Rabbi Says Holocaust Must Be Viewed Objectively, Not Emotionally

The Holocaust was “a watershed that will affect Jewish history for the next few thousand years…a central event of Jewish history which changes what it means to be a Jew,” and must be viewed objectively, not subjectively, it was asserted last night by Rabbi Irving Greenberg of the Riverdale Jewish Center.

“To wallow in the events is to cheapen,” declared Rabbi Greenberg, an assistant professor of modern Jewish history at Yeshiva University and newly appointed head of the City College’s Jewish Studies Department. One needs discipline and must avoid emotional cheapening or special pleading, he added, noting that religious Jews view the Holocaust as “punishment for secularization” while secular Jews see it as “proof there is no God.”

Rabbi Greenberg spoke to an audience of 120 at a symposium on “American Jewish Youth and the Holocaust,” sponsored by YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. Of central importance in understanding the Holocaust, said Rabbi Greenberg, who has taught the subject at Yeshiva since 1964, is the knowledge that “it could not have happened if the local (German) population had cared enough.” The Jewish community must organize and learn how to survive so that a Holocaust cannot happen again.

Arthur Samuelson, a student at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass., and project director of the student-run “Encounter With the Holocaust” course, noted that his generation learned about the Holocaust from Hollywood movies, which all had happy endings, “though there was no happy ending at Auschwitz.” Today’s children, he said, are learning about it through television programs which make the Nazis bumbling funnymen, and “history has become a comic book.”

“We blame our parents,” he said. “They desired to blot out memories of the Holocaust so as not to have to come to grips with the cultural implications.” Samuelson added that in the public schools the Holocaust is taught as a “Jewish tragedy,” with no implications for humanity as a whole, while Jewish schools never teach the Holocaust’s implications for the Jews in the United States.