From slavery to freedom

At Passover, we celebrate our release from bondage in ancient Egypt and, in the process, reaffirm our connection to the enslaved children of Israel. For the Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps, the ancestral connection is palpable. They need no reminding of what it is to yearn for food and freedom.

One remarkable illustration of that palpable connection exists in "A Survivors' Haggadah," which was created in the winter of 1945-46 by Holocaust survivors in the Munich area, in preparation for their first Passover after liberation. Conceived of by and for the She'erith Hapletah, or "few who escaped," and printed by the U.S. Army of Occupation, "A Survivors' Haggadah" represents a new beginning after a time of great hopelessness.

"We were slaves to Hitler in Germany," reads one page, underscoring the parallel between the two tyrants, millennia apart, who oppressed the Jewish people. In the design that borders the text, the artist has drawn knives, crematoria, axes and daggers. The next page shows an image of the seder plate, surrounded by grapes, flowers and grain: all symbols of fertility and new life.

This explicit pairing of destruction and renewal, the twin themes of every seder, runs throughout "A Survivors' Haggadah." Its editor, Saul Touster, sums up the juxtaposition beautifully when he writes in his acknowledgments, "I have tried to recover and memorialize the making of a Haggadah that is full of both the terrible flames of the Holocaust and the seed that escaped and sprang in green stock from its ashes."

As we celebrate Pesach this year, we should take a moment to consider the new lives that survivors of the Shoah were able to establish here in the United States, and particularly in Phoenix. Ella Adler, who spoke recently and eloquently of her own experience in the camps of Nazi Europe, said that she tells her children and older grandchildren: "You are each of you a miracle. You were not supposed to be born." Like Ella, the survivors and their children and their children's children serve to remind us both of our own very real connection to slavery, and of the thanks we owe for the miracle of our freedom.

May we always look forward with hope, even as we remember the sorrows of the past.

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