LOOKING AROUND: Melody from the ghetto
By Barbara Sofer
Sep. 12, 2002
A new Jerusalem synagogue group was meeting before the High Holy Days.
Because it was the first time the members would be praying together for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, this was a chance to familiarize the congregation with those melodies that would be sung.
Jerusalemite Chaim Zlotogorski, 51, an electrical engineer and software specialist, introduced a Hassidic melody. The room fell quiet. The melody was lively but poignant. The words, sung as part of the oral repetition of the amida, Judaism's central synagogue prayer: "He sustains the living with kindness, revives the dead with abundant mercy, supports the fallen, heals the sick, releases the confined, and maintains His faith to those asleep in the dust."
This particular nigun (melody) rose from the dust of the Lodz Ghetto. There, in Europe's second-largest ghetto, on Rosh Hashana 1942, another Chaim Zlotogorski organized a synagogue prayer group - amid typhus, torture, tuberculosis and constant death - in a movie house . He wasn't the cantor, just a Pabincer Hassid with initiative. In 1944, the Zlotogorskis were deported from the ghetto, first to Auschwitz and then to Dachau. Chaim Yehezkel perished there. His son Abraham, 20, repeated the words "He sustains the living with kindness" through his slave labor. He survived, and after the war opened a candy store in New York.
He taught the melody to his two American sons, Zoli and Chaim. At first, the boys thought of it as a family tune. Chaim was endowed with a resonant voice and stage presence. He made his Rosh Hashana premiere in a store-front synagogue, not a movie house but a tire store, in Palo Alto, California.
The Zlotogorskis - the father and now-married sons - moved to Israel. In Jerusalem, Chaim always used the tune when he was invited to lead prayers.
Last year, sabra Jonathan Zlotogorski went with his high-school yeshiva class to Poland. His grandfather, Abraham, and father, Chaim, went with him. Great-grandfather Chaim was buried somewhere in Dachau. They took a detour from the usual tour to visit the unmarked grave of Jonathan's great-great-grandfather, Yosef. There, in the windy graveyard, Abraham, Chaim and Jonathan Zlotogorski sang the nigun of the Lodz Ghetto.
AS THE new Jerusalem congregation came together, members were brimming with innovative ideas. The members were mostly young families with small children. The thought of that feisty, haunting ghetto melody filling their hearts in Jerusalem made me teary. That's what we're supposed to be doing here, salvaging Jewish remnants and making them whole, be they endangered communities, ancient documents, desecrated Torah scrolls, or our own Jewish identities.
But as the evening went on, I realized that preserving the old wasn't all we had to do.
Someone suggested using a melody written for the kibbutzniks of Beit Hashita, composed after the Yom Kippur War when the "secular kibbutz" felt a desire to relate to the day.
Others favored adapting Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach melodies that had touched so many hearts.
As Chaim's tune took its place among those to be sung, I thought of that cantor back in Lodz. In the prison of a ghetto, in the heart of a country reeking of death, he hadn't used a tune from his own home. He'd come up with a new melody to exalt the Creator.
The ghetto is no source of nostalgia. The closed streets of Lodz were a place of internal dissension as well as external persecution. The Hassid's prayer was a cry of protest, a demand to heaven to reaffirm life, to tear down the gates of imprisonment.
Even as we reach back into the past with reverence, empowered by the strength of the covenant of Sinai, we are compelled to come up with new solutions to new challenges. A spirit of innovation needs to be nurtured, respectful of the past but not hobbled by it.
The best example in our own times is the change in women's Torah learning.
Not so long ago in Jerusalem, an esteemed rabbi's tires were slashed because he dared teach women Talmud. Today, claiming that a woman cannot follow a talmudic argument would sound as silly as saying a woman couldn't understand chemistry. Today, women's study halls with a full range of Jewish texts flourish all over the city, with Israeli and Diaspora-born Jewish women studying across the wooden tables that were so long the domain of men only.
In Jerusalem, women Torah scholars have become rabbinical advocates and "halachic advisers" who can answer questions of ritual purity. Women's presence in the rabbinical court has had an impact at chipping away the patronizing, oppressive attitude towards women there.
The traditions of old have not been disregarded with mocking irreverence, but what Grandma did is not the only guideline for coping with life today. When the barriers to preventing women's Torah study fell, the structures did not collapse. Just the opposite is true. Jewishly educated women are a great resource and hope for turning back the tidal wave of assimilation in the Diaspora, as well as in Israel.
That 300 Israelis attend a Chabad Hassidic Shabbat dinner in Chang Mai in Northern Thailand while few of them would step into a religious home or synagogue in Israel shows that we have not been able to create non-threatening, non-coercive opportunities for experiencing Judaism in Israel. We must never let the length of someone's sleeves be the measure of whether or not he can eat at our table.
Like the Lodz cantor, we have to invest in new melodies for waking up ourselves and our people.
"He maintains His faith to those asleep in the dust." We are commanded to emulate the Divine ways.
Gmar hatima tova.
