Jewish in a Gentile World

Last night was "Dining Out for Life" in Philadelphia and many other metropolitan areas. Participating restaurants donate a portion of their proceeds for the nights to local charities that provide quality-of-life services to people with AIDS. (And yes, there are kosher restaurants that participate). I make an effort to "Dine Out" every year, and it always reminds me of Steve, a person I knew in Georgia who died of AIDS in the early days of the epidemic. Apologies in advance to anyone from the old minyan who remembers this story differently; this is how I remember it: I met Steve in the Fall of 1986, shortly after I started law school in Athens, Georgia. Those first few weeks in Athens were quite a culture shock for me, both religiously and generally. I was having a hard time getting my Jewish life in order in such a remote place, and it was very painful. I knew that the college Hillel had an egalitarian Orthodox shabbat prayer group, but it took me a few weeks

Today is Yom ha-Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, on the Jewish calendar, a day to remember the tragic loss of 6,000,000 Jewish lives, the brutal pruning of one-third of the branches on our collective family tree. Over the years, I've seen many exhibits about the Holocaust, showing the camps, the packed trains, the luggage left behind, the walkways made from tombstones taken from Jewish cemeteries, the crematoria and so forth. It tends to provoke in me a bit of a cringe, but mostly a "yeah, yeah, seen it," reaction. When the atrocities are explicitly and repeatedly displayed, we become desensitized to the horrors of that era. The exhibit that moved me the most showed none of these atrocities. It was a collection of hundreds of photographs of Jews in Poland before the war, titled "And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews." I saw the exhibit several years ago, when it came to Lancaster PA, and it still brings me to tears to think about it.