“Days of Remembrance” ceremony hits home

  • Published
  • By Chris McCann
  • JBER Public Affairs
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  "Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it. ...

For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Krakow. Think about that. By this evening, those six centuries are a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."

The voice of Ralph Fiennes as Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth filled the theater near the beginning of the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Days of Remembrance ceremony.

As the segment of "Schindler's List" went dark, about a dozen black-clad Soldiers with swastika armbands and sirens stormed through the theater, demanding papers, then dragged out members of the audience, much as the troops on screen dragged Jews from their homes.

It was a chilling way to illustrate what was accepted between 1933 and 1945, in what came to be known as HaShoah, the Holocaust.

Guest speaker Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, the Lubavitch rabbi in Anchorage and president of the Alaska Jewish Historical Museum and Cultural Center spoke about the Holocaust through the lens of Ezekiel 37, in which the prophet has a vision of a valley filled with dry bones.

"In the sixth century B.C.E., after the destruction of the first Jewish temple...a great wind lifted Ezekiel up, and carried him to a valley filled with dried bones.

And God said, 'Son of man, can these be alive again?'"

God commanded Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and they were reassembled, and new flesh grew on them; but there was no spirit until Ezekiel spoke again, Greenberg said.

In the prophecy, they were then filled with spirit and stood up as a vast army.

God promised to Ezekiel that the Jewish people would say their bones were dried up and hope was gone, but God would raise them up and take them back to Israel.

"Sixty-five years ago, the Soviets and the U.S. troops liberated the camps.

The people were living skeletons - dry bones," Greenberg said. "Everyone wondered, 'Can these bones live? Is there a future for a people singled out by the Third Reich for extermination? Do these people still have a place in the world?' And the biggest question - was there still hope for humanity?"

At Nuremberg, at the tribunal held for war criminals after the war, Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, said Hitler and Eichmann believed if they could exterminate the biological base of Jewry in the east, there would be no hope, and within three decades, all Jews would be gone.

"Statistically, they were correct," Greenberg said. "The only logical course for American Jews would be assimilation. But they did not realize that Jews, and all humanity, are governed by different rules. Those dry bones contain the secret of life.

"Of the 900,000 skeletons that came out of the camps alive, most went to Israel and they rebuilt Jewish life in the world. They married, they had children. The miracle is that they participated in rebuilding life."

Greenberg, who was born in Soviet Russia, raised in Israel, and immigrated to New York to continue his rabbinical studies before moving to Alaska 20 years ago, spoke of seeing a man daily in Brooklyn who would watch children get on the school bus.

"He used to watch the children get on the buses to go to Hebrew school," Greenberg said. "Every day, for forty years, at eight a.m., and people wondered what he was doing.

Perhaps he was senile, they said.

"But he said he remembered watching children come into the camp on trains.

Within an hour, they were in the ovens. But today, he said, he could watch Jewish children on buses, going to Hebrew school, and hear their happy voices."

Elie Wiesel, author of many books about the Holocaust and his experiences in the camps, said his greatest revenge was not the books, Greenberg said.

Wiesel said his revenge was that he married and had children.

Greenberg honored those in uniform at the ceremony especially, and said they were the greatest testimony for making sure that justice is done.

American Soldiers liberated several of the camps, and their sacrifices will not be forgotten, he said.

"Ezekiel is important to us all," Greenberg said. "We may have great dreams, but life settles in, and we look in the mirror and see only dry bones.
 
But there is never a dream that dies all the way - there is always a spark of life.

"Reach out to it and speak to it. And never give up on anyone ... believe in each person."