"A rescued scroll"
Oct. 21st, 2005 10:11 pmWednesday evening, I attended a talk by Michael Heppner on the Czech scrolls.
To a large extent, it was a discussion of Holocaust education. Heppner's thesis is that there is little point trying to tell people about the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust, or trying to convey the scale of it, because people just switch off. Instead, educators should try to get people to empathize with individuals and small communities, particularly towards the beginning of the Nazi era . This is not entirely a new idea; Anne Frank's diary is very widely read, for example, and films like Schindler's List do just this sort of thing.
But Heppner wants to connect this to the Torah scrolls which were preserved in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and which now belong to Jewish communities around the world. He suggests that each community that has a scroll should make it their duty to find out everything they can about the community their scroll came from, and tell the world about it. People should adopt members of the destroyed communities who were their age, or share a name, or had the same occupation.
As an example of this, he talked about his own community's research into the town of Kolin, where their scroll came from. ( more notes from Heppner's talk )
Anyway, Heppner told us that our scroll comes from a town called Pardubice. We know that the Jewish community of Pardubice and the surrounding areas were deported to Terezin in two transports in December 1942. The Nazis' meticulous record keeping means that it would be a fairly trivial task to find out the names of everyone who was deported from Pardubice; the exact numbers are known, but not by me. Heppner exhorted us, the Cambridge Jewish community to take on a project to research and memorialize the Pardubice community, as his community have done with Kolin.
I suppose I'm contributing a little bit by promulgating the story he told on my blog.
To a large extent, it was a discussion of Holocaust education. Heppner's thesis is that there is little point trying to tell people about the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust, or trying to convey the scale of it, because people just switch off. Instead, educators should try to get people to empathize with individuals and small communities, particularly towards the beginning of the Nazi era . This is not entirely a new idea; Anne Frank's diary is very widely read, for example, and films like Schindler's List do just this sort of thing.
But Heppner wants to connect this to the Torah scrolls which were preserved in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and which now belong to Jewish communities around the world. He suggests that each community that has a scroll should make it their duty to find out everything they can about the community their scroll came from, and tell the world about it. People should adopt members of the destroyed communities who were their age, or share a name, or had the same occupation.
As an example of this, he talked about his own community's research into the town of Kolin, where their scroll came from. ( more notes from Heppner's talk )
Anyway, Heppner told us that our scroll comes from a town called Pardubice. We know that the Jewish community of Pardubice and the surrounding areas were deported to Terezin in two transports in December 1942. The Nazis' meticulous record keeping means that it would be a fairly trivial task to find out the names of everyone who was deported from Pardubice; the exact numbers are known, but not by me. Heppner exhorted us, the Cambridge Jewish community to take on a project to research and memorialize the Pardubice community, as his community have done with Kolin.
I suppose I'm contributing a little bit by promulgating the story he told on my blog.
