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Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, spiritual leader of the Forest Hills Jewish Center since 1984, has written about Holocaust survivors and has led members of his congregation to Israel and on tours of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He has served as a member of UJA-Federation’s Board of Directors. Here are Rabbi Skolnik’s insights during a recent interview.
What’s changing in the Jewish community in how we regard the Holocaust?
I think there are a growing number of people in the Jewish community for whom the Holocaust is not an automatic frame of reference. They haven’t grown up knowing either parents or grandparents who are survivors. As that generation dies out, it’s more of a challenge to imprint on their consciousness the significance of that event in terms of what it means to the body politic of the Jewish people, and what it should mean to them.
Also, I think that there’s a general sense — not across the board, but a general sense — in certain circles of Jewish education and in Jewish public policy that too much emphasis has been placed on making the Holocaust the underpinning of Jewish education and Jewish identity. That can have negative blowback in terms of how people understand their own Jewishness, as opposed to reinforcing their sense of history.
I think it’s becoming more and more challenging.
As Holocaust survivors age, how has caring for survivors changed?
The world is a much more mobile place, and it becomes harder and harder to keep that sense of intense family connection going. It tends to be thrown back on the community at large.
What I found increasingly is that in a more mobile society, the younger generations of survivor families don’t necessarily live near their parents. It used to be in the Jewish community that families lived more organically, more than one generation living under the same roof, much like the Bukharians do now. When we were new immigrants, that’s the way families lived, or they lived close to each other because they couldn’t conceive of living far away from each other.
As Holocaust survivors — often viewed as heroes — are dying, what effect is this having on how we view the Holocaust?
It’s not just that we’re losing our heroes — we’re losing our witnesses. So the fact that a movie like Defiance came out this year, and Schindler’s List and all those kinds of movies, which are the kinds that are a hagiography to the people who really performed heroically under the most adverse circumstances — those are going to be fewer and farther between.
The challenge [is] how we choose to not only remember the Shoah, but how we choose to make sure the memory remains secure in our consciousness. I think we’re all faced with that. ♦
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