MICHAEL SOBERMAN

I’m not a deeply religious person, but a number of years ago, I decided that I wanted to be a more observant Jew.

Last April, which coincided with my 12th visit to Poland as part of the March of the Living, also marked the first time I was accompanied by my tfillin. On a cold snowy morning in Warsaw, I began my ritual. I was instantly connected to the more than 1,000 years of rich Jewish history in Poland and the tragic events that almost put an end to Jewish People partaking in Jewish rituals. It was meaningful and therapeutic. But what it meant to me personally had yet to be revealed.

Each day in Poland started the same way, until the morning of Yom Hashoah and the actual march from Auschwitz to Birkenau. As I prepared to put on my tfillin, I stopped. I decided I would rather put them on that afternoon at Birkenau. I somehow sensed that I had to be influenced by a series of events that would culminate later that day.

I had recently learned the story of Hugo Lowy, a Hungarian Jew who disappeared from Budapest during the war. It took more than 50 years for his family to learn that he had been put on a train to Birkenau. Upon his arrival, Hugo was ordered to leave his belongings in a pile. He refused, and the small bag he was holding was ripped from his hands by a Nazi soldier. After the Nazi turned away, Hugo retrieved it. But the Nazi saw and, enraged by Hugo’s disobedience, beat him to death on the platform. (I would walk on the very same platform where Hugo was murdered). What was in that small velvet bag that he gave his life to defend? His tallit and tfillin. It took Hugo’s surviving family more than half a century to learn that he had died, in what Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel said, “was the ultimate act of Kiddush HaShem” (sanctification of God’s name).

Several years ago, I noticed a boxcar sitting on the tracks in Birkenau. It had been donated by the Lowy family after learning of Hugo’s fate. It’s a memorial to him and all the victims of the Shoah. At a private dedication ceremony, Hugo’s son, Frank Lowy, placed a small velvet bag containing a tallit and tfillin inside the boxcar.

On Yom Hashoah 2013, Frank Lowy addressed more than 10,000 March of the Living participants. I stood in the freezing cold on the snow-covered ground and, like everyone else there, listened intently to the story about his father’s tremendous sacrifice. As his speech concluded and Hannah Senesh’s song Eli, Eli echoed throughout the camp, I made my way to an empty barrack. I removed my jacket, fleece, sweater and long-sleeve shirt until I stood shivering in a T-shirt so I could put on my tfillin.

As I began to wrap my arm, the cold was not an issue. I heard the voices of hundreds of thousands of Jews before me reciting the prayers and I never felt more connected to who I was as a Jew. It was a moment of tremendous clarity: I realized that I was nothing more and nothing less than another link in the chain of the Jewish People, another chapter in an incredible story. I felt a familiar solidarity with Hugo Lowy and so many others before me who participated in the same ritual, day after day, year after year, until his devotion to that faith and that ritual prematurely ended his days on this planet.

It was then that I was able to succinctly answer these questions: Why did I put on tfillin at Auschwitz? Because I could! Why do I put on tfillin every day? Because I can!

Most Jews today live in free and democratic countries. The conditions of the Holocaust are so far removed from the experience of our generation that it is almost impossible to comprehend the extent to which our people were robbed of every last freedom, of any vestige of human dignity.

But today we have the freedom and the privilege to practise our Judaism at any time, in any place and in any fashion we choose. We ought to choose to passionately exercise that liberty! Whether it is daily prayer, putting on tfillin or another tradition, search out that aspect of Judaism that speaks to you, embrace it and make it part of your life!

We owe it to future generations and we owe it to Hugo Lowy, and to the millions of others before us, who lived – and died – defending our faith. They entrusted us with a most precious legacy, as I learned on that freezing day, wrapping tfillin around my arm, in a barrack in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Michael Soberman is national director of Canada Israel Experience, a department of Jewish Federations of Canada – UIA. This is an edited version of his High Holiday address to Toronto’s Congregation Habonim in September 2013.