Why Bring Children into this Cruel World? Rabbanit Yemima on Yom HaShoah

Why Bring Children into this Cruel World? Rabbanit Yemima on Yom HaShoah

Who is still left today from the Shoah?

In my class this week, a Holocaust survivor spoke. She was a 9-year-old girl when the Nazis arrived in her town. The only Holocaust survivors who are among us today are the ones who were little then. And their mothers sowed a seed. They planted within the ashes. They planted love, they planted babies.

Why, why?

Don’t you know where you’re going? What are you doing? Children in a world like this, why?

And that woman said to herself: “To hold a child in my hand for a single day. A single smile from a child. To see a child taking her first steps. A child getting married. To see, and if only that, it’s worth it to me. This step in the Death March. Just one more step. Even though I don’t know where I’ll get to, or if I’ll get anywhere at all, is so worth it. Another day under the sun? Is wow.”…

Every time I go to Boro Park, I cry. I see the yellow school buses with the names of the shtetls that were erased: “Talmud Torah Stretin,” “Talmud Torah Sighet.” And my eyes see Nazi trains, and inside them are sitting children with peyos. The Nazis could have never imagined such a sight when they planned the Final Solution. And today, those cheider boys sit on their school buses and laugh. At Hitler.
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4 comments

  1. Just before I saw the post I looked at the Parsha sheets and that’s exactly th part that caught my attention

  2. I LOVED this (and loved the parsha sheet this week). It put tears in my eyes. It made it clear to me how every single action to raise a child, every little step of the way, is so precious. I tend to think I’m successful once I have a large family of successful older children but actually even just the very first steps of getting ready for a pregnancy count as success.

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