The mathematics of mourning

When I traveled to Poland in January with the JUF Rabbinic mission, my plan was to focus on the number “one”: one person, one family, one story at a time. The number “six million” is too unfathomable; I would seek out opportunities to learn about the victims one by one, as individuals.

While there, I discovered other numbers greater than one, but less than six million. The number is one, two, or three thousand. It’s the number of Jews in small towns in the Polish countryside.

We visited Kazimierz; before the war, 1,500 of its 3,500 inhabitants were Jewish, nearly 50% of the town. We visited Sandomierz; in 1938, there were nearly 2,500 Jews there, about 20%. I thought of the Polish town of my grandfather’s youth, Glubokye, which is today part of Belarus. It had 2,800 Jews, a whopping 60% of the population.

I cannot tell you what a crowd of six million people would look like. But I’ve spoken to crowds of one or two thousand on the High Holidays, and many of us have been to concerts or sporting events among that many. These are numbers we can comprehend.

As we wandered through one marketplace, I could almost hear the tumult of Jewish and Polish businesses side by side. As we marveled at the old synagogues and cemeteries, lovingly preserved, I could read the words in Hebrew and Yiddish that told the stories of lives guided by Jewish ritual.

As we passed by the worn wooden building that had been a butcher shop, I imagined my own great-grandfather, the shochet, the kosher slaughterer in his town; his flaming red beard gave him the nickname “Bentzion the Red” (or was it the blood of the animals he slaughtered?).

I discovered a new way to articulate the loss: the number of Jews in each community. There were three thousand such towns across Poland- teeming with Jewish life, then swiftly silenced. That’s one way to count to six million: town by subtracted town. I went looking for vanished individuals, but I discovered vanished communities. We can count the destruction of Eastern European Jewry by the destruction of these communities-each town, shul , school, and market a “unit” of loss. As a group of rabbis, each of us representing a community within this Chicagoland community, this felt like the right unit of measure.

The organizing concept of Jewish life is the Kehilla (community). Each loss of two or three thousand represent the personalities and interests and ideas, even the disagreements between the secular Bundists with the religious Messianists, or between the spiritual Hassidim with the intellectual Misnagdim. No, these communities did not all agree. But they lived and worked and prayed and learned and cared for one another. We didn’t just lose individuals, we lost communities, each with its own vibrant life.

We will soon read, in The Book of Esther , of the destruction that threatened the Jews of Persia. I will be thinking this Purim about the 127 provinces of the kingdom of Achashverosh, each of them learning of the existential threat against them, each community of individuals clinging to one another with hope and desperation.

In Poland 80 years ago, there was no Queen Esther to step in to save the communities. There were so many individual brave ones who fought back, and so many righteous gentiles who saved innocents, but the communities never recovered.

In the words of the Polish Jewish poet Antoni Slonimiski:

Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet/ The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.

Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined/ Biblical songs with Polish tunes… / Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees/ Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem.

Rachel K. Finegold is the Rabba at Moriah Congregation in Deerfield. She was ordained as part of the inaugural class of Yeshivat Maharat.