What We Remember and Who We Are Becoming

Dear Mirowitz Community,

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. I am not Jewish. And yet I have carried the weight of this history for most of my life.  This felt especially present this week as I observed our students learning about Yom HaShoah.  Through carefully designed, age-appropriate experiences, they explored the history of the Holocaust while also grappling with enduring questions about human behavior, courage, and moral responsibility.

Students came down to light six candles and spoke names aloud — real names, belonging to real people who had ordinary lives and did not choose what happened to them. Teachers built lessons across every grade about the Righteous Among Nations, about what it looks like to be the person in the room who decides that someone else’s suffering is, in fact, their problem. About how you resist. Quietly. Loudly. At great cost. And sometimes in ways that history only records much, much later.

We are not raising children to see their Jewish identity primarily through the lens of tragedy. We are raising them inside a living, breathing, joyful Jewish community. But we are also raising them to understand that being a person of conscience is not a passive condition. It requires something of you.

One of my good friends from college is Olivia Mattis. She is the co-founder and president of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, which preserves the legacy of Aristides de Sousa Mendes — a Portuguese consul who defied his own government in 1940 and issued thousands of visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. He saved more lives than almost anyone outside of the mechanisms of war. He lost his career, his pension, and eventually his home for doing it. He did it anyway.

It required something of Aristides de Sousa Mendes. It required something of the families who hid neighbors in attics and root cellars. It requires something of each of us now, in a world that is still — still — asking whether we will stand up or stand by.

Our students are learning to answer that question before it arrives.

As we go about the work of remembering this season, perhaps we can find the time and courage to think deeply about our work of repair in this world, but most importantly within our very selves.

Shabbat Shalom,

Brian Thomas