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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Just before I saw the post I looked at the Parsha sheets and that’s exactly th part that caught my attention
your sister and her rabbanit touching people’s hearts all over:)
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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