Reaccepting the Torah: Looking back the first Shavuot after the fall of Nazi Germany

Shavuot in 1945 fell on May 18, some 10 days after the unconditional capitulation of Nazi Germany to the Allies, which marked the end of World War II in Europe.

For many Holocaust survivors, this was the first Shavuot they were able to celebrate after years of war. It was a moment of emotional reconnecting with their faith amid the pain of the profound tragedy that had occurred and the loss they had experienced.

Jewish chaplains serving in the Allied forces were instrumental in conducting such religious services.

The first to bear witness

One of these chaplains was Wales-born Captain Rev. Leslie Hardman. During his service in Europe, he tried to help find lost Jewish assets and offered Jews religious assistance.

Rev. Hardman served in the 8th Corps of the Second Army when it liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.

Upon liberation, many of the 60,000 inmates in the camp were in dire condition, while thousands who had been killed had not been exhumed.

Rev. Hardman said “Kaddish” continuously. “We tried to do it for every single one,” he recalled in an interview with the Imperial War Museums in 1997.

“When I did the first burial, the second burial, for five thousand bodies, some of the inmates came to stand by me, and they used to comfort one another.”

The fact that “a religious service” was “being mentioned” was of great solace to the survivors, he said.

The harsh scenes with which he was confronted at the camp led him to momentarily struggle with his faith. However, one Friday, a chance encounter with a survivor who was ill “brought me back to it,” he said.

The survivor asked the chaplain for additional food, in honor of “the first Sabbath I’ve felt free.”

Rev. Hardman brought him tins of sardines, at which point the survivor said, “Stop, Rabbeinu, stop,” the chaplain recollected.

Having noticed Hardman’s tefillin “in a plush bag with Hebrew letters,” the inmate lost interest in the food and asked instead to wear the tefillin.

“I haven’t worn them for nearly three years,” the survivor said.

“I thought he might have forgotten how to do it,” Rev. Hardman stated, recalling how he assisted the man. “I took them down, I opened them up for him, and helped him put them on.”

Following the survivor’s prayer, “The whole of his face lit up,” the chaplain recounted. The survivor went back into the camp. “He’d forgotten his sardines.”

The Shavuot service Rev. Hardman officiated offered a poignant scene. Footage from the Imperial War Museums filmed at the time shows him performing the day’s prayer, aided by Rabbi B. Goldfinger from Poland, a chaplain in the French army; and Rabbi H. Helfgott, a chaplain serving in the Yugoslav army, who had been captured by the Nazis in 1941 and freed by the British army in 1945. Behind them was a screen shielding the Torah Ark.

Some 200 survivors, mostly women and children, stood in a circle outside, some on stools and chairs to get a better view. They watched intently, some in tears, as Rev. Hardman, wearing a tallit over his uniform, raised the Torah scroll and intoned the service, siddur in hand.

While Rev. Hardman was leading the Shavuot prayers in Bergen-Belsen, another service was being marked by American chaplain Rabbi Herschel Schacter in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.  

Liberated on the morning of April 11 by US forces of the Third Army led by General George S. Patton, the camp numbered 37,000 to 86,000 inmates between 1943-1945. The number dwindled to around 21,000 survivors, 4,000 of whom were Jewish, on the day the camp was freed.

Rabbi Schacter served in the Third Army’s VIII Corps and was among the US troops to enter the camp.

“April 11, 1945, was the most unforgettable day in my life,” Rabbi Schacter said in a 1995 interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

While aware of the existence of the concentration camps and the persecution of Jews, “We had no idea of the extent of the tragedy,” Rabbi Schacter stated.

He recounted his shock at the sights that unfolded before him as he entered the camp. In the Kleine Lager, the small camp, he moved from barrack to barrack, encountering “hundreds of men, a few boys,” who were “more dead than alive.”

They looked at him, “paralyzed with fear. I looked around. I didn’t know what to say.”

He chose to address the survivors in Yiddish, a language he knew would be a common denominator, calling out “Shalom aleichem yidden, You are free. The war is over.”

His words were met by “utter silence” and “incredulous eyes.”

Gradually, those who could muster the strength followed him, touching his “insignia, the little Star of David, and the Hebrew letters.

“Is the war really over?” “Does the world know what happened to us?” “Where do we go from here?” were the recurring questions, he said.

One child, eight-year-old Lulek, who would one day become chief rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, accompanied the American chaplain in his visit of the barracks.

Having encountered the young boy behind a heap of bodies, Rabbi Schacter took him under his wing, Rabbi Lau recounted in his book Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last.

Rabbi Lau remembered the “surrealistic sight” as “the prisoners lay emaciated and prone on wooden planks, while before them stood Rabbi Herschel Schacter upright and strong, a messenger of redemption.”

Rabbi Schacter helped young Lulek find his brother, Naphtali, who was ill, telling him, “We’ve gone from slavery to freedom.”

For Naphtali, the American chaplain was “the first person to offer him relief after liberation” and was the one who “restored his confidence in himself and humanity.”

Rabbi Schacter moved unceasingly to conduct services where he was needed. According to him, these “were remarkably well attended.”

He noted how “Jews flocked to a religious service,” and he recalled “the tears, the cries, and the fervent prayers.”

The Shavuot service he officiated was no exception. “There was a mass of Jews who had come.”

Survivors, some still in their striped prisoners’ garb, gathered in a large hall, Lulek in their midst. In front of them stood Rabbi Schacter, wearing a tallit over his military uniform, as can be seen in a photo taken at the time.

For survivor Zalman Cohen from Hungary, the moment struck a deeply personal chord, he recalled in a testimony. 

Rabbi Schacter “prayed out loud, and we prayed after him,” he said.

“When we finished the prayer, he said, now each one will say “Yizkor” [the memorial prayer for the deceased recited four times a year, among which is the second day of Shavuot].

“It was the first ‘Yizkor’ I said,” Cohen noted. He added, “Before, I thought that we would meet our parents again.”

Following the prayer, Rabbi Schacter told the survivors to recite the “Kaddish.”

“It was the first ‘Kaddish’ I said in this world,” Cohen recounted.

Slovakia-born Simcha Bunem Unsdorfer, who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, remembered the collective aspect of the Shavuot service in his 1996 memoir The Yellow Star.

“On that evening, Buchenwald staged a fantastic demonstration of faith and loyalty to God. Thousands upon thousands of liberated Jews crowded into the specially vacated block for the first postwar Jewish religious service to be held on the soil of defeated Germany,” he wrote.

Initially, when the camp loudspeakers announced that the American chaplain would be holding such a service, he had been unsure how many would actually attend.

While he “had always looked forward eagerly” to the Jewish festivals “and particularly so in the tragic war years,” he wondered “whether we weren’t being put to a test too soon.”

Who “would want to attend services and prayers so soon after their tragic experiences?”

“Within a few weeks after liberation, religion – which had seemed to do so little for us – was now challenging us and our loyalties,” he added.

“But just as you cannot measure the physical strength of an oppressed people, so you cannot gauge its spiritual wealth and power.

“As Chaplain Schacter intoned the evening prayers, all the inmates in and outside the block stood in silence, re-accepting the Torah whose people, message, and purpose Hitler’s Germany had attempted to destroy,” he wrote.

“Jewish history repeated itself. Just as our forefathers who were liberated from Egypt accepted the Law in the desert, so did we, the liberated Jews of Buchenwald, reaccept the same Law in the concentration camps of Germany.” ■