Where was God during the Holocaust? It's a daunting question, and an appropriate one to raise as we approach Yom Hashoah, usually rendered as Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year falls on April 12. But it's also one thing to contemplate this question from the comfort of an office or synagogue. It's something else entirely to have addressed it from within the Warsaw Ghetto. That, however, is exactly what Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943) did in sermons delivered in the ghetto between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1942, when mass deportations to Treblinka began.
Known to posterity as the Warsaw Ghetto rebbe, Shapira transcribed these sermons, which were subsequently buried in the hope that they would be passed on to whoever managed to survive. Published until now under the title Eish Kodesh (“Holy Fire”), they are far more than a collection of Sabbath homilies. Together they bear witness to personal theological upheaval and a spiritual struggle of almost inconceivable proportions, conducted not only under circumstances of unrelenting torment, starvation, and death but with a very deeply felt apprehension of divine absence.
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