Some years ago one of my elderly relatives remarried. Her new husband Shimon, was a Holocaust survivor whose relatives had been deported from France and murdered in Auschwitz, but he had no idea when they had been deported or how long they had survived.
He regretted that he had never registered them in the records in Yad Vashem so I offered to take them there so his relatives’ lives and deaths would not be unmarked. He filled out the ‘Pages of Testimony’ and gave as much information as he knew about each person in his family.
When the clerk saw what he had written, he became quite emotional. “Please quickly go to the room at the end of the corridor. Someone is registering all the arrivals from France to Auschwitz, from new information and lists we have received through the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Maybe you will find your relatives on the list.”
We were surprised to be greeted by a young man with a strong German accent. He explained that he comes to Yad Vashem every year for a few weeks to help out in any way he can, as an attempt to make atonement for what his parents’ and grandparents’ generation did to the Jews.
He was now documenting and computerizing the lists of Jews who had arrived from France to Auschwitz. We gave him a list of the names of Shimon’s family we were searching for and he asked us to take a seat and he would look for them.
A few minutes later he showed us several of the names with the dates of their arrival at Auschwitz. He asked if we knew the approximate ages of the people. Shimon told him what he knew. Among them were elderly grandparents, babies and young children.
“For the old and very young you can be fairly certain that the date of their arrival is also the date of their death. That’s how it was at Auschwitz,” he said quietly.
It was a very emotional moment. For the first time since he had discovered that his family had been murdered in the most notorious of concentration camps, Shimon now had a correct date to say Kaddish for some of them.
It would not bring them back, but it brought Shimon a measure of comfort and closure.
Shimon was not alone in not knowing when his relatives had been murdered. This was the cry of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors on realizing that their relatives had gone forever and they alone remained to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for their entire family.
But where had they died and when? They knew they would probably never have a grave to visit, as their remains lay either in ashes scattered in the raging winds of blood-soaked Europe, or in a mass grave where they would lie forever unidentified.
They wanted at least to say Kaddish for them. But what date should they say it if they had no idea when their relatives were killed?
National tragedies in our history, of the magnitude of the Holocaust, are often marked by Fast days. But Judaism does not add days to the calendar that has now been set. However, it does allow a new tragic event to be combined with another.
The Chief Rabbinate in the newly founded State of Israel knew they had to find a way to ease the pain of the survivors. They declared that the Fast of the 10th of Tevet, which commemorates the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem which led to the eventual destruction of the 1st Temple, would also be known as Yom HaKaddish HaKlali, the day to say Kaddish for all those whose date of death during the Shoah was unknown.
This year the 10th of Tevet falls on Friday, Jan. 10, the day when thousands of descendants of Holocaust victims will raise their voices in a collective Kaddish for those whose real yahrzeit will forever remain unknown.
