Rabbi Avraham Krieger's eyes light up when he talks about the selfie he took with Israeli pop singer Noa Kirel and his collaboration with Israeli musician Aviv Geffen. There are those who might find that odd, but that is just who Krieger is: someone who is constantly working to retell and memorialize the events of the Holocaust and mainly to make it accessible to Israeli youth in any way possible.
Krieger, 58, is a married father of seven from Kfar Haroeh in central Israel, which is also where the offices of the Shem Olam Faith and the Holocaust Institute for Education, Documentation & Research, which he established 20 years ago, are located. He set himself two principle tasks: to make the institute focus on the resilience shown during the Holocaust and make it accessible to members of the younger generation.
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Krieger was one of the pioneers of the Israeli high-school trips to the ghettos and death camps in Poland.
In 1987, when Israel did not yet have diplomatic ties with Poland, then-Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat sent a delegation of city councilmembers to Poland. According to Krieger, Lahat had a personal relationship with the mayor of Warsaw, which was how the trip came to take place. Two of the councilmembers were friends of Krieger, who asked him to serve as a guide on their trip.
Krieger's parents were Holocaust survivors, and he himself read and researched the subject in depth.
"I took it all in from my parents, who both were in the same place in the Lodz Ghetto. My mother was there until 1944 and was sent to Auschwitz. She was in the death march, made it on all fours to Germany and was liberated at [the] Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My father went through the labor camps, was sent to Auschwitz, was sent to labor camps and was liberated at Bergen-Belsen. I heard a lot, I read a lot about the period. I got my degrees in history at the University of Haifa, I wrote research papers. That first trip with the members of the Tel Aviv Municipality really got me to a place where I realized something needed to change."
Through his work at the Shem Olam institute, Krieger promotes a different narrative from that which we normally think of on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"The story that was present in my home was different, [it was] a story of strength. I can barely remember stories of suffering, humiliation, starvation. It was there, but it was on the sidelines. It wasn't the central story.
"There is one example that has accompanied me throughout my life. From the time he was born, my father would fast on Fridays, not eating until they got back from the synagogue. From the moment he was sent to the labor camps, he asked himself, 'How will I preserve myself, my identity? Will it all just be about existential needs?' He decided that he would not eat his ration of bread on Friday, and he would save it for the Shabbat, for Kiddush [the Shabbat evening prayer]. And so regardless of the ups and downs of that time, when he had a slice of bread, he hid it in his armpit for Shabbat. He told us, 'I did not keep the Shabbat, the Shabbat kept me and my identity.'"
The heroism of man
Krieger says that every story told in his home had an element of strength, how they always helped someone else, how try tried to observe the religious commandments. "And then, hearing the Holocaust stories as an adult, I feel that the Jewish people messed up. Something in the story doesn't feel right. Because the story is [really] about the dilemmas and the resilience that was shown by every family, in public, in the leadership - how they dealt with ethical, moral, humanist, cultural questions. They were coping every moment.
"For example, there is a ration of bread. Do you take it from the children and give a little more to a grandmother that doesn't feel well, or how do you divide a load of bread for one family so that it lasts two days? The dilemmas were what accompanied them all the time. My story of the Holocaust is one of spiritual resilience created within the inferno. That is why I established the institute, which is turning the tables. Everyone knows the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people, but they do not know that is also the most authentic laboratory that reflected the spiritual resilience and spirit that could be found in each every one of the Jews. It is true that there were people who failed, but in that whole time and despite the many dilemmas, the way they coped was miraculous.
According to Krieger, "We found official archives in Poland, in files that deal with various issues that concern all kinds of aspects of coping, we saw questions of keeping the Shabbat in such a time, of keeping the holidays like Passover, a lot of issues of mutual assistance. We found, for example, a women's organization established in the Warsaw Ghetto whose aim was to help … deported Jews from other villages that were in chaos, people who came from absolutely nothing. They took care of everything for them, and that while they were not in any better situation themselves."
Q: How is your institute different from, let's say, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum?
"All the other institutes focus on the story of suffering, the killing, the numbers. In recent years, they have also experienced a significant change, possibly because we raised the issue of resilience to the agenda, and maybe it it's the period [we are living in]. With the passing of years, we absorb different messages. Now the focus is more on resilience, education and theater in the ghetto, things that reflect the human spirit, but the gap is still huge."
Connecting with the inner language
At Shem Olam's education department, Krieger says, "We've raised the banner of the issue of looking ahead. We have an education department that doesn't think about our children and our grandchildren today, but rather our grandchildren's great-grandchildren, [and] how we can make the Holocaust accessible to the generations that follow. Those who, when you tell them the story, will after four seconds say, 'I got it,' and lose interest. And if we add to that the distance in time and the Holocaust's transformation into a historical story, it could be complicated."
According to Krieger, there is also a problem with messaging.
"[Late President] Shimon Peres came to the UN and said, 'Never again,' and 'We will know how to fight.' That's all right, but the youth that is born into this doesn't connect with it."
On the trips to Ukraine, there is also an emphasis on, on one hand, making the Holocaust accessible to the younger generation, and on the other hand, contending with relevant issues to everyday life.
As Krieger explains, "We don't just talk about how Jews died, but how they lived."
Political strategist Moshe Klughoft recently helped Shem Olam take his efforts one step further, incorporating children's TV stars in a project aimed at helping them reach the youth market. Singers and other celebrities were given songs and stories from the Holocaust era to make their own, with the emphasis being on the sanctity of life, not the inculcation of death.
According to Krieger, every generation speaks its own language. While in Israel, we speak Hebrew, the youth speaks a different version. He says we need to take those who can speak to the younger generation in their language- whether they are singers, celebrities, like Kirel - and help them connect with the issue.
Q: A s a rabbi, do you not despise celebrity culture?
"Absolutely not. … I met with Noa in our offices, in the studio … and she really connected to the story of a mother who worries she is going to die and disappoint her son who is left alone. It's a difficult song. Noa said she wants to go and see things from up close. We went for two and a half days with the producer and the manager and she got into the story at a level that is hard for me to describe. Some of her family perished at Auschwitz, it took her to a personal place. We stood there next to Crematorium No.2 and her father told her the family's whole story. She felt like she was connected to something.
"When we left, she said, 'Let's take a selfie,' and she put it on Instagram. I am less knowledgeable about all this, but within an hour, an acquaintance of mine called me and told me I was on a page with 500,000 followers. Crazy. Later Noa returned to Israel, went to schools, talked about it, she was on TV. She helped bring the youth and the children into this important story. Instead of another ceremony …. They played the songs we made with all of the singers. That speaks to the young people and that is very important."
Q: Doesn't it make the discourse around the Holocaust superficial?
"Absolutely not. It doesn't make it superficial; it opens the gate."
Q: Speaking of Holocaust stories being made accessible to today's youth, what did you think about the "Eve Stories" Instagram project, which dramatized the plight of a Jewish teenager murdered by the Nazis by imagining her documenting her final months over social media?
"Very impressive. A fantastic project. I am very much in favor of it. I am in favor of anything that doesn't veer from the truth and takes a real thing and mediates it into the native language of the present."
Krieger attributes particular importance to communities in the United States, where he plans to embark on a similar project to the one in Israel.
"We want to take songs from the time of the Holocaust [and translate them into] foreign languages in order to open the issue up to the world. It is the defiance of anti-Semitism."
According to Krieger, "American Jewry has an important role as far as the memory of the Holocaust is concerned. With them, it's not just a memory, but a day-to-day battle.
"Students on campuses are forced to fight anti-Semitism. They are fighting BDS [the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement] and all those anti-Israel movements. When they talk about the Holocaust, they are told the Jews have always known how to cry about something. We give them material that they can use to respond, material that doesn't talk about the low points, but about the values, the greatness and the strength of those days during the Holocaust."
Q: Are you afraid the Holocaust will be forgotten?
"Absolutely. We are constantly saying, 'Never forget,' going to Poland and doing everything we can, but that is no indication. When you go to the young people, you see that there is already forgetfulness. It's true that … in Israeli society, every single person knows what the Holocaust is, but there is no longer any in-depth knowledge, and that is precisely where we enter the picture."
