out of 116 Jews from Kladno, only 16 would eventually return. Kladno was the largest city in that area, large enough to house a synagogue with an established Jewish community and several Torahs. Other nearby towns with smaller Jewish populations in the Greater Kladno region, all stretched around it. As these families boarded these trains, they were destined to the tragic fate that could have been envisioned by Greek mythology. Clotho had finished her spinning; Lachesis was busy measuring; Atropos stood ready with her shears in her fist. The garment was a shroud.

Who were these Jews and what is their connection to us here today? Let me tell you. They were people very much like us. They were merchants, miners, doctors, bankers, tailors, and farmers. Their lives centered on their families and their synagogue. Their ancestors had lived, worked, and died in Kladno for a long time. They grew from three families in the 15^th century to many in the 19^th century, when their shul was completed.

By 1939, the news of Kystellnacht resonated throughout the Jewish world. The Jews in this small city of Kladno knew that the winds of war were heading their way. They contacted the members of the Hussite Church in their community and asked for help. The Hussites, are a religious sect connected to the Protestant Reformation and were integral to the Czech national self-awareness.

The Jewish community of Kladno asked the church to take over the synagogue in a way that would allow the Jewish presence to be camouflaged. Parishioners of the Hussite church - their neighbors and friends, agreed. The Kladno synagogue was folded into the Kladno Hussite church.

The Kladno synagogue had seven Sifrei Torah, many were probably written in Bohemia 100 years prior. The Torahs either remained in the church walls, or some report, hidden in the cemetery behind the Hussite church. Today what was the synagogue building in Kladno is still a Hussite church.

Torah scrolls are extremely expensive to commission. The number of Torahs owned by a community is indicative of its wealth. The Jewish Museum in Prague, originally founded in 1906, did not have a large collection of Torahs. They were too valuable for any community to donate to a museum. But this changed drastically in May of 1942. The Nazi authorities ordered the Jewish communities in the historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia, Czechoslavakia, to send all their objects relating to Jewish practice, books, ceremonial Judaica, archive records and so forth, to the newly established Central Jewish Museum in Prague. The Nazi’s collected these many objects, some going back 1000 years in the country, because they wanted a museum of the extinguished Jewish race. Some of you, like I, may have seen those myriad of sacred objects still sitting in theGhetto of Prague – objects used in homes and synagogues, some elaborate, others simple, over centuries of Jewish religious life.

The Czech Jews gladly facilitated the Nazi collection. The final solution was inconceivable, so the Jews assumed these objects would be returned to them after their return once the war concluded. The collection resulted in the acquisition of almost 1800 Torah scrolls for the Jewish Museum in Prague. Jewish scholars tagged all items – their origin and year. Once their work was finished, the scholars too, were sent to camps. The families who cherished and used these objects did not escape the Fates. But then Persian Serindipity intervened. These sacred objects escaped their Fate as pieces in a Nazi museum. Serindipity overwhelmed Fate – How did that happen?

Many years later - In 1963, after long negotiations, a US-born British collector, teamed up with a friend and Judaica expert, went to examine the scrolls, which by now were stored in a bleak warehouse. A philanthropist named Ralph Yablon, motivated by Judaica experts, donated the funds to save these Torahs. 1500 scrolls were sent to London, and took refuge in the Westminster Synagogue. In 1965, The Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust was created. Its mission: to place these Torah scrolls in synagogues across the world where congregations would assume the role of protectorate and use these scrolls and their history as a means to “Never Forget” and to teach our youth and those around us the story that is so intertwined with the fate of these objects. In 1978, we in Neve Shalom received that one which we placed as a memorial on our wall. Every YK since then, I have pointed it out, at Yom Kippur Yizkor indicating that it was rescued from Czechoslovakia, I was not aware of this complete Kladno history. On this Yom Kippur of 5769/2008, we rededicate this Kladno Torah which hangs on the front left side of the sanctuary. The inscription on the plaque now reads

Zachor Et Asher Asa Lecha Amalek

(Deut 25:17)

“We remember the brutal slaughter of six million Jews in the Shoah, including those from Kladno, Czechoslovakia. At the request of the Jews of Kladno, who feared and suffered the worst, this Torah was hidden by righteous Gentiles in the walls of a synagogue converted to a Hussite Church. The Torah was retrieved after the war.

This creative sculpture is symbolic of an abhorrent era.

Temple Neve Shalom records:

“The remembrance of Amalek – You shall not forget.” (Deut. 25:19)

Dedicated Yom Kippur 5739, October 1978

Rededicated Yom Kippur 5769, October 2008”

As I was preparing these thoughts I had a different thought about our collective mourning for Kladno Jews and the Shoah which is part of this Yizkor service. How do we really mourn those who we have never met, whose names we really don’t know, whose faces we have never seen? How do we mourn those with whom we probably share nothing personal, no memories, no information, except for a shared Jewishness? How does that collective Yizkor dovetail with the individual Yizkors we each recite in a moment?

Clearly there are different kinds of sorrows. At Yizkor, as we mourn and commemorate our personal loved ones, their shared company, their conversation, their love, their faults! But for the dead of the Shoah, it is this kind of tribute that matters. We might assume that a shul display and the expression of real emotion are separate categories, in fact these kind of memorials take on special emotional meanings. That Torah and plastic and metal display declare that a relationship exists between us and the victims of Kladno. We are now concretely connected to each other. And it will help also if I tell you about some of the real people who lived in Kladno.

Let us start with Dr. Kamilla Lederer, a physician, who spent her entire life in Kladno and perished in the Shoah. Or with Elsa Rind, a bank teller who was born in Kladno, lived in Prague, and perished in Auschwitz. Fana Schoenfeldova was a tailor. Willy Jelinek was a dentist. Jan Zid, a shoemaker and his brother, Karel, a miner. You have their pictures in front of you. They look like us.

Of course, besides our collective mourning and the rededication of this Kladno Shoah Torah, all of us are here to mourn our own loved ones; whether that death was in old age after a full life or more tragically in young age; whether parent, spouse, most tragically child. No memory is the same for each of us at Yizkor: Each Yizkor pain is particular and unique. But we have a common reaction to the pain and separation.

At these moments I always think the story told about the legendary University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bryant to do a TV commercial. The commercial was supposed to be very simple – just a little music and Coach Bryant singing in his tough, gravel voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to adlib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was exactly how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

At Yizkor of Yom Kippur, each of us would sure wish to call our mama, or, our papa, or, our zayde, or ,our bubbe, or, our spouse, or our cousin, or our uncle or our aunt, or our child. I sure wish I could call my mama or papa. But, alas we cannot. So instead, let us recite the Yizkor. That is the next best thing.