"In the Beginning Was the Holocaust" - Wiesel | Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

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"In the Beginning Was the Holocaust" - Wiesel

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." — Genesis (Bereshit) 1:1

"In the beginning was the Holocaust. We must therefore begin again. We must create a new Talmud and compile new midrashim, just as we did after the Ḥurban, the destruction of the Second Temple. We did so then in order to mark the new beginning: until then we lived one way; from then on nothing could be the same."

— Elie Wiesel, in "Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium.'' Judaism, vol. 16 no. 3, 1967.

I found the above Wiesel quote on page 19 of Nightwords: A Liturgy on the Holocaust (2000, originally published in 1971 as Night Words: A Midrash on the Holocaust) by David G. Roskies (pdf), and if you ever needed indisputable proof the Big H is now a religion, then look no further.

Essentially, Nightwords is a play for Jews to enact during Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Fortnight), which involves them throwing their shoes in a pile and writing numbers (i.e. Auschwitz prisoner tattoos) on their arms. There's 36 characters, but only three "require some preparation" to play (roles can be doubled-up if there's fewer people), and there's singing and chanting involved.

What Roskies has done is cherry-pick quotes from the Bible, Talmud, Midrashim, Jewish writers, Jewish historians, holocaust survivors, holocaust victims, a dictionary, and even the novel The Last Temptation of Christ, and used them as dialogue in the play.

A few quotes from Roskies' introduction to the 2000 edition of his Holocaust Midrash:

"At Sinai we received the Torah,'' the poet Jacob Glatstein reminds us, "and in Lublin,'' in the shadow of the Maidanek death camp, "we gave it back.'' The destruction of European Jewry is the sign of God's betrayal of Israel. Yom Hashoah marks the day of broken covenants. It is the day of sanctioned rage against God."

"... arguing with God, which the Rabbis called ḥutspah kelapei shemaya"

"I could not bring myself to quote German-language texts other than through the neutral medium of English."

"It is the duty of our generation to create a communal ritual for Yom Hashoah."

"Unique to the Holocaust are the tattooed numbers. They represent the permanent branding of every Jew marked for slave labor and eventual murder (in-reality, it was only at Auschwitz that the tattooing occurred). In the writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yekhiel Feiner-Dinur), branding becomes a sign of the Apocalypse, beginning with the Jewish stars and armbands that civilians were forced to wear, and culminating in the branding of young Jewish women as Feld-huren in Auschwitz." (the Feld-huren 'Field Whore' lie, was made-up by the imfamous Planet Auschwitzer about his non-existent sister. He also saw a Jew covered in marmalade eaten alive by 1,000 prisoners at Auschwitz, although this doesn't make it into Roskies' religious play.)

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