Holocaust classes offer lessons of hope

A young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp organized the collection of bread crumbs to help nourish starving orphan children left to fend for themselves.

A group of Jewish men, in the face of certain death, sang of their hope in God as Nazi soldiers marched them to gas chambers.

Rietta Miller of Norman said she was inspired by these stories from the Holocaust told during a Jewish Learning Institute class taking place Thursday nights at the Belle Isle Library.

Taught by Ovadia Goldman, rabbi with the Chabad Jewish Center of Oklahoma City, the class has helped Miller and others see past the tribulation of the Holocaust to the hope in humanity.

“We can get caught up in the horror, but there’s a recognition that we can enrich our own lives by how we show our humanness with one another,” she said.

“I think, 60 years later, that’s what resonates through time: that you can pick up lessons from the people who had these horrible things happen to them.”

The class is “Beyond Never Again: The Holocaust — A View From the Soul.” It’s a new approach to Holocaust study, its backers say: a philosophical exploration rather than the customary catalog of history and suffering.

The Jewish Learning Institute launched the international course that seeks to examine the moral and spiritual lessons of the Holocaust.

An estimated 10,000 adults are taking the six-week course that began Nov. 7 in 160 locations worldwide. It comes amid the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the anniversary of Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” referring to the 1938 riots against German Jews, their businesses and synagogues that some consider the start of the Holocaust.

The timing also marks a new moment in Holocaust remembrance, organizers said. After the shock of the Holocaust, the last few decades have seen a tremendous urge to document the catastrophe, and nearly every major U.S. and European city now hosts Holocaust memorials or museums, said Rabbi Efraim Mintz, director of New York-based Jewish Learning Institute.

“We’re now at the tail end of that era,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

Mintz answers himself by voicing the course’s mission: to find the Holocaust’s moral and spiritual meaning for contemporary American Jewry.

He said by exploring how Holocaust victims found strength for life and by studying Jewish text, today’s students, who are primarily Jewish, will learn how to sustain themselves “in the face of our sort of smaller horrors, if you will.”

Rabbi Goldman said the Oklahoma City-area class has had thought-provoking discussions that he has found inspirational.

“It’s been amazing. I found myself not having to make a point, because the students themselves, through discussion, came to the point themselves,” he said.

Goldman said many of the students have been able to share how the triumph-over-tragedy lessons from the Holocaust have encouraged them to go to another level of spirituality as they face personal challenges in their lives.

In that respect, the class has been a resounding success, he said.

“Judaism is always looking for how the past can illuminate and inspire our present and ensure our future to make sure that there will be a Judaism of tomorrow.”

For Aron Judkiewicz of Edmond, the class has done just that.

Judkiewicz said his parents survived the Holocaust, so he learned about it from their memories.

He said the class doesn’t attempt to explain the Holocaust, “because I think suffering such as this is beyond explanation.”

Instead, Judkiewicz said the class has helped him look for the hope that transcended the Holocaust.

“We know not to look for an explanation but to look at the aspects of spirituality and hope and humanism that allow the Jews to persevere,” he said. The Jews’ hope in their God “outlasted the Nazi regime.”