The-Ave.US

On this last day of Passover 2104, there is great irony in remembering how easily Jews forget we are not just like other people able to ignore our history.   Sue Eisenfeld has written an essay on celebration of Passover during the Confederacy.  I hope her words will help  my brother and sister understand why everyone has a right to see what our father saw and what he wrote.

I have put Ms. Eisenfeld’s words in italics below.  A good place to start is with the prayer Rabbi Max Michelbacher  wrote for the thousands of Jews who fought with the confederacy (below).  The confederate Rabbi, (from the essay):

asked General Lee to grant a furlough for the Jewish soldiers to attend synagogue for the High Holy Days. Because of the exigencies of war, Lee declined, but his response to Michelbacher eloquently illustrates the way that ecumenical regionalism overshadowed any sense of religious difference between the two men: “I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart.” In closing, he added: “That your prayers for the success & welfare of our Cause may be granted by the Great Ruler of the universe is my ardent wish.”

So easy!  Fighting for the Confederacy made the Jews good people in Lee’s eyes. For all his life after returning from WWII my father hated Germany.  He could never forgive the German people for their acquiescence in the horrors of what he saw in Buchenwald.  Part of the Schwartz Family Haggadah, the story we read, talks about these Germans, civilians and military, who stood by … some within a few feet of the camps, others working alongside slave laborers, while later denying  was happening.  One of the most moving stories told by my father’s writing from inside the camp is of the denial of  guilt by German soldiers forced to see what had happened inside Buchenwald.

When my wife and I first visited Dachau, we were shocked to see that the camp was so close to downtown that no citizen of that supposedly liberal city could have avoided hearing screams or smelling the odors form the camp.  Yet, the fences that now bring tourists in are decorated with quotes from those who denied  what THEY were guilty of.

Here are more excerpts from this remarkable essay:

For at least one night each spring during the Civil War, in places like Louisiana and South Carolina and Georgia and Virginia, Confederate Jews commemorated how God freed the children of Israel from slavery. They retold the story of when God is said to have sent down 10 plagues to help free the Hebrews from their bondage, the last of which was the slaying of all Egyptians’ firstborn children, and how the Jews marked their door posts with the blood of a slaughtered lamb so the Angel of Death would know to “pass over” them. Thus, they celebrated their liberation more than 3,000 years ago from slavery in ancient Egypt, and their exodus.

……

Today’s Jews, imbued with the idea that we are a people devoted to justice for all,  would likely not understand what one Jewish-German Southern soldier  wrote. “This land has been good to all of us.  I shall fight to my last breath.”  Records show that 75 to 85 percent of all young white males in the South served in the military.

…………

Sadly, Ms. Eisenfeld notes that northern Jews were not better than those of us living in the South.  Morris Raphall, of New York, the leading American rabbi of the period, defended defending slavery on biblical grounds, saying in 1861 that “slavery has existed since earliest times,” that “slaveholding is no sin,” that “slave property is expressly placed under the protection of the Ten Commandments” and that the reason Africans were slaves in America was because that’s what God wanted for them.  David Einhorn of … the  slave state of Maryland — argued against every one of Raphall’s biblical claims. (His congregants did not agree, and he was forced to flee to Philadelphia.) 

Meanwhile, my brother Hugh and sister Stephanie would rather see my father’s heritage rot than make it public.  They should be ashamed.