The Shoah Scrolls

In 2003 the Conservative Jewish movement produced the first-ever formal liturgy to ritualize the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. They called it “Megillah Shoah” or The Shoah Scroll.

Holocaust Remembrance Day was fixed by the Israeli government during the 1950s as an annual observance on the Hebrew date corresponding to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. Adopted over the years by Jewish communities around the world, it is commonly marked with a patchwork of poetry readings, musical performances and speeches by Holocaust survivors, communal leaders and politicians. In recent years, however, rabbis and theologians, particularly in the Diaspora, have suggested that the holiday needs a formalized and less secular set of rituals if it is to outlive the last generation of Holocaust survivors.

The new liturgy represents the first attempt to address future commemorations. “Having one central text, shared by Jews wherever they live, will unite us and make possible the perpetuation of the story,” Rabbi Reuven Hammer, president of the Rabbinical Assembly, wrote in one of three introductions to the Megillah. “It will help us to fill what has become the new imperative of Jewish life: We must all view ourselves as if we had personally experienced the Shoah.”

Some people feel that Yom HaShoah must not be characterized as a religious holiday but as a commemoration to those who perished under the Nazi war machine, and a tribute to those who survived.

The six-chapter Megillah is built largely around first-person testimonies. After an opening chapter that gives an overview of the victims’ suffering, it offers composite sketches of a Christian journalist observing life in the Warsaw Ghetto, a Jewish woman in a work camp and a Jewish youth who was forced to work in a death camp. A fifth chapter consists of a eulogy for those who died in the Holocaust; the final chapter recounts the efforts to rebuild Jewish life after the war ended.

Organizers of the Megillah say that, in addition to supplying a set ritual, the new document is meant to address theological questions posed by the Holocaust but often ignored at communal ceremonies.

In one chapter, the woman in the work camp blames the Jews of Europe for ignoring the rising tide of anti-Semitism and rejecting the advice to “emigrate to the distant east.” Others place the question — though not necessarily direct blame — at God’s feet.

The overriding theological message of the Megillah is that human beings have a right to question the divine, but they cannot expect answers — and that even without answers, the Jewish faith in God endures. The Megillah ends with the exhortation: “Do not mourn too much, but do not sink into the forgetfulness of apathy. Do not allow days of darkness to return; weep, but wipe the tears away. Do not absolve and do not exonerate, do not attempt to understand. Learn to live without an answer.”