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And so we have arrived at the beginning of another year. Perhaps it is not even appropriate to refer to Rosh Hashanah on H-Holocaust, since unlike the other holidays, it does not commemorate a historical event of liberation or destruction. On Rosh Hashanah the blaring of the shofar sounds a different note. Isaiah has put it into words: "_Hitorri! Hitorri! Kumi Yerushalyim!_ (Awake! Awake! Stand up, Jerusalem!)" [51.17]. It is a call to judgment, to self-examination, to confession--that is, to the acceptance of responsibility. But perhaps there is a Holocaust text that is not inappropriate for Rosh Hashanah. In 1944, a Dutch Jewish family "passing" as Aryans in Brussels was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Although most of the children survived, the parents and one son died there. The son was not yet eighteen. His name was Moshe Flinker. After liberation, a diary that he had kept in three notebooks was found among the family belongings. In it, the young man drew up a remarkable portrait of the Jewish situation under Hitler. Moshe Flinker wrote his last entry in September 1943 near the time of Rosh Hashanah: "I am sitting facing the sun," he wrote. "Soon it will set; it is nearing the horizon. It is as red as blood, as if it were a bleeding wound. From where does it get so much blood? For days there has been a red sun, but this is not hard to understand. Is it not sufficient to weep, in these days of anguish? Suffering stares at me as on every side and in every direction, and still further troubles appear before your eyes. Here a man and woman, both over seventy, are taken away. There you meet a Jew who has been hiding and has no money to live, and elsewhere you meet a Jew whose fortune has gone because he invested it is dollars, which for some unknown reason have become worthless. Trouble never ends . . . And every time I meet a child of my people I ask myself: 'Moshe, what are you doing for him?' I feel responsible for every single pain. I ask myself whether I am still participating in the troubles of my people, or whether I have withdrawn completely from them." (_Young Moshe's Diary: The Spritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe_ [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979], p. 122 [ellipses in the original].) This from a young man who had been marked for death along with the other Jews in Europe! And yet *he* felt "responsible for every single pain." Moshe Flinker gives new meaning to the ancient teaching _melamed shekol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh_ (all Jews are responsible to one another). The question he asks himself at the end of his diary is the one that all Jews must ask themselves this evening and in the ten _yamin noraim_ to follow. L'shanah tovah. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> D. G. Myers Department of English Texas A&M University dgmyers@tamu.edu
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