Polish sisters reunited, discover they are Jews

iyar ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 9:52 am

sequoia wrote:

Um its better than being murdered by Nazis.

Are we now blaming the righteous gentiles who hid Jewish babies at personal risk?

We don't blame anyone. We don't have the resources to judge, we can never know the truth of what's in another's person's heart. Those who went through the Holocaust went through horrors none of us have experienced. Even those of us who have taken the time to educate ourselves about those terrible times can't know exactly what happened in any given circumstance.
There were non-Jews who rescued Jews at great personal sacrifice and there were those who happily took Jewish babies and their parents' valuables and then refused to give the children back after the war and hid the truth about their birth from them. This is a place and time that finds us looking at a confluence of good, evil, greed, kindness and every nuance in between that can be found in a human heart.
I know of the patriarch of a large Jewish family who was a wealthy man but made the decision not to send any of the family's children to non-Jewish families. He was afraid of their neshamos being lost. Can we understand the depths of his pain? Can we say he was wrong? We can never understand him just as we can't understand the Jews at Masada who murdered their own babies as the Romans approached.
The only thing we can do is cry for the neshamos lost. I cried when I read the story you posted Sequoia, for these two sisters and all their Jewish children and grandchildren who never knew the light of Shabbos candles, never brought a baby to a bris or a child to the blessing of kiddushin under a chuppa. The horrors of the Holocaust continue to reverberate eighty years later.

↑ sequoia ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 9:56 am

There were lots of secular Jews before the Shoah, AT LEAST since the Haskalah. Plenty of families who never lit Shabbos candles or knew anything about their heritage. In some places secular Jews were the majority.

No, they’re not “better off dead,” and if you feel that way about all non-Orthodox Jews, that is insane and something is wrong.

↑ mommy9 ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 9:59 am

sequoia wrote:

You said that. I didn't.

↑ sequoia ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:02 am

mommy9 wrote:

History is full of Jewish parents killing their children so the church wouldn't get them.

Good thing we stopped doing that.

You know, people can become baal tshuvas, but nobody can come back from the dead.

I feel like you’re sincerely saying half of imamother should never have been born because we weren’t raised frum.

And yet, here we are.

↑ iyar ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:03 am

sequoia wrote:

Where did you hear me say anyone is better off dead?
Sometimes it seems you're looking for the worst you can find in any person's thoughts and judge them accordingly.
There were more Neolog Jews than observant Jews in many areas of Europe before the Nazis decimated their communities. Because of the area these sisters were from I thought they were left behind by an Orthodox family. There is nothing wrong with feeling pain for Jews robbed of spiritual sustenance any more than it would be wrong to feel for those deprived of material possessions.

↑ sequoia ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:05 am

iyar wrote:

And I feel like you’re trying to chase me off my own thread.

↑ iyar ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:10 am

sequoia wrote:

And I feel like you’re trying to chase me off my own thread.

I'm mystified as to where you'd have seen that in anything I wrote. You posted an article. I commented on it. You're of course free to add your own reactions and comments without my permission. None of us should feel we're free to pass judgment on people who left this world decades ago, aren't here to defend themselves, and lived through terrible times we can't fully imagine. The effects of the heartbreaking decisions they made live on. None of us can judge them.

↑ Chayalle ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:14 am

iyar wrote:

There were plenty of secular Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. I didn't think these sisters necessarily came from frum families.

I still think they deserved to know they were Jewish. If those who hid them had that knowledge and didn't tell them, I feel it was wrong. (ETA the article says it made a difference to them to know they weren't abandoned children - but rather, those who placed them in the orphanage were actually trying to save them.)

They also each deserved to know they had a sister. If there were people who withheld that information knowingly, I think it was wrong.

Reality ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 10:21 am

A few points:

1. Even if the parents weren't religious it doesn't mean they wanted their child to grow up not knowing they were Jewish and being raised in another religion. So it is very very sad regardless if their family was religious or not.

2. Many many religious Jews chose not to give their kids to their non-Jewish neighbors because they didn't trust them not to baptize their children. The Catholic church's well-known policy was once a child was baptized he/she could not be returned to a Jewish family.

3. My main point: While individual non-Jews acted heroically to save Jews, the Catholic Church's behavior when it came to hidden children is despicable.

I remember reading an article by a historian about the Church having keilim from the Bais Hamikdash. While he said their is no proof they have keilim, they most certainly have lists of the Jewish children baptized during WW2 to save them from the Nazis. Even all these years later they refuse to give out that info. They are still the same evil institution they always were. They may put on a veneer of we aren't antisemitic anymore but when push comes to shove they are the same institution from 500+ years ago.

↑ mommy9

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 12:20 pm

sequoia wrote:

We stopped because no one is dragging us off to be baptized today. The Torah is not warm and fuzzy and politically correct. There are aveiros that we are supposed to be killed before doing.
I never said or implied that non Frum people are better off dead.
I said maybe a Jew is better off dead than living as a catholic.

↑ PinkFridge ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 1:27 pm

RandomJewishmom wrote:

I don't know what's better. I think about this very often, how they left their children with neighbors so their children will survive. What a life their children lived. Most of them with tremendous pain and a lot of them depressed. Some of them grew up completely not Jewish. I know that many of us come from those children, but still now that I'm a mother myself I cannot fathom leaving my children. I feel like they would be better off with me in gan eden. Sad thoughts, I am plagued by the holocaust and what these women went through.

No, we value life. We can't say anyone would be better off dead.

↑ PinkFridge ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 1:30 pm

So what wrote:

Why not?

I hear both sides but we value life.
I can't imagine having to make the decision. In some cases, when people make decisions under great duress it points to the greatness of every moment of their lives till then; think of Avraham Zelmanowitz Hy"d. But people who gave their children away, whom could they consult? And sometimes, even those who gave eitzas second-guessed themselves for life. So I can hear both sides. But having that shred of optimism, to spare one's child's life and give them a possibility of a future, I think that's what I might have chosen, and davened that the child be returned if not to me, then to his or her people.

↑ Chayalle ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 1:31 pm

sequoia wrote:

But people who are never told they are Jewish in the first place are not so likely to become BT's.

I think it's wrong of non-Jews, particularly those in the Church, to have withheld information from Jewish children about whom they are and who their families were. It's like stealing from them. I also have known people who were hidden by non-Jews and taught to hate Jews, including their parents and family, and I find that abhorrent (my grandmother A"H had a relative who survived and got his daughter back, but the adjustment back was beyond horrible....she had been taught to hate and mistrust him because he was a Jew.)

I have also heard of children who were hidden by non-Jews during the war and really had it tough there. Children who were abused and molested by their keepers...... I think the decision to hide their children was agonizing. It wasn't just about living, it was about the environment and people they were trusting with their children's lives.

↑ PinkFridge ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 1:31 pm

mommy9 wrote:

Maybe it is better to die a Jew than to live as a Catholic.

We can't make that judgment now. Is that the decision you would have made? I can't judge others' decisions under these circumstances. But the moment in time when the people made those decisions they were hoping that these children would be returned to their people.

↑ PinkFridge ↓

Tue, Feb 08 2022, 1:34 pm

mommy9 wrote:

History is full of Jewish parents killing their children so the church wouldn't get them.

At the moment when they were banging down the doors and the parents knew what was on the other side.
The Holocaust was entirely different. Converting was never an option, and converts were considered tainted by Hitler ym"sh.