If you lived through holocaust, would you be frum after?

leah233

Fri, Mar 09 2018, 12:32 pm

amother wrote:

Does the knowledge that the holocaust happened impact your faith and belief that hashem is a loving God who listens to prayers?

No.

It was done by people with bechira. Hashem rarely takes away Bechira. Not even if other people daven for it.

If anything it should cause people to lose all faith in secular humanism being it was a heavily stressed topic in the German school curriculum that the Nazis grew up on.

Had I lived through the holocaust myself the pain may have caused me think other things.

amother

Blonde

Fri, Mar 09 2018, 1:27 pm

I think that for people who believe they have a relationship with hashem, and that when they daven he will respond, that he is a loving father, and that he is merciful in a way we can understand, it probably would have turned religion upside-down because all these expectations that people had turned at to be empty. If someone has the mindset that in truth we don't have a relationship with hashem, we have zero expectations of him in this world, we have zero understanding of ANYTHING that happens from young people getting killed to not being able to find a parking spot, it is somewhat easier to explain bad things because there was no pretense of a loving merciful father anyway.

amother

Ruby

Fri, Mar 09 2018, 3:16 pm

I gotta say this. I cannot believe people are voting here and discussing this.
You have NO CLUE how you would have reacted if you had gone through the holocaust!!! You have NO CLUE what they went through!! To say something like, well if your relationship with Hashem is not always expecting love amd you understand that He does everything for a reason.. implying that those who didnt stay frum didn't feel that way, is so judgmental!!! I know you guys don't mean to, but this discussion is so judgemental of people who went through the worst gehennim on earth because it assumes you know what they went through. I hope a holocaust survivor never ever ever hears a conversation like this.

southernbubby

Sun, Mar 11 2018, 9:54 am

Remember too that if someone was a child or teen survivor, their religious outlook was dependent on the adults around them and an adult survivor who was sent to a place void of religion or at least void of the Jewish religion, also had no real way to connect with Judaism, and might have settled for a life of secularism simply because that was what came their way, such as life on kibbutzim. (bad grammar, run on sentence, I apologize)

Those who survived with their faith intact probably had people around them who helped strengthen that faith.

We have to also realize that in the 40's, much of what was considered Orthodox then, is considered MO today because of the reestablishment of RW communities so when reading Holocaust memoirs, we often see the survivors as more worldly than frum Jews are today. Most could not, for example, leave the DP camps and sit in Yeshiva and learn, although apparently some did. It all depended on how the circumstances presented themselves to a group of people who lost everything and sometimes everyone.