3-Weeks reading: ‘Heroes of Spirit,’ 100 Shoah tales

While the popular jingle goes, “Summertime and the living is easy,” for the Jewish people, the summertime has proven to a hot time of the year, literally as well as figuratively.

Beginning with the destruction of the First Temple and for many summers thereafter down through history, there was and is nothing easy, ritually, about the summer. Fully, three whole weeks during the heart of summertime are taken up as a collective mourning period for disasters that occurred over two millennia, from the Crusades to the many pogroms that have dotted our people’s troubled history.

Framed by two fasts, this period has generated an array of literature that reminds us of the contemporary nature of persecution and woe that has overtaken our faith unto this very day.

This week, in line with that theme, I bring to your attention a book that relates to the personalities of those religious leaders whose lives were touched by the twin evils of Nazism and Communism.

Titled, “Heroes of Spirit: 100 Rabbinic Tales of the Holocaust” (Israel Bookshop, 2009) by Rabbi Dovid Hoffman, this book’s 100 brief essays tell of our religious leaders, most of whom survived the terrible years of World War Two and the rule and ruin of World Communism to serve as witness to the evil and destructiveness of these ideologies and to the eternal indestructibility of our people.

The great leaders highlighted include such luminaries as Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav Josef Breuer, the Klausenberger Rebbe, the Bluzhever Rebbe, Rav Moshe Feinstein, and Rav Yisrael Gustman, and, among those who did not survive, the Piaczecna Rebbe, Rav Elchanan Wasserman and Rav Menachem Ziemba.

The author gives an account of Rav Eliyahu Lopian who, having settled in England in 1925, helped establish the Etz Chaim Yeshiva in London as a premier center for Torah learning.

It was Rav Lopian’s destiny to spend the war years in London and to witness, firsthand, the destructiveness of the Nazi Blitz. I am certain that the members of his family in Bayswater have taken special pride in this legacy.

The author also included several leaders who, from the shores of the United States, led the heroic Vaad Hatzalah effort to help assist those of our brethren in dire distress, among them Rabbi Irving Bunim. (For many years Bunim and his son Rabbi Amos Bunim were important residents of the Five Towns-Far Rockaway community.)

Originally published in 2009.