Diary of a Chief Rabbi

Inspiration From Images of a Vanished World

There are times when you know you are in the presence of greatness, and it happened to Elaine and me last Shabbat. We had as our guest a most unusual woman, Yaffa Eliach. Yaffa is a historian, part of a family of outstandingly gifted individuals, but it is she who is unique because of what she has lived through and done.

Yaffa was born in a little Lithuanian town called Eishyshok, close to Radun, home of the saintly Chofetz Chayim. There had been Jews in Eishyshok since the eleventh century. The village was founded in 1065 by a group of Jewish families from Babylonia. For nine hundred years Jews had lived, worked, celebrated, studied and prayed there. There were periodic crises and persecutions. But by and large Jews had lived at peace with their neighbours for as long as anyone could remember.

In 1941, that whole history came to an end. In June German troops, on their way to the Russian front, entered the town. On September 25th and 26th most of the Jewish inhabitants, three and a half thousand of them, were rounded up, taken to a nearby forest, and shot, the men on the first day, the women on the second. A few managed to escape. One of them, a young yeshiva student called Zvi, was among the last to be lined up and shot. He stood between his father and his Rosh Yeshiva, who was reciting psalms and comforting the people around him. Just before the shots rang out he felt himself pushed into the mass grave. In his last act, his father had saved him from the gunfire. He lay still for a long time among the dying and the dead, crawling out when night fell. He went back to the village, going from house to house looking for shelter in a non-Jewish home. Everywhere he went he was told, "Jew, go back to the grave where you belong."

Yaffa was four years old at the time. Somehow she escaped, survived the war and came to the United States to begin a new life. She became a distinguished scholar, working with the doyen of American Jewish historians, the late Salo Baron. In 1969, she decided that the story of the Shoah should not only be told but also given its proper place in the study of modern history. She created the first Centre for Holocaust Documentation and Research in the United States and became, first, an advisor to President Ford, and then a member of President Carter's Holocaust Commission. It was in that capacity that she found herself, in 1979, on a plane to Russia on a fact-finding mission.

Looking down in mid-flight she realised that she was directly above Eishyshok. Memories came flooding back, not of the great destruction but of the time before the Germans came, the idyll of her not-yet-shattered childhood. At that moment, she says, she made a decision. Though it seemed an almost impossible task, she would search the world for facts, memories, documents, anything that anyone could remember or had preserved about the history of the town. Above all, she wanted photographs.

Her sudden insight was that Holocaust historians had studied how Jews died. What they had not done, and what she now resolved to do, was to tell the story of how Jews lived. Attention had been focussed on a single phase in the history of East European Jewish life - the moment when it was all but wiped off the face of the earth. She wanted people to be able to see, not just the victims in their agony of death, but what they had been like before, full of energy and argument, vigour and passion. This would now become her mission, her life-work. To do it for the whole of Eastern Europe was impossible. But with luck and iron determination, she might be able to do it for one town, her own.

It took her seventeen years. By repeated trips to Lithuania, searching through attics and basements, working through all available records and following up leads throughout the world, she eventually accumulated sixteen thousand photographs and more than forty thousand documents and artifacts. Piece by piece she reassembled the story of one shtetl and its Jews.

You can see it today if you visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Stretching the full height of the Museum, around a staircase, are 1500 photographs of the Jews of Eishyshok before the slaughter, family portraits, school groups, wedding pictures, holiday snaps. It is an incredibly powerful montage of life in the midst of an exhibition of death. It is called, appropriately, the Tower of Life.

In addition, last year Yaffa published the story of Eishyshok through the ages, its dramas and daily existence, its heroes and heroines. Called There Once Was A World, it has won huge acclaim; rightly so, because it is astonishingly well researched and beautifully written. But it is more than just a book: it is one of the most moving acts of remembrance I know. The Jews of Eishyshok died, but thanks to Yaffa Eliach their memory lives.

Yaffa now has a new project. She is building a replica of Eishyshok in Israel, so that for generations to come, visitors can see what was lost and recapture for a while the unique atmosphere of the shtetl. Like everything she touches, it will be a success. But what is important about Yaffa, and the message she has for all of us, is her emphasis on life. Without bitterness or hatred, she has salvaged from the devastation a powerful testimony to the Jewish spirit as it was once and as - not least through her work and inspiration - it may be again.

Rarely have I met an individual who has understood so well the words of Moses, so simple yet so profound: "Choose life". Through her, I have come to understand that emunah, faith in its deepest sense, is not a matter of being blind to the violence, evil and injustice of the world. It is not believing that all is right, when so much is manifestly wrong. It is faith in life itself and the ability of human beings, with G-d's help, to construct a more gracious future, one that does justice to the sanctity of life and the dignity of difference.

In the closing sentence of her book, Yaffa explains why she gave it its title. She took it from the words of a member of her family who encouraged her to tell the story so that "at least the people, and perhaps even G-d, will remember that there was once a world filled with faith, Judaism and humanity." That is what Yaffa Eliach has done, and what makes her one of the most remarkable people I have met.

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