I n a piece in Tablet entitled “Blow Up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” writer Alex Cocotas meditates on the meanings of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that stands on a sloping field in central Berlin. It consists of an immense grid of stelae (i.e. rectangular gray slabs of concrete of various sizes) numbering 2 711 — precisely the number of blatt in Shas — an astonishing fact that was once the subject of a meditation of my own in this space.

Beneath the memorial is an underground information center and one of its five rooms is dedicated to tracing the fate of various Jewish families across the war years through photos and documents. But apparently not all types of families. He notes that “Haredi Jews of Eastern Europe one of the largest victim groups are often minimized in educational and artistic representations of the Holocaust… To the extent that Haredim appear at all it is frequently during a moment of humiliation: as German soldiers cut off their payot; that is as they become secular.”

It seems that one need not be a fervently Orthodox Jew or even a religious one at all to notice the relative invisibility at various Holocaust memorial venues and even at Yad Vashem until recently of religious Jews as victims of the Nazis yemach shemam.

Cocotas opens his essay with a heartbreaking description of the kinds of behavior a visitor to the site will find others engaged in there ranging from the frivolous to the scandalous. It’s painful but not really surprising especially given the finding of Israeli sociologist Irit Dekel who has studied the memorial that many visitors have no idea they’re even at a Holocaust memorial.

But many many others are fully aware of where they are yet behave egregiously all the same and Cocotas offers an interesting theory: that a visit to the memorial is “a pilgrimage of performative guilt… It allows its… visitors to wallow in self-regard which in part explains the visitors’ behavior the spectacle surrounding the memorial: They have already paid their penance; their presence is their penance.”

The writer is not enamored of Holocaust memorials in general which he says encourage “external shows of remorse external shows of enlightenment external shows of sorrow tailored and edited for an intended audience. It is selfies instead of self-examination. The internalization of the Holocaust’s lessons conversely engenders no immediate political or social capital.”

He contrasts the standard Holocaust memorial with another sort that has sprung up throughout Europe starting in the 1990s. Known as stolpersteine or stumbling stones these are small brass plaques embedded into the sidewalk in front of a Nazi victim’s last known residence stating his name date and place of birth and date and place of deportation or death. There are more than 50 000 of these plaques in 20 countries around Europe total today their installation having been sponsored by private citizens at a cost of 120 euros each.

The potency of these stolpersteine Cocotas writes is that

They force you to think. Not just the production of a superficial thought — wow dead Jews — but… to experience that sparse information from another’s perspective…. Every time I pass a stolperstein… I stop and linger on the sparse information the immensity of the lives that lay behind a handful of letters and numbers…. How long had they lived here? And did [the victim] whistle a tune every night (the same tune perhaps) as he fumbled for his keys anticipating the comforts of home?….

Implicit in thinking of the lives of the victims is the lives of the neighbors — some of whom were surely perpetrators and many of whom were enablers. Did their children play together? Did they ever borrow a few spoons of sugar? And what did Frau Schmidt think watching little Hans Cohn walk out of the house never to return again?

External shows of thought and feeling versus quiet internalization of truths. Minimalist superficial actions that allow one the self-satisfied feeling of having paid his dues obviating any need for the hard ongoing work of self-transformation. These are the challenges of human living we all face which extend far beyond the question of how to absorb the lessons of the Holocaust.

PERILS OF PUNDITRY Writing a weekly column like most of the rest of life can sometimes be a balancing act. On the one hand a writer must try to see what he’s written through the eyes of his readership making sure his prose is understandable and precise. Sometimes however a writer can write too carefully mistakenly assuming that others are reading his words with as much precision as he has used in writing them.

And then there are those who for a variety of reasons will read the words they think he has written although the latter may bear little resemblance to the printed reality. Not much to be done about those folks.

Case in point: Two weeks ago discussing why lots of very good Jews live outside Eretz Yisrael I mentioned the view of gedolei Torah that the decision of where to live is a very individualized one a product of the complex calculus of factors of both a ruchniyus and gashmiyus nature in each Jew’s life. I followed with the story of a fellow who moves to the Holy Land on a spiritual high only to find that it’s the yetzer hara who has brought him there.

It’s a tale that the great Rav Mendel Kaplan ztz”l would tell (see the wonderful book Reb Mendel and His Wisdom p. 230) to illustrate the importance of self-knowledge and honesty a central principle of the discipline of mussar in which he was steeped. Scrutinizing one’s motivations can be particularly crucial in matters of spiritual pursuit where one is more prone to allow his good intentions and the worthiness of the cause to lead him astray into grave mistakes or even sin. As Reb Mendel put it “A person goes to do a mitzvah and he isn’t aware that the baal davar” — the way he’d refer to the yetzer hara — “has jumped onto his wagon and is riding along with him.”

Although the anecdote involves one man’s aliyah to Eretz Yisrael its point is applicable to all of life: Making big decisions that put everything important in one’s life at potential risk requires searching forethought and consultation with the wise to ensure one isn’t fooling himself. Although its point was obvious to me it’s also a somewhat subtle one and in hindsight I certainly should have elaborated to make both the lesson and its connection to my column more explicit.

Some readers did grasp my intention but others did not such as the reader who felt I had “disparaged those who move to Eretz Yisrael insinuating that their motives are the work of the yetzer hara.” Another one saw in my words a complete absence of any desire to live in Eretz Yisrael.

I can’t expect every reader to be familiar with the columns I’ve written each time I return from visits to Eretz Yisrael describing its uniqueness with great emotion. But I think I can expect them to have read my words in last week’s column acknowledging the good fortune of those “who live and raise a family in Eretz Yisrael’s uniquely vibrant Torah atmosphere” and my “envy of people who live there for that very reason and many more.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 658. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com.