(JEWISH GROUP) Children taking part in a Seder while hiding from the Nazis
Many Yiddish children’s stories about the Holocaust are set during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and depict children in heroic, albeit non-combatant roles. But most children who survived the Holocaust did so by fleeing Nazi-controlled areas or going into hiding, often under the care or protection of non-Jews. Yiddish children’s fiction published in North and South America after the war tended to fuse recent historical events with the eternal cycle of the Jewish holidays.
Zina Rabinowitz’s story “Elijah the Prophet — 1945” forms part of her 1958 collection, Der liber yontef (“The Precious Holidays”), which she published in New York. (Before the Holocaust, most children’s literature was published in Europe.) Portraying a group of Jewish children hiding on the French-Belgian border with a Jewish teacher and aided by a Catholic priest, the tale confronts the challenges faced by a diverse group of young people who have been separated from their parents and thrown together as a group.
Could the events Rabinowitz recounts have actually happened? It seems unlikely and would require some research to determine — although the name given to the story’s US Army chaplain, Rabbi Isadore Caplan, does correspond to a figure whose identity is attested to in the online American Air Museum.
What is certain is the rhetorical and emotional power of the tropes the story brings to life: the determination to nurture the community’s children even in the absence of the nuclear family; the deeply etched memory of the Haggadah’s best-known songs and phrases, and the Seder night’s promised passage from darkness to light, from captivity to liberation. Speaking in language that even a determined rationalist can appreciate, the story nevertheless presents a miracle in modern form.
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