Posts tagged Holocaust
Melted Down to Our Essence (Erev Yom Kippur 5782)
Melted Down to Our Essence (Erev Yom Kippur 5782)

Three years ago, my husband, Alex, and I had a direct experience of melting down metal, and finding history transformed in that act: It was the fall of 2017, and our wedding date was set. My mom had given me my grandfather’s wedding ring. With my mom’s permission, we decided to melt it down, and combine it with some material from Alex’s family - and from it form two rings, our wedding bands - to represent the way, in marrying each other, we were bringing our families’ stories together.

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sermonAdam Lavittforgiveness, transformation, history, Holocaust, High Holidays
Choosing Life with a Stranger (Rosh Hashanah Day)
Choosing Life with a Stranger (Rosh Hashanah Day)

Yesterday I spoke about Rosh Hashanah’s invitation to us, b’charta b’chayyim – to renew our commitment to life, even in the face of the world’s brokenness and our own limitations. But how can ordinary people like you and me make a life-giving choice — when it means doing something out of character for us, something we might never have done or imagined doing before?

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Adam LavittRosh Hashanah, family stories, Holocaust, High Holidays
Yom HaShoah #TorahForTheResistance: Humanization as Resistance

Since Election Day I have been sitting with the images of resistance my grandfather’s story offers me as it continues to echo across time. The story he told about what happened 78 years earlier gave me an image of resistance I’ve carried with me most of my life. But recently I’ve discovered another story of resistance, one he didn’t tell me when he was alive.

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Adam Lavittresistence, resilience, Holocaust, politics
Descended From Trauma Enriched By Hope

The first person to toast my sister and her fiancé at their rehearsal dinner was a descendent of Mrs. Hamilton. She recalled her grandmother, a “righteous gentile” who had sponsored our grandfather and his family to immigrate to America in 1938. She described how delighted our grandparents would be to see our families gathered together for this celebratory moment. I wasn’t the only one moved to tears by the way she brought their memories into this rite of passage in our family.

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Adam Lavittfamily stories, history, hope, compassion, Holocaust, wedding
Telling Stories of Trauma for Healing and Compassion (Parshat Ki Tetzei, Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19)

On the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, a group in Japan launched a project in which storytellers are training to retell the experiences of survivors. My grandfather participated in a similar project 20 years ago, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which sought to collect testimony from survivors before the experience of the Holocaust was lost to the world. My family’s participation in this project instilled in me the belief that these stories, though painful, should be actively remembered and repeated.

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Adam LavittHolocaust, family stories, history, compassion, Amalek, epigenetics, Deuteronomy, Ki Tetzei