Released From the Support Team Study Vault! – The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz

In this Support Team Study, The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz, Nehemia Gordon explains how a series of scrolls hidden by Jews facing imminent death during the Holocaust, serve as a rare testimony of human dignity, the importance of free speech, and the glory of Yehovah.

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Support Team Study – The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz

Nehemia: Before I get started, I want to really thank you guys for having me. And particularly, I want to thank Dr. Burckel, who’s the head of this university, and I want to thank the Israeli Alliance at McNeese. Can we get a round of applause for them?

Audience: [Audience applauds]

Nehemia: I don’t want to miss anybody. Dr. Mi, who’s the advisor to the Israeli Alliance at McNeese, Kyle, Clifton, Joe, and last but not least, Adam Harris, who contacted me and said, “Would you come and speak here?” And he assumed I was in Israel at the time. It happened to be that I was spending some time in Dallas, Texas, and I said, “Yeah, that's less than an hour flight, sure.”

My name is Nehemia Gordon. You can call me Nechemia, Nehemiah, Nihamiah, just don’t call me Baldy!

Audience: [Audience laughs]

Nehemia: It’s very sensitive! Although this is a choice… I tell myself that every day… and it becomes less and less of a choice every day!

So, in any event, I grew up in Chicago. My father was an Orthodox Rabbi in Chicago, and a lawyer. I moved to Israel in 1993 and lived in Jerusalem for over 20 years where I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I did a double major for my undergrad, Biblical Studies and Archeology. I found out that archeology is digging through ancient garbage, and decided to continue in Biblical Studies and got my master’s in biblical studies. I worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls and with various Hebrew manuscripts.

And that’s really what I normally do; I deal with Hebrew manuscripts. I’ve dealt with issues in the New Testament as it relates to the Hebrew and Jewish cultural background. I’m what’s known as a Karaite Jew. Do you guys know what that is? It’s a type of Jew… it doesn’t matter, we have a lot of denominations in Judaism. I think the Christians have us beat with like 40,000.

So, they invited me here to talk about the Holocaust. And what Adam told me when he invited me to come speak is that the theme of this event… there’s two themes really, critical thinking and diversity. And I said, “This is perfect! I have a topic that I have been working on for a number of years that fits the bill perfectly with that.” And that topic, I call it “The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz.” And we’ll get to what that is.

Before I get to that I want to give a little bit of background about myself, what I do, what I've been doing lately. I have a podcast called Hebrew Voices. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. What inspired me to do Hebrew Voices was really this whole idea of diversity. I’d been invited to speak, at various churches in particular, and I would get people walking up to me afterwards saying, “We’re so glad you came to speak, but there was a big controversy about whether we can have you speak at our congregation because you’re not a Christian. You’re not a Messianic Jew. How can we as Torah keepers have you come speak at our congregation?” I’ve heard all kinds of versions of this. I hear it all the time. And it got me thinking over the years. If they’re so afraid to hear what I had to say, what about all those other Hebrew voices out there they were afraid to hear? And so, the idea came to me.

And I just want to give you an idea of some of the things I’ve done. Professor Emanuel Tov, who’s the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I actually worked for him during my master's studies. And I interviewed him on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was really interesting because he said, “An interview? Like for regular people?” He’s used to writing a paper that’s read by 12 people, and if it’s 13 it’s a bestseller, and he’s excited about that. And half of those 13 don’t understand what he’s talking about because he’s so smart. And I said, “No, this is just for regular people who love the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it’s usually between 30 and 45 minutes.” He said to me, “I can’t imagine what people would be interested in for 45 minutes about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” meaning the common people, because he deals with complex, linguistic things. And of course, it's so exciting, he doesn’t understand… to “normal people”.

The next one I did there was with the deputy minister, Micheal Oren, who was an ambassador to the United States. He’s the world's leading historian on modern Israel, who's still alive.

I interviewed a lady who is an archeologist who is putting back the floor of the Second Temple. They found pieces of the Second Temple, and they found all these different designs. And she went to the head archeologist and said, “We’ve got hundreds of these pieces. Shouldn’t we try to put the floor back together?” He said, “I don’t know how to do that.” She said, “Well, my undergrad was in mathematics,” and she worked out the mathematics of how to do this. It’s incredible stuff!

The next lady down there on the bottom left is a woman named Shamir who was raised in the United States as a Muslim. She now lives in Israel and studies at Bar Ilan University, in Israel, an Orthodox Jewish University, and she is not Orthodox. I like to put people in boxes so I’m going to call her a Torah-keeping believer in Yeshua. What an incredible journey! Being raised as a Muslim and… I’m hearing all these incredible stories. Once I’m willing to listen and hear what’s going on in the world beyond my little box. It's just incredible.

I interviewed Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, who is a legend in the Jewish world. And I interviewed the head of the Jordanian opposition, who is living in exile in London with a life sentence hanging over his head if he ever returns to Jordan.

So, that’s what Hebrew Voices is about; understanding anything to do with modern Israel, ancient Israel, ancient Judaism, Christianity, the Hebrew language, and just really exploring these issues. People listen to some of the episodes and say, “I didn’t really like that.” No problem, listen to the next one. It’s interesting; I often hear about the same episodes where people tell me that it was the worst episode ever, and other people tell me that was the best episode ever. So, to each their own, right?

Before I actually get started talking about my main topic, which is the Holocaust and the Scrolls of Auschwitz, I’m here at a university, and I felt I really couldn’t speak at a university unless I said something about free speech. Free speech is under assault in the United States, and this breaks my heart. My father was a rabbi, and a lawyer by profession. And I remember when the Nazis tried to march in Skokie, which is a northern suburb of Chicago, and the Supreme Court ruled that it was their First Amendment right to have a march even though they’re Nazis.

And my father’s response was, he said, “Nehemia, we don’t have free speech for popular ideas. We have free speech for the ideas that people hate. If we ban the Nazis today, 20 years from now they’re going to be banning us.” And he actually told me this was how great America was; that they even let the Nazis… now they can’t attack you, they can’t call for violence, that’s not free speech. “Kill the Jews” is not free speech, but expressing yourself in a nonviolent way, that is the greatness of the American enterprise. And I remember my father, the rabbi, telling me, “Basically, it’s wonderful the Nazis are marching on Skokie, because it means they won’t shut us down!”

In 1263 there was a rabbi named Nachmanides, a very famous rabbi. He became a famous Bible commentator. Even at the time he was a famous Talmudic commentator. He was one of the great luminaries of the 13th century. And he was ordered by King James I of Aragon, what we would call Spain, at the time it was just Aragon, he was ordered to appear in a disputation with a Jewish convert to Catholicism named Pablo Christiani. The rabbi did not want to participate in this debate. This was not a debate he could win. If he lost the debate, the Jews could be forced to convert to Catholicism. If he won the debate, the Jews could be killed. Some debate!

He comes to the debate, and he says as follows… and I found this quote years ago and it just really touched my heart, how this connects with the modern American idea. And not just American, Israeli as well. I’m a citizen both of the United States and Israel, and in Israel we have a concept of free speech. I’ll be honest, not quite like you do in the United States. No one in the world has free speech like in the United States, embedded in your constitution, but in Israel we do have the foundation laws. And one of those foundation laws is chofesh ha’dibur, “freedom of expression”, “freedom of speech”.

In 1263, he writes… well, he actually said this before the king, King James I of Aragon. He said, “When His Majesty the King ordered me to debate with Friar Pablo in his court, in his presence, and in the presences of his counselors in Barcelona, I replied saying, ‘I will do according to the commandment of my lord the king if you grant me permission to speak according to my desire.’” I want free speech. Why do I want free speech? You’re making me debate! I’ve got to be able to say whatever I want to say. “I request this permission from the king and from Dominican Friar Raymond de Penyafort and his associates present here.”

That’s really interesting! You have to understand the historical context there. This Dominican leader, he wasn’t just a monk, a pious monk. What the Dominicans would do in Spain, and in many countries in Europe, is they would whip up the Christian mob, the Catholic mob, to attack Jews. This guy is the head of Antifa of the 13th century.

And what Nachmanides is saying is, “You could give me permission all day long, King, but if the Dominicans don’t give me permission, when I go home, they’re going to kill me and my family and my friends.” History doesn’t change, does it? Friar Raymond answered, “Only on the condition that you do not speak offensive things,” “bizyonot” in Hebrew. "Well, how can I talk about religion and not say things that are offensive? There’s no way I could even speak, there’s nothing I could say. Everything I say is going to be offensive."

He was being forced to debate, and really, in essence, the question was: why is it you’re a Jew? Your identity as a Jew is invalid. You need to be Catholic. And the fact that you’re a Jew, you need to defend that. That really was the fundamental question. And he’s saying, "Look, if I can’t express myself, then how can I respond to this?" "Well, only if you don’t say things that are offensive." "Well, it’s the things that are offensive that we need protection for! Those are the things we need freedom of speech for."

I love Nachmanides’ response. He goes on and says, “I said to them, ‘I will speak everything that I desire in the matter of the disputation, just as you speak as you desire. Although I intend to speak politely, but it will be whatever I desire to say.’” He’s saying, look, I’m going to be a mensch. I’m not going to come up here and insult you and insult your religion, but the things I say will be inherently insulting to you and your religion. I’m not going out of my way to insult you, but I am identifying myself as a Jew and why I am a Jew, and there’s no way I can do that without insulting a Catholic, in the 13th century.

It’s really interesting; if you read on in the disputation, there’s two points in the disputation where he writes in Hebrew, “Aniti ke’mahatel,” “I answered sarcastically.” In other words, he’s saying, I’m going to be polite, but there’s that Jewish sarcasm, which is a part of our culture, and it’s apparently been part of our culture since the 13th century. And once he’s being sarcastic to Friar Pablo, who he’s debating. The second time he’s being sarcastic to the king! That took some chutzpah! What it shows you is that free speech in the Jewish sense is a core value. We cannot express ourselves and our faith if we don’t have that freedom of speech. And as a persecuted minority, we cherish that value of free speech.

And it breaks my heart when I turn on the news, and I open up Facebook, and I see these attacks against free speech, particularly at American universities. The universities should be the bastion of free speech, and instead, those are the places that are the most dangerous to express your identity if it’s not the right identity. This is tragic.

What came out of the disputation really underscores how important free speech is and how delicate free speech is. So, Nachmanides won the debate. And after the debate, Pablo Christiani, the Jewish convert to Catholicism, wrote down what happened, and he lied. And so Nachmanides responded and wrote a transcript of what happened, word for word, and he was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church. "But you gave me free speech." "Yes. You had freedom to speak, not to write.” You can say whatever you want but you can’t post it on Facebook.

The king of Aragon, James I, commuted his sentence from death to exile, and Nachmanides ended up becoming one of the Jews who returned to the Land of Israel, helping to reestablish the Jewish presence after the Crusades had wiped out the Jewish community.

In 1264 in Spain, they then began the censorship of the Talmud. Why censor the Talmud? Well, we lost the debate; a hundred years from now we want to win, so we’d better make sure the things in their books that caused us to lose the debate aren’t in there. This is how fascists work. This is how totalitarians work. They won’t let you say what you want to say, and then they say, “Okay, you can say it,” but then they find a way to persecute you anyway.

I really hope the United States turns around and that free speech is restored, because what’s happening is a slippery slope. It can happen faster than you think. You think, “Oh, it'll never happen here.” Those are famous last words, “it'll never happen here”. That’s what the Jews said in the Holocaust in Germany, “Not in Germany! Germany is the home of literature and music, all of the great, fine culture of the world! It'll never happen here. There’s some crazy guy who’s saying stuff now, he’ll be gone in another four years, or six years.” How did that end? Not so well.

Let me get to my main topic here. Years ago, I was at Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. And they had just rearranged the museum. They had new exhibits, and one of the things they had there was a quote from a rabbi, and it explained that this was something the rabbi said just before he went into the gas chamber. In Jewish culture, when you understand what is being said here, this is such a powerful story. The rabbi said to the German SS commander, “‘Do not think you will succeed in destroying the Jewish people. The Jewish people will live forever.’ When he had finished, he cried out emphatically, ‘Shema Yisrael!’ ‘Hear, O Israel’, and all the Jews cried out with him ‘Shema Yisrael!’”

And I remember seeing this in Yad Vashem, and my first reaction was… I mean, it touches your heart. If you understand the Jewish culture, this rabbi is about to walk into a gas chamber, or he’s in the gas chamber, actually, and he’s crying out the most precious words in the Jewish culture and in the Bible, Shema Yisrael. My next reaction, as someone who has a master’s degree from Hebrew University and has studied ancient history, was that this can’t possibly be true. How could this be true? It’s a great story. What a wonderful, powerful, motivating story, but it can’t possibly be true. The rabbi is dead, everybody who was there with him in the gas chamber is dead. How could anybody know this? And it began a journey for me of searching to find out if it’s true, and if it’s true, how do we know it? And if it’s not true how would anybody dare to put this into the Yad Vashem Museum?

I really can’t get into the details of this without being really open about this. My background as a Jew, in a sense, sets me up to be very sensitive to this topic. It’s a sensitive topic. Here I am questioning part of the narrative of the Holocaust. When I was 17 years old in 1990, I went on a trip to Poland, and I visited Auschwitz. And this is me, believe it or not! This is me many decades and pounds ago. That skinny little guy was me standing in Krema II, the second crematorium at Auschwitz. And I’m standing here in a place where 500,000 Jews were murdered, in that very spot, in that building. So of course, I’m sensitive about this.

On the other hand, it’s just in my nature and in my training from Hebrew University to employ critical thinking. And I have to balance that out, my emotional attachment to the topic and my critical thinking. And what I was trained to do at Hebrew University, really as a philologist… a philologist is somebody who uses language, and history, and the study of manuscripts to understand ancient texts… and modern texts, it can be used for that as well. So, my critical thinking had to win out.

About a year ago I was researching my family, and I had always suspected someone in my family died in the Holocaust. I didn’t know any details. I signed up for ancestry.com and started clicking around and found out there was this database called the All-Lithuania Database, where they were archiving all kinds of documents about Jews, not just in the Holocaust, but Jewish genealogy. And I found out that my great-grandmother, Fruma Robinson, who came to the United States in 1925, that she had a sister. I never knew this. I found her Polish citizenship application from 1923. And she never came to the United States.

And as I continued to research, I found more information about her. I even found her picture. Her name was Fani, or Feiga, in Yiddish, Zemel; she was my great-great-aunt. And her husband, Yirmiyahu Zemel, who’s my great-great-uncle. So, this is my grandmother's aunt, my grandmother’s mother’s sister. I had never heard of this woman, so I asked my mother about her. She said, “Yeah, that was my aunt Feigi, we think she died in the Holocaust. We really don’t know. She was in Europe before the Holocaust; we never knew what happened to her.”

So, I’m clicking around in this database and doing research, which is what I do, and I find there’s a listing that mentions her and her husband. There she’s called Fani, which is the more secular form of Feiga, which is the Yiddish form. Her husband was Yirmiyahu, they had a son named Natan, Nathan, and they had a granddaughter whose name is not known. And I found out that all four of them were killed in the Holocaust. And their granddaughter, whose name we don’t even know, was a little girl who was eight years old. And if you look there, it says, “Killed 1943, Ponar, daughter of Nathan Zemel.” What’s Ponar? Well, I knew exactly what that was. Ponar refers to the Ponary Forest outside of Vilna, Lithuania; today it’s known as Vilnius. And that’s where the Jews were taken out, lined up over trenches and shot. And this wasn’t a one-time event; this was a process over years. "We’ve got too many Jews in the ghetto, let’s shoot some more. We’ve got a shipment of bullets, let’s shoot some more." And they shot an eight-year-old girl.

Well, I’m a guy who always wants to see the source. Really, I tell people I was born and raised in Chicago, in Illinois, but deep in my heart I’m from Missouri, which is the “Show Me” state. So, I’m seeing this document… and this is a modern thing, a database that was put together really in the last couple of years. And I say, “How do they know this?” And if you look there, they tell you. It says there, “Book by Shmerke Kaczerginski - ITS Archive and other sources.”

So, I find that there are actually references to this at Yad Vashem. They have testimonies of people who survived the Holocaust. But I wanted something a little more concrete. Who’s this Shmerke Kaczerginski? So, I researched him, and I found out he wrote a book called Churban Vilna, or Hurbn Vilna in Yiddish, The Destruction of Vilna. Vilna was the cultural capital of the Jewish people outside the Land of Israel up until the Holocaust. In fact, it was called, and somewhat embarrassingly, I have to say, it was called Yerushalyim DeLita, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania”. I say embarrassingly because there should never be another Jerusalem. There’s only one Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people in the Land Israel! But culturally, outside the Land of Israel, Vilna, Vilnius, was the center of the Jewish world, of Jewish learning at the very least.

And Kaczerginski was a partisan who lived out in the forests. I purchased this book online. It took me quite a long time to even find it, and then I had to hire someone to translate it because it was in Yiddish. And I got the translation five hours ago. I had no idea what it said. I knew my great-great-aunt was killed in the Holocaust, Fani Zemel, and her husband, Yirmiyahu Zemel, but I didn’t know the details.

Five hours ago, I called up my mother who lives in Israel. It was around 9 pm in Israel. She lives in Jerusalem. And I said, “Mom, you know how we’ve talked about your aunt Feigi. How she was killed in the Holocaust, and I found a reference to it in this modern database. Now I found out how she was killed. Do you want to know?” It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I read to my mother the translation. I said, “Do you really want to know?” Because I had read it 60 seconds earlier. She said, “I really want to know. Tell me whatever it is. We’ve wanted to know for decades. We knew she must have been killed," because she knew where my grandmother lived, and her sister. She knew her sister lived in Chicago. Why didn’t they contact us? She must have been dead. I’m going to read it to you; I got this five hours ago.

So, this is in the book, Churbn Vilna 1947, pages 67 to 68, and this is a report that’s identified there. It says, “Sent by Shaul Kaplan of Voronova,” I’m going to use the Jewish pronunciation of these towns. Voranova is today in Belarus. At the time it was Belaya Rus, “White Russia.”

And it was sent from Vilna, August 31, 1944. "When the slaughter of the Jews began in Lithuania, many of them fled to Belarus, to Voranova, 62 kilometers away from Vilna. In November 1941, the SS surrounded the village. They caught over 300 Lithuanian Jews, men, women, and children. They were confined in the village’s cinema, where they were shamefully tortured. In the village there was a German communications company that used to come every evening to the cinema’s lobby and go wild on the Jews,” that’s what it says in the Yiddish apparently. “And they gradually tortured them. The Germans used to come in and call, ‘Who wants to go to the toilet?’ Those that asked to go were taken to the yard and shot. There were also events… striking and crushing skulls using the butts of their rifles, leaving the Jew suffering until his end. A week later, they walked Jews out of the cinema to the railroad, at the right side of the train station, where they were shot. They forced the Jews to dig graves for the corpses at the same place. The confined Jews in the cinema were ordered to take off their shoes and their better clothing,” whatever that means, “and to hurry to the grave half naked in a frost of -15 degrees Celsius. Among the shot were the well-known Vilna teacher, Yirmiyahu Zemel and his wife… When shooting, they often used explosive bullets so that many of the bodies were impossible to identify.” And there it is, you can see it in the Yiddish, “Yirmiyah Tzemel mit der froy,” “with his wife.”

I read this to my mother five hours ago, and until then she had no idea how her great-aunt died. Imagine that. They knew she wasn’t around; she must have been dead. And this was written in a book in 1947, but she didn’t know that. How did I find it? We live in an information age where it’s available at your fingertips. This is a miracle age we live in, that you can find out information that the woman's sister didn’t know! That her niece didn’t know! That her grandniece didn’t know! That her nephew didn’t know. We now have this information that nobody knew for over 70 years, available. This is a blessing in a way, and in a way, it gave my mother, today, closure. She had no idea what happened to her great-aunt, my great-great-aunt, and now we know.

I actually found out there’s a photo of the Ponary Forest, of them shooting the Jews in Ponary. This is where my cousin was killed, that is the granddaughter of Fani Zemel.

And I bring all of this to say that I struggle as a scholar to be objective here. I honestly do. I want to have critical thinking and be objective, and to question, as a critical scholar should question, this story about the Shema Yisrael. But I have this emotional attachment. I can’t get around that. So, I think it’s important to be honest about that emotional attachment. This is one of the things I see going on, particularly in the media. People will come out and pretend they’re objective, and everyone knows they’re not objective. Let’s just be honest about it! Tell us what side you’re on. Tell us what your biases are and work to overcome those biases if you want to find truth.

I found out a few years back that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and one of the characteristics of my Asperger’s is that I’m obsessed with the truth. Because most people would say, “Shut up, Nehemia. We had the great story about the Shema, just shut up. Stop questioning it. Don’t ruin our story!” And if you don’t want to hear the rest of this, don’t listen. That's fine. Turn it off on YouTube. But I’m going to investigate this and find out what the truth is because I have a true love of the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Now, why was I so skeptical about the Shema Israel story? I want to give you the background here. Some of you may know this. The rabbi said as he’s in the gas chamber, “‘Do not think you will succeed in destroying the Jewish people. The Jewish people will live forever.’ When he had finished, he cried out ‘Shema Yisrael!’ and all the Jews cried out ‘Shema Yisrael!’”

What is Shema Yisrael? “Hear, O Israel!”

What we refer to in Judaism as Shema Yisrael is really three passages which are combined together as a prayer. And many Jews recite this prayer twice a day. It’s Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41. Many Jews recite the Shema twice a day. Many Jews recite it a third time just before they go to sleep. That’s called kriyat Shema al hamita, “reciting the Shema over the bed”, especially children who don’t really go to prayer services. Jews go to prayer services, traditionally, two to three times a day. My father went three times a day. Or at least he prayed three times a day or went to two formal services certainly every day.

The children who don’t do that, their parents take them to the bed and recite the Shema with them, word after word, “Shema, Yisrael…” word after word. And this is the prayer, “Shema Yisrael,” and traditionally this is read as “Adonai,” “the Lord.” In Hebrew it has the name. I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, but I have been given free speech here. “Yehovah Eloheinu, Yehovah Echad.” “Hear O Israel, Yehovah is our God, Yehovah is One.”

The earliest copy of the Shema is the Nash Papyrus from 150 BCE. It was discovered in Egypt. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this was the oldest known Biblical text at all. Now we have much older Biblical texts, or copies of Biblical texts. I don’t know if you can see it. It’s not so easy to see, but if you look here… I’ll use my laser pointer. Is that on? Yes. That is the Lamed of “Yisrael”, of “Shema Yisrael”, we don’t have the word “Shema”, actually. That is the name, Yud. Everybody with me, Yud.

Audience: Yud.

Nehemia: Hey.

Audience: Hey.

Nehemia: Vav.

Audience: Vav.

Nehemia: Hey.

Audience: Hey.

Nehemia: That’s what scholars call the Tetragrammaton. In Judaism we usually call that Shem Hameforash, “the explicit name” or “the unequivocal name”, also known as Shem Hameyuchad, “the unique name”, the four-letter name of God. It says there, “Yehovah Elohinu, Yehovah Echad.” That’s the oldest currently known copy of the Shema, and we only have the first verse… I guess we have part of the second verse.

It goes on, “Ve’ahavta et Yehovah Elohecha b’chol levavcha u’ve’chol nafshecha u’v’chol me'odecha.” “And you will love Yehovah with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might.” “V’shinantam l’vanecha,” “And you will teach them to your children,” “v’dibarta bam,” “and you will speak about them,” these are the words of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, “b’shivtecha b’veitecha u’v’lechtecha ba’derech,” “when you sit in your house and you walk on your way,” “u’v’shachbecha u’v’kumecha,” “when you lie down and when you get up.”

And this is why many Jews, for thousands of years, every morning and every evening, have recited the Shema, because it says, “when you lie down and when you get up”. They said, “Maybe not literally when I lie down, but sometime in the evening. Maybe not literally when I get up, but sometime in the morning.” And this is so deeply ingrained in the Jewish culture, this idea of reciting the Shema… the words that that rabbi, we’re told, spoke just before he was killed at Auschwitz, it’s so deeply ingrained that the opening passage of the Talmud… the Talmud is the repository of Rabbinical learning. In some sense it’s the encyclopedia of ancient Judaism. The opening words of the Talmud are, “Me’ematai kori’in et Shema b’aravin.” “From when do we recite the Shema in the evening?”

There’s no question that we recite the Shema. Nobody discusses that! Everyone knows you recite the Shema in the evening. The question is, from when are you allowed to first recite the Shema? It says, "when you lie down." Okay. Well, what time do you go to sleep? From sunset, can I recite it? And then there’s a great discussion that ensues where there’s a debate between rabbis about, “Okay, we agree when you can start reciting it. But how long are you allowed to recite it? Can you recite it until sunrise?”

And then there’s a great story about the children of Rabban Gamaliel; that’s Gamaliel II. He’s the grandson of the Gamaliel mentioned in the New Testament. And it talks about how his children were in a tavern until very late at night and they came home to their father and said, “Can we still recite the Shema?” You feel the Jewish experience of ancient times. This was an important question. Really, it wasn’t a question about reciting the Shema, but when. The parameters of when you can recite the Shema, that was something that Jews were debating.

Of course, the Shema makes an appearance in the New Testament. Mark chapter 12 verse 28, “And one of the scribes came and asked Yeshua, ‘Which is the first commandment of all?’ And Yeshua answered him, ‘The first of all commandments is, Shema Yisrael Yehovah Eloheinu, Yehovah Echad. Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord,’” that’s just kind of a paraphrase in English. “‘And thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength: this is the first commandment.’”

And what’s really interesting here is, the scribe hears this answer and he’s like, “Okay, I’m satisfied. You’ve spoken something that’s authentically Jewish, that I hear, and I cannot dispute.” There’s no disputing the Shema remember, even in the Talmud. You could dispute the parameters of it, but you can’t dispute inherently the Shema.

The Shema makes another appearance in Jewish history in a very famous story in Jewish culture of the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva was the leading rabbi during the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which took place between 132 and 135 CE. It was a Jewish revolt against the Romans; it was really the third in a series of revolts. And Rabbi Akiva is eventually executed by the Romans, skinned alive. And we have an account of his martyrdom. “When they brought forth Rabbi Akiva for execution, it was the time for reciting the Shema,” there we have it, the Shema in the execution of the leading rabbi in the early 2nd century. “As the Romans were combing his flesh with iron combs, he was receiving upon himself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Now, in Hebrew that phrase, “Kabalat or malchut shamayim”, “receiving upon oneself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” “yoke,” in the sense of an ox that puts a yoke on its neck; that means he was reciting the Shema. How do you get that, reciting the Shema? Because when you say, “Hear, O Israel, Yehovah is our God, Yehovah is One,” you’re accepting upon yourself God in Heaven as your God, as your king.

The story goes on. “Rabbi Akiva’s disciples said to him, ‘Even now? You’re reciting the Shema now, as they’re combing your skin with iron combs? “He said to them, ‘All my days I was troubled by the verse, ‘with all your soul,’” which means ‘even if it costs you your life’. “I said to myself, ‘When will I have the opportunity to fulfill this?’ And now that I have the opportunity, should I not fulfill it?” And these are some of the most famous words in Rabbinical literature. “He elongated his pronunciation of Echad until his soul left him.” His last words were the Shema, and the last word was “One”, proclaiming the oneness of the God of Israel.

What’s really interesting is, my father, he knew this story. Everyone knows this story, certainly in the Orthodox Jewish world, and they walk it out in their lives. How do they walk it out? When my father would recite the Shema, he would take off his glasses. He would put his hand over his eyes, and he would say, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad-d-d-d.” And he would actually do it like that, elongating the Dalet in the manner of Rabbi Akiva.

Of course, I study ancient Hebrew texts and the ancient Hebrew language, and when I read this, I say, “That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t elongate a D.” It doesn’t make any sense linguistically, philologically, or phonologically. Of course, anybody who studies ancient Hebrew knows there are six letters in the Hebrew language that have two forms, we call them the Beged Kefet letters, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Peh, Tav. When they have a dagesh, a dot in the letter, we have the hard form of the letter, “B” for Bet; when there’s no dot, we have the soft form, “V”. Well, what’s the soft form of Dalet? Well, we know that, because some Jewish communities preserved it, and the soft form of Dalet is “TH”. And so, Rabbi Akiva didn’t say, “Echad-d-d,” like my father, he said, “Echath-th-th”, as the life went out of his body.

So, here we have an example where understanding the ancient Hebrew language can help us. Here’s a testimony that tells us this is how they spoke, the way that’s preserved by a Jewish community even today.

The Shema didn’t end in Jewish culture with Rabbi Akiva. There was the German Crusade of 1096. In the German Crusade of 1096, Pope Urban II had called for a crusade, for the Catholics to go to the Holy Land and liberate Jerusalem. And many of the people said, “Why would we go all the way to the Holy Land when we have heathens in our midst? First let's wipe out the heathens among us before we go and wipe out the heathens over there.” And they wiped out three major Jewish communities, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Those were the three major Jewish communities in what today is Germany. And just to give you an idea of how important these were as Jewish cultural centers, Rashi, the famous rabbi, went to study in Speyer and then in Worms before he returned to his homeland in France.

In Judaism these are called G’zerot Tatn”u. Most people don’t know the details, but many Jews know the general picture; that the Catholics would surround the Jewish synagogues, demand that the Jews be baptized, and rather than profess the Catholic faith, these Jews were martyred. And many of them recited the Shema. And why the Shema of all things? One, they remembered the story of Rabbi Akiva, but more importantly, as they were being asked to profess a doctrine which they felt did not honor the oneness of God. And so, the Shema was their way of saying, “Look, we’re going to die for the oneness of God.” And many, many Jews died reciting the Shema during the G’zerot Tatn”u, the mass German Crusade of 1096. And more importantly, this is remembered in the Jewish collective consciousness.

Now, that was a thousand years ago. My critical thinking is a bit skeptical. Do we know for sure that happened? It may have. I looked for contemporary documents that describe this. They may exist, but I couldn’t find them. And I’ll admit, I might just need to look harder.

There’s a modern instance of the Shema being recited, which is indisputable because it happened in the internet age. There was a man named Major Ro’i Klein in the Second Lebanon War. He wasn’t a soldier, he was a father with two children, little beautiful children. And he was called up for reserve duty. He was the second in command of the 51st Golani Battalion, which is a mechanized infantry brigade. In the Battle of Bint Jbeil in Lebanon, a Lebanese terrorist, on July 26th, 2006, threw a grenade in among him and his men. He jumped on it, covered it with his stomach, and his men reported that as he was dying, he recited, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adoni Echad.” This is not some story that you can question, it’s in the internet age. There are many witnesses who testified about it.

We’ve got some other stories about the Shema, and these I’m extremely skeptical of. I don’t know if they happened, I honestly don’t know. I have to be critical. I’m a critical thinker, it’s what I do. This story is told about three separate rabbis, which already raises a red flag. And in general, the story is true. Whether this specifically happened I don’t know. What happened is, many Jews survived the Holocaust as babies, as children, by being handed over to orphanages run by Catholic nuns and monks. And after the war, the Jews went and said, “Okay, can you give us our children back?” And they said, “Show us some documentation.” There was no documentation. “Bring their parents.” “Their parents are dead, or we don’t know where they are.” So, the story is that these rabbis went to the orphanages, and they started crying out the Shema, singing the Shema, Shema Yisrael…” And the children in their bunks as they were being put to sleep started crying, the ones who were Jews, because they remembered their parents reciting the Shema with them as little children.

Now, did that actually happen? I really want to believe it happened. I couldn’t find any solid documentation that it happened. I found a lot of stories written decades later, and I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying that for me this remains a question mark.

And this is how I approach the story of Rabbi Moshe Friedman, the Boyaner Rebbe, who prior to being murdered in the gas chambers cried out the Shema. You understand why I’m skeptical? This is your archetypal martyrdom story, and that should make you skeptical. It should make you have some critical thinking. And really, the reason that I had the critical thinking is I couldn’t understand who reported this event! Everyone was killed! The rabbi was killed, everyone in the gas chamber was killed. I couldn’t believe the SS officers reported this, it doesn’t make sense. Even if they heard it, they wouldn’t have necessarily known what it was.

The only people who could have reported this were what were known as the Sonderkommandos. I knew this. The Sonderkommandos, that’s the German word that means “special squads”, those were the Jews who were pressed into slavery to clean the bodies out of the gas chambers. And do some worse things that I don’t know if I’ll say. I had assumed all the Sonderkommando were killed, and so surely they didn’t report this.

And what I discovered is, first of all, there were approximately 2,000 Sonderkommando, and 30 of them survived. In addition to that, some of the Sonderkommando wrote down what happened during the events as they were happening and hid their documents, their diaries and their reports, among the human ashes and bones that they were forced to create. Their job was to burn the bodies, grind up the bones into ash, and eventually toss the ashes into the Vistula River to hide the crime that had been done. And they knew they were going to be killed. Why were they going to be killed? Because if the Nazis lost the war, they knew there would be trials and they would be held accountable. And so, the first thing you do is you kill the witnesses.

There are two really good movies about the Sonderkommando. I’ve got to say, I did most of the research on this topic before I knew about these movies! I was reading academic journals and articles in Hebrew, and all kinds of first-hand documents and studies about these Scrolls of Auschwitz in which the Sonderkommando recorded the events, and I didn’t even know about these movies. And what’s interesting is, as a scholar, I kind of look down on movies. This is not a serious source of historical information.

But what it did is, through art it brought to life many of the things I had been reading. In fact, some of the events described in the Scrolls of Auschwitz became the storyboard for these movies, became the outline for these movies. It actually blew me away, particularly the Son of Saul, which won an Academy Award. It's a movie in Hungarian with subtitles and it won, I believe, The Best Foreign Film, or something like that. The Grey Zone honestly isn’t the best movie ever. It has a relatively negative portrayal of the Sonderkommando, The Grey Zone. And it’s true, some of the Sonderkommando maybe weren't the best people, but other ones are heroes.

This next part is difficult, and you might say, “Wait, it hasn’t been difficult until now?” This is really difficult, the next part. And look, if you need to get up and leave, no problem. And if you’re watching on YouTube, this may not be for children.

One of the Sonderkommandos who survived was an artist named David Olère, and he made a series of drawings showing the work he did. Now remember, these guys had a number of jobs. Basically, these people were taken when they arrived at Auschwitz, separated from their families, sent into a bunk, and told, “Your families have been killed. Your job now will be to burn their bodies.” These people thought they were coming on a work detail. Many of them knew they weren’t, but some of them were deluded into believing they were coming to work. They were told by the Nazis, “Jews are lazy. We’re going to put you to work in the east.” They put you on a train, they arrive on the train, and in less than 24 hours they’re burning their families' bodies.

And they’re not just burning the bodies, the Germans didn’t want anything to go to waste. So, they stripped the people naked before they sent them into the gas chambers, to recycle the clothing. They cut their hair, after they were dead, the women’s hair. They pulled out gold teeth. Well, the Germans weren’t going to do that. It was the Sonderkommando who did those things. It was the Sonderkommando who were assigned to pull the teeth out. They had a German guard watching over them who was drunk most of the time.

This is one of the drawings of David Olère’s, The Undressing Room. He did this in 1946, which is really significant, because this is a year after the war. You could say, “40 years later, did he really remember that? Did he remember if the door is on the right side or the left side? Okay, maybe not.” But a year after the war, this guy is not going to forget.

This next painting is called In the Gas Chamber, and that’s the SS officer standing at the door. Of course, these Jews weren’t told, “We’re sending you to the gas chamber.” The Jews were told, at least by the Germans, “We’re sending you to be deloused before we put you to work. There’s soup waiting for you, there’s hot coffee, let’s get over there, let’s do it quick. Take your clothes off and put them on a hook. And remember your hook number, you’re coming back for your clothes.”

One of the descriptions is by a man named Leib Langfus. He did not survive the war. He wrote down what was happening during the war, during the Holocaust. This is one of the men who worked in the gas chambers removing the bodies. And he describes his first experience just after arriving at Auschwitz, what it was like to go into the gas chamber after the people were dead.

He said, “Falling down dead in such a confined space, the people pressed against each other in five or six layers, one on top of the other, to over a meter in height. Mothers were left sitting on the ground clutching their children, men and women hugging each other. Some were stuck in a bent over posture on account of the mass,” they were all smashed together. “The legs standing up, and from the waist up lying down. Some were left completely blue under the effect of the gas, and some completely fresh, as if sleeping. One group did not go into the bunker...” In other words, a train arrived, and they didn’t have enough room in the gas chambers to kill all the Jews at once. “They were held in a wooden hut until 11 in the morning the next morning. They heard the despairing voices of the people being gassed, and worked out exactly what was awaiting them. They witnessed everything. As I later found out, my wife and son were among them.”

Wow. So, this was the life of a Sonderkommando. And one of the reasons I bring this up is, in the literature on the Holocaust the Sonderkommando are often vilified as these… In fact, I was telling my mother about this earlier today, and I explained what the Sonderkommando was, and she said, “Oh, you mean collaborators?” I don’t know that that’s fair. What would you do if you were pulled off a train and told, “We just killed your family. If you want to live… you probably won’t live for more than three days anyway,” that’s what they told them, two or three days. “The only reason you’re alive is because your job now is to burn bodies, pull teeth, and cut hair.” What would you do? And some of the people in the Sonderkommando were bad people, but some of them were true heroes.

There was a man named Zalman Lewental, who was also killed, but he wrote what happened. His document was discovered in 1962. I call it “#8” because there were nine caches of documents. I’ll get to that in a bit. He wrote, “When the Sonderkommando set to work, many recognized members of their families among the dead, as this kommando was made up of men who had just arrived. Thus were murdered all the population of our settlement, all our community, our town, our dear parents, our wives, our children, our sisters, our brothers, on 10 December 1942 late at night. The rest were killed on the next day.” It’s very similar to the other description, meaning they were over capacity in the killing. They were doing so much killing that they didn’t have room in the gas chambers, especially early on. They got more efficient with time.

This next image is of David Olère. This is a very difficult image, but this is what it meant to remove the bodies from the gas chamber. If you don’t want to watch, close your eyes for a few seconds. This is what the life of the Sonderkommando was. Imagine that’s your wife and your son. They then took the bodies to an elevator, brought them up the elevator, and then there were ovens where they burned the bodies. And again, this is David Olère, 1950, The Oven Room.

Now, you could read about this all day long, but until you see an image of it… it was hard for me to understand. What did this really involve? And then I found these drawings. These drawings are the storyboards for those two movies. They’re based on these drawings and other documents.

There was a Sonderkommando who survived named Yaakov Freimark, and he wrote about Zalman Gradowski, who we’re going to hear a little bit more about. Zalman Gradowski was a very devout Jew who was pressed into service as a slave in the Sonderkommando. “After the cremation of each shipment of Jews, Zalman Gradowski would return to the block, wrap himself in his tallit,” his prayer shawl, “put on his phylacteries,” his tefillin, “and say Kaddish for the souls of the victims.” Kaddish is the prayer over the dead. “He wept for the holy books, prayer shawls and phylacteries which had been burned.”

This was a man who didn’t want to be doing this. He did this so he could live another day, and another day, and so he could tell people what happened. That was the goal of many of the Sonderkommando, to let the world know what happened. And they knew they were going to be killed, and he was killed, Zalman Gradowski, but he wrote down what happened. And we have those; those are called the Scrolls of Auschwitz. We have those documents. They exist.

There was a Sonderkommando named Filip Müller who was one of the 30 or so who survived. He tells the story of how, at one point, he decided to commit suicide. He walked into the gas chamber, and the people in the gas chamber said to him, “We understand that you have chosen to die with us. We think your decision is pointless. Return to the camp and tell everybody about our last hours. Perhaps you’ll survive this terrible tragedy, and then you must tell everybody what happened.” This man was given a solemn duty. That solemn duty was to survive whatever it took so he could tell the world what happened. And he did. He wrote a book about it explaining what happened. It’s an invaluable historical document, his book.

We have different types of documents. In history you learn that there are different types of documents. There are documents that are written years later. His book was written in the 1970’s, decades after the war, after the Holocaust.

One of the Sonderkommando was a man that didn’t survive. We only know him as Alex the Greek. Alex the Greek was killed, but before he was killed, he took the only photos that exist of the extermination process at Auschwitz. He took four photos; one of them is black, you can’t see anything. One of them is naked women being taken to their deaths. I won’t show you that. The two other photos are the Sonderkommando out in the open, burning the bodies. They had run out of room in the crematoriums. There was no more room in the ovens, so they were burning the bodies in the open air. And this is the photo.

In the movie Son of Saul, they recreate Alex the Greek taking this photo. And imagine what this man had to go through. His job was to drag the bodies and burn them and grind them to dust and pull-out teeth. Where does he get a camera from? I’ll tell you where he got a camera from. People came with luggage and the Nazis said, “Mark your name on the luggage. You’ll be coming back for it.” And then they took the luggage, and they sent things back to Germany. Well, one of the Jews whose job it was… this was an area of Auschwitz the Jews called Kanada, which in the Jewish mind meant “great riches”. In this area called Kanada they would go through the luggage, and somebody found a camera and smuggled it to the Sonderkommando. This wasn’t an individual act, this was a group act, to make sure the world knew what was happening. At least in the future they would find out, and these are the only four photos of the extermination process at Auschwitz. We have photos from the selection process, a few of those, but this is an incredible document. I’m talking about the Scrolls of Auschwitz, but I don’t want to discount this, which in a sense is a scroll as well. It’s not written, but it’s an invaluable document of history.

This is one of the nine caches of scrolls; this contains two different documents. It’s interesting, there were nine caches, but the way I count them, 11 different scrolls. And I didn’t name them scrolls, scholars have named them scrolls. I guess because they were rolled up, but also presumably because of the association with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were just coming out at the time that these were discovered. This cache was discovered in 1962, and it contained the documents of Zalman Lewental and Leib Langfus.

This is the last one to be discovered, in 1980. And here you can see very clearly that it was in some kind of a thermos, some kind of a metal thermos that's decayed. And that thermos was put inside of a leather briefcase, and it contained a letter in Greek by a Sonderkommando named Marcel Nadjary, a Jewish man from Greece. And he was a Greek nationalist. He famously wrote the name of Greece, in Greek Hellas, in capital letters in his letter. He was very proud of being a Greek, but to the Germans he was just a Jew and needed to die.

This is Cache #6, 1952, Leib Langfus. This is the one that we’re going to be coming back to because this is the one that has the story about Shema Yisrael. This one is Cache #7; it was discovered in 1961. It wasn’t written in Auschwitz; two of the 11 documents were written in the Lodz Ghetto. Lodz was a Jewish community, and the ghettos were a place where they amassed Jews from all over, hopefully to starve them to death. That was the plan of the Nazis, that the Jews would die of disease and starvation. And if they didn’t die of disease and starvation there was always Auschwitz. But you want to save some gas, that was the way the Nazis thought. Save the train space if you can. Well, two of those people from Lodz both separately ended up at Auschwitz and their diaries were discovered.

And this one is really moving to me. This is the diary of a little girl, or possibly a young man, and it’s written in four different languages, Polish, German, Yiddish, and English. And we can actually read this. “We have to love good times in the ghetto. We can get some cabbage with what to lessen our mortal hunger.” That’s a Yiddish expression, “with what to lessen”. “The only care is about our future; the nearest future because everyone is concerned that the war has decidedly approaching its end. Fears are aroused by rumors according to which the Germans destroyed tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.” It was over 500,000. She didn’t know that. “When will this question of ‘to be or not to be’ be taken off our shoulders?” She’s quoting Shakespeare in English. And this little girl was taken to Auschwitz. In this instance we actually know who discovered it. Presumably, when they were stripped of their clothing, she may have had this in her pocket or in a small bag. It was discovered by one of the Sonderkommando, who buried it along with a commentary. He explains, “I found this,” and he’s commenting on it. It’s incredible! I mean, their sense of history facing impending doom is just beyond comprehension!

I want to give you a little bit of a historical outline here very quickly. October 7th, 1944, was the Sonderkommando Uprising. On that day, the Sonderkommando decided… and they had been planning this for many, many months, they had been smuggling explosives. There were Jews who were used as slave labor in a munitions factory, particularly three women who smuggled out explosives that they handed off to the Sonderkommando. They were later raped and hanged, those three women. The Sonderkommando managed to blow up one of the crematoria, and the word crematorium is maybe a bit of a euphemism. It had the ovens for burning people, but it also had the undressing room and it had what’s called the gas bunker, the gas chamber. It wasn’t just a place for burning bodies. So, they realized, “If we blow this up maybe it will slow down the murder.” They managed to kill three SS officers, and 400 Sonderkommando were killed.

January 18th, 1945, the Nazis decide to abandon Auschwitz, by and large, and they deport thousands of Jews. “Why take the Jews with you when you’re leaving?” “Well, it’s slave labor, we’ve got factories to man, what are you talking about? And we’ve got people to kill.” Imagine what the Nazis could have done if they would have used those trains to transfer weapons and supplies. But they were so obsessed with killing the Jews that they were willing to let it harm their military effort. And this wasn’t an isolated incident; this was a pattern for several years.

January 27th, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army.

I’m going to quickly go through the nine caches just so you get an idea of what was discovered and when. Most of them were discovered in 1945. One of the reasons I’m going through this is that it’s really hard to get information on this topic. I started with this book called The Scrolls of Auschwitz, and it talked about six different scrolls. Okay, there are only six. There’s a book from a few years ago that mentions eight. I find out there’s nine. There might be more than nine, but I only know about nine.

The first one is late January, possibly early February 1945. There's a Red Army doctor, her name is Zinaida Berezovskaya. She finds the diary of a young Jewish girl named Rywka Lipszyc from the Lodz Ghetto near the crematorium at Auschwitz. It was just on the ground. Now, this isn’t the diary we read from, it’s a different little girl from Lodz. It was only turned over by her granddaughter in 2012. Imagine that! She put this in an attic somewhere, and her son put it in an attic somewhere, or in a drawer, and her granddaughter moves to San Francisco. Her granddaughter's not Jewish, and she looks at this document that she got from her grandmother and says, “I wonder if the Jews would be interested in this.” She contacts the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco and they said, “We’ve got to authenticate if this is real. This doesn’t sound like it’s real!” And it was real. So, the first one to be discovered is the last one to come to light.

The second one is from February 1945. Andrzej Zarski, he's a 21-year-old doctor from Poland. He describes how he came out, walking among the crematoria, and he sees Polish villagers pillaging, digging through the piles of human ash and bones. Why would they do that? Because they assumed the Jews had hidden gold among those piles. They didn’t find gold, but they probably found some documents which we’ll never see because they were destroyed. Because they said, “That’s not valuable.” He scares them off and finds a letter written in French by a man named Haim Hermann. And it’s in a glass bottle, which is really interesting. Why is it in a glass bottle? Because the plan was to dump the ashes into the Vistula River, and he figured this would be washed down and someone downriver would find it. Well, the Nazis didn’t have the time to dump this particular ash pile, or they missed it.

May 5th, 1945. This to me was one of the most moving instances. Shlomo Dragon was a Sonderkommando himself who escaped on January 18th. He was taken in the transport from Auschwitz and escaped from the transport in January. He then went back four months later to Auschwitz to dig up one of the documents. He knew that his brothers, his fellow Sonderkommando, had hidden documents and he went there specifically to dig them up. And he dug up the document of Zalman Gradowski near Crematorium II. That was the man that would put on his tefillin and pray for the souls of the dead.

Early in 1945, we don’t know exactly when, an unknown Polish man finds documents and sells them to a Jew who’s from Auschwitz. He’s about to leave for Israel and it turns out that it’s a letter from Zalman Gradowski, a second document from the same man! And it’s a letter, where in the letter he says, “Please send this to my family in New York,” and the man sends it to his family in New York! Can you imagine? You open up the mail one day and there’s a letter that was written in Auschwitz by a man who knew he was going to be killed, and he’s essentially writing as a dead man. How come I don’t know about this? How come this isn’t taught in schools?

In April 1945, Gustaw Borowczyk found The Deportation, which is a long document, many, many pages written by Leib Langfus at Birkenau. He put it in his attic until 1970. Incredible.

In 1952, a man, whose name I can’t pronounce, Franciszek Ledwon, he’s cutting the grass. And as he’s cutting the grass, he turns up this document from Leib Langfus, the one that actually mentions the Shema that we’ll get to. Unbelievable.

July 28th, 1961, an anonymous diary from the Lodz Ghetto; that’s the one that we read where it’s written in English, a part of it. How did she know English? Well, my great-grandfather, when he came to the United States, it says at Ellis Island, he spoke English. He spoke Polish, English, Yiddish, Russian. That wasn’t unusual for the Jews of that area. Many of them had family in the United States and they corresponded with them. Her English is British English, so she may have had a family in England.

October 17th, 1962, Lewental’s diary plus loose papers of Leib Langfus.

And finally, October 24th, 1980, students cutting grass near Crematorium III. These are forestry students from a forestry college who every year would come to volunteer at Auschwitz because it’s in a forested area and they don’t want it to be overrun by trees. So, they come, and they pull up shrubs and they cut grass, and they do what forestry people do, and they find this letter of Marcel Nadjary, written in Greek.

So, these are the nine authors of 11 documents, and when I bring the quotes, at the top I put the number of the cache in which they were found. And you can see they were written in many different languages; Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, English, German. There were Jews from all over Europe. What they had in common is, they were Jews.

Now, why do I call this The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz? One reason I call it The Lost Scrolls is because they were lost and rediscovered. But there’s another reason I call it that. An archeological excavation needs to be carried out at Auschwitz to find more documents. It is a crime against history that this has not been done. It was done in a very limited sense in the 60’s, but this needs to be done. I don’t know if they’ll find anything decades later, but we won’t know if we don’t look.

Zalman Lewental wrote on October 10th, 1944, in a document discovered in 1962, he says, “— you will find more —” and those dashes indicate sections where the mold has destroyed the page. We don’t know what it says, “of the courtyard under the crematorium, not to the street — on the other side, you will find many — because we must, up till now, until — event — in a chronological historic manner, to expose everything to the world. From now on we will bury everything in the earth.” There are dozens of documents that have never been discovered, and some might still be there. We don’t know!

Zalman Gradowski, on September 6th… and I want to put this in context. What happened on October 7th 1944? There was the uprising of the Sonderkommando; 400 of them were killed, 200 remained. He knew it was only a matter of time before they killed him. So that’s what he’s talking about, “From now on we're going to put everything in the earth, because we know we’re going to be killed any day.” Up until then, they had tried to smuggle some documents out with the Polish underground. That wasn’t going to happen after October 7th. They had buried some things in the ground before. They’re going to bury everything now.

On September 6th, 1944, before the uprising, he wrote, “Dear finder, search all the grounds. Buried in them are dozens of documents.” How clear can you be? “Mine and those of others which cast light on all that has happened here… The future will judge us on the basis of these writings. The world will learn from them, though it be only the smallest testimony of the tragic world in which we live.”

November 25, 1944, Leib Langfus. Leib Langfus is a Dayan, “Day’an,” he is a Rabbinical judge. He’s the head of a Jewish community in a place called Makova, that’s how the Jews pronounced it, Makova, in Poland. He says, “I would request that my various writings of the past, signed with the initials A.J.R.A. and buried in jars and boxes in the courtyard of Crematorium II, be collected, as well as the two larger writings: one titled The Deportation, hidden in the bone pit of Crematorium I,” that was actually found, The Deportation. “And another entitled Auschwitz…” which has never been found, “was hidden in a heap of bones on the southwest side of that courtyard.” No one’s ever gone to look for those. How can that be? “I later recopied them and completed them and they were separately buried in the ashes of Crematorium II. I would request that they be edited and published together under the title, The Horrors of Murder.”

These people were charged with a solemn duty by the people in the gas chambers, “You have to tell the world what’s happening!” And they did whatever they could to tell the world, and they buried documents describing what happened. And we haven’t found all of those documents. We haven’t even looked! This is a crime against history, in my opinion.

The very next day, Leib Langfus writes, “We are now going to the ‘sauna’.” The sauna was a euphemism for the gas chamber. “The 170 remaining men. We are convinced that they are taking us to our death.” And he was right. “They have selected 30 men to remain in Crematorium IV. Today is 26 November 1944.” And this is actually the original, and you can see he scrawled it on the side, sideways. He had maybe 30 seconds. They said, “We’re coming to take you to the sauna,” and he scribbles it down and puts it somewhere. And somebody else must have hidden it, buried it. He couldn’t have buried it, I don’t think. Incredible.

So, Leib Langfus was really an incredible man. He was a religious man. Like I told you, he was a Dayan, which is kind of like a rabbi. He was the religious leader of a community in Poland, and he has a series of stories, of accounts, that happened over a period of several years that he calls The Particulars, which can also be translated as “The Individuals”. He writes, “End of summer 1944. A transport arrived from Slovakia.” A transport, meaning of Jews. “The arrivals knew without a doubt that they were being taken to their death. Nevertheless, they were calm. They undressed and entered the bunker. As they were leaving the dressing room and entering the gas bunker, a woman said: ‘Maybe a miracle will still happen with us.’”

And I don’t know if it fully conveys the power of that. This was written in Yiddish, but Yiddish has many Hebrew words, and the word here is “nes”. She says, “Maybe a nes will happen with us.” And I can hear my grandmother saying those words in her Yiddish accent. I read that and I was in tears, because the hope of this woman… she’s stripped naked, walking into the gas chamber, and she says, “Maybe a miracle will still happen with us. I still have faith in God.” Wow.

“Another group of Jews had arrived from Tarnow.” Which is in Poland. “One of the young people sat on a bench and asked for everyone’s attention. A deathly silence prevailed. ‘My Jewish brothers,’ he called out, ‘do not believe they are taking you to your death. It is unthinkable that this can happen to us, that tens of thousands of innocent men will be put to death.’” It was millions. “‘Such cruel and shocking slaughter could never happen in this world. Those who told you those things must have had their reasons. Fearmongers, hatemongers, those are the ones that told you the Germans are going to kill us.’” This is a man sitting naked in the undressing room just outside the gas chamber. “Guys, we've got nothing to worry about. The Germans are the most civilized people in the world!” This is what Jews believed, and it was kind of true before the war.

“He continued to speak until he had calmed down. Only when the gas was thrown into the bunker did the preacher with the well-developed conscience awaken from the dream of innocence. The pretexts that he had used to calm his brothers were shown to be mere illusion and self-deception.” And I think it’s so important to understand this. I only read this very recently when I was researching these scrolls of Auschwitz. But this sense that we’ve been told in the past, "don’t worry, this will pass". Every Jew knows that. “This will pass. Hilter’s a nut. There will be another chancellor in a few years. Don’t worry about it, this too will pass.” And it didn’t “just pass”. Six million Jews were murdered.

And I think it’s key to understand that if you want to understand the geopolitical situation in the world today between Israel, and particularly Iran, here’s a tweet from Ayatollah Khamenei, who is the actual ruler of Iran. He’s the religious ruler of Iran. For some reason this wasn’t considered a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. I can’t quite understand that. Ayatollah Khamenei, “Israel is a hideous entity in the Middle East which will undoubtedly be annihilated.” No Jew can hear that and know what happened in the Holocaust and say, “Oh, we’ve got a piece of paper, don’t worry about it. They won’t do that, they’re rational actors. What are you worried about? The people who are making you worry must have their reasons.” We’ve heard that before, we can’t take that risk. You can understand that I hope.

Leib Langfus goes on in The Particulars, “End of summer 1943. A group of Poles from the immediate vicinity was brought to the camp; all its members, including 12 young women, were members of the underground organization…” These are not Jews; these are Polish Catholics. “At the same time, several hundred Dutch Jews from among the camp inmates were brought to be killed by gas.” This is an incredible account here. “In the gas bunker, totally naked, a young Polish woman made an impassioned speech against the German murderers. The Poles then knelt, and, formally, in an impressive pose, whispered a prayer.” Remember, this is a rabbi writing about Catholic women. He doesn’t say, “Oh, they’re Catholics, God doesn’t hear them.” He sees them as women of faith standing before their Creator, literally naked about to die! And he’s moved by their faith. “Still on their knees, they sang the Polish national anthem in chorus. The Jews sang Hatikvah.

Hatikvah, as many of you know, is the national anthem of the State of Israel. There was no State of Israel in 1944, 1943. Before the State of Israel, this was the anthem of the Jewish people.

He goes on, “Their common, cruel fate joined in that cursed place…” This is incredible, the way he writes. Imagine him writing this. He has to get paper from Kanada, meaning from the place where the Nazis were pillaging the Jewish possessions. The people came with suitcases, and somebody smuggled for Leib Langfus a notebook and a pen. And he’s writing this in a notebook with a pen that was stolen, that was smuggled in for him. And he’s writing poetry! Every moment he’s in danger of death, and he’s writing high literature. This is incredible! “Their common, cruel fate joined in that cursed place the lyric notes of the two anthems so different from one another.” Meaning the Polish anthem and the Jewish anthem. “Movingly and heartily, they expressed their last emotions and their consolation in the hope of their peoples’ future.” That’s a play on words with Hatikvah, obviously. Meaning, the Jewish national anthem means, “the hope”. “The gas was thrown into the bunker. They passed away in the midst of their song, borne on the wings of a dream of brotherhood and a better world.” I could sit down with my computer, and I couldn’t write that well. And this guy is writing at night. If he’s caught, he’s going to be killed. He’s in danger every moment and he’s writing fine literature.

Hatikvah, “the hope,” the song, says, “As long as in the heart within a Jewish soul still yearns,” these are the words that were sung at Auschwitz, and they’re still sung today by the State of Israel. “Towards the end of the east an eye still gazes toward Zion, our hope is not yet lost, the two-thousand-year hope, to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” And the Jews are naked in the gas chamber and they’re singing about their hope. They have no hope, individually, but they know we, as a people, will have a hope. That’s what they’re singing about. The hope that God won’t forget us and as a people we will survive.

And one of the things you see in Leib Langfus’ diaries and his scrolls is these religious references to a miracle, the confession of these Catholic women in their prayer. And he actually talks quite a bit about Jewish confession, we call it the vidui. I think it’s important to talk about this because I read a lot of books and articles about the Scrolls of Auschwitz, and I couldn’t find anybody, at least in English, who talked about this. They glazed over this as if it was, "Yeah, before you die, you say a confession." Well, no, this is a deeply moving religious practice for Jews.

Langfus writes in The Particulars, “End of summer 1943. This was a transport of Jews from Tarnow. They inquired where they were being taken. They were told they would be liquidated,” meaning murdered. “They were already standing naked. A heavy, serious mood overtook them. They became lost in thought and whispered the Confession,” the Vidui, “for the sins of the past. All their emotions had become dulled and only one thought stunned and electrified them; the need to take account of their souls before extinction.” Wow.

What is this vidui? What is this confession? This is part of the Jewish experience. On Yom Kippur, in the traditional prayer book, throughout the whole service of Yom Kippur, from the beginning in the evening to the following evening, 25 hours later, there are 11 recitations of the Vidui, of the confession. And it’s a formula, it’s a formula I can recite some of by heart even though I haven’t recited it in a synagogue in decades. “Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, dibarnu dofi…” Why do I beat my chest? Because this is what you do when you recite the confession.

This is what is says in English, “We are not so arrogant and stubborn as to declare before Thee that we are wholly righteous and without sin. Surely we have sinned. We have offended, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken basely, we have been devious, we have been mean, we have been arrogant, we have been violent, we have been false…” and on, and on, and on, every sin you can imagine. You may not have individually done that, but someone has done that, and we’re asking God to forgive our sins, “We have turned away from Your goodly commandments…”

This actually appears in the Gospel of Luke, a reference to the Vidui, to the confession. Luke 18:9-14, “Two men went up to the Temple to pray,” this is a parable of Yeshua, “one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves,’” they’re beating their chest saying, “‘thieves, rogues, adulterers.” That’s what they’re beating their chest saying. “I might beat my chest, but I know that I'm not like them. I’ve never done any sins, I’m good.” “‘Or even like this tax collector.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast.” 2,000 years we've been doing the same thing. When I first read this in the New Testament, I’m like, “Yeah, that's what I do every Yom Kippur in the synagogue.” “He beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”

So, imagine, this was being done 2,000 years ago by Jews, this confession, this Vidui. And it appears in Auschwitz, in the diaries of Leib Langfus. “The two Hungarian Jews asked the Sonderkommando: ‘Should we say the Vidui, the confession?’ He replied in the affirmative. They then pulled out bottles of brandy and drank happily, raising their bottles in a toast to l'chaim, to life.” Which I can’t say I entirely understand, but maybe they at least knew what was going to happen to them. They had been living in terror thinking they were maybe going to die at any moment, wouldn’t know if they’d live or die. And they must have been Chassidim. I don’t say that even jokingly. Like, that’s a very Chassidic thing to do, I think, in some respects.

“The Sonderkommando became very emotional and burst out weeping. He ran into the crematorium and sobbed bitterly for a long time: ‘We have burned enough Jews. Let us destroy everything, and ourselves as well, for the sanctification of the Name, Kiddush Hashem.’” And that’s a theme that we’re going to see again, this sanctification of the Name. There are these themes that are weaved throughout these Auschwitz documents.

Let’s get to the Shema Yisrael, that’s what we were looking for. “Passover 1944,” this is the actual source that I saw years ago at Yad Vashem. This is the actual account. “Pesach 1944. A transport arrived from Vittel in France, including several Jewish notables. One of them was the rabbi of Bayon, the late Rabbi Moshe Friedman. He had been one of the great Jewish scholars of Poland, a truly rare patriarchal figure.”

Who is this, Moshe Friedman? This is him; he was a beloved rabbi in Poland. He was one of the leading rabbis in Poland. They called him Moshenu, our Moshe”, “our Moses”. He was known as the Boyaner Rebbe. He was a Chassidic Rebbe; a Chassidic leading rabbi of a denomination called the Boyaner. But everybody loved Rabbi Moshe in Poland, all branches of Jews. He was really a unifying figure. And just so you understand, I didn’t know who this was. But I looked into who this was, and just to give you a comparison… God forbid may it never happen. But imagine if there was a Holocaust today, and you’re a Sonderkommando, and all of a sudden, a group arrives, let’s say 10 years ago, and standing there naked before you, stripped, about to be sent into the gas chamber is Billy Graham. That’s the stature of this rabbi in Poland at the time.

So, Rabbi Leib Langfus, from a little town in Poland, sees this man and he can’t even believe it. It’s Moshenu standing before us. “Rabbi Moshe undressed along with everyone else. He then addressed the Oberscharfuhrer,” that’s the SS commander, “holding on to the lapel of his coat, he spoke to him in German: ‘Do not think that you will succeed in destroying the Jewish people. The Jewish people will live forever. The innocent blood you have spilled will be demanded of you.’ He spoke with great emotion and great strength. Then when he had finished, he put on his hat.”

I’m going to stop here for a second. The hat is the symbol of a rabbi, the big black hat. The man is standing there naked, and he puts on his hat. That’s really significant. “And in great excitement he called out ‘Shema Yisrael!’ And all the Jews faithfully responded with him ‘Shema Yisrael!’ out of a sense of profound faith which had surrounded them in the last moments of their lives. It was a moment of supreme elevation, such as may be encountered but once in a lifetime, proving the eternal nature of Jewish spiritual experience.”

So, when I started this research, I began with critical thinking. I was skeptical, and it was right for me to be skeptical. But I found out this was real, this really happened, and it was recorded by an eyewitness. It was recorded by an eyewitness who didn’t survive, who wrote down what happened. And those who did survive went back to look for some of these documents. This one turned up in 1952.

What I really wanted to do is find not just the translation, I found the English translation of the document, I found the Yiddish original, printed in a book in Israel in 1972. I wanted to see the original handwritten document, the autograph. “Autograph” in a manuscript means the one written by hand by the original author.

And there was a book written in 2015 about the Scrolls of Auschwitz. It’s called something like Understanding the Scrolls of Auschwitz, and they referred to this as a lost scroll. They said it was missing. It was discovered in Poland, and it was in a museum in Poland, and nobody knew where it was. I found it. And I actually contacted the authors. They said, “Yeah, we found it too, after we wrote the book.” It’s at Yad Vashem in Israel. And what apparently happened was the head of the Jewish Museum in Warsaw was experiencing persecution for being a Jew in 1968, in Poland, persecution at the hands of the communists. So he went to Israel, and apparently, he stuck this in his luggage and brought it with him.

And this is it. This is the actual document which is on the website of Yad Vashem, Israel’s National Holocaust Museum. And this is the passage where it says in Hebrew, “Shema Yisrael”, and again, “Shema Yisrael”, “Hear O Israel”. Now, it’s in Yiddish, and I don’t read Yiddish, but I can make out some of the words from what I learned from my grandmother, very little Yiddish.

And what’s really moving to me, in a sense, and in many ways, is these words here. Translated into English, “He said it with great excitement,” in the Yiddish it’s, “gevaltika hitlahavus,” hitlahavut is a Hebrew word. Yiddish had many Hebrew words. “Gevaltika,” have you ever hear Jews say, “Oy vey, gevalt?” “Gevalt” means “with intensity”. So, “gevaltika hitlahavus,” hitlahavut is from the word lahav, which is “a flame of fire”, and hitlahavut means “a burning excitement”, that’s the best way to describe it, “a flaming excitement”. He didn’t just say “Shema Yisrael,” he said, “SHEMA YISRAEL!” And the Jews responded “SHEMA YISRAEL!” as they were going to their deaths.

So, this sounded like it was this archetypal martyrdom story, but it turned out it really happened. And it was recorded not decades later by somebody trying to reshape history, but by somebody in the thick of the events who knew he was going to die! And knew he had to leave a legacy of what happened, to document the history of what happened, of what the Nazis did and how the Jews behaved in the last moments before they died. That they still had faith in that moment in the Creator of the Universe. That they went to their deaths like Rabbi Akiva. That they went to their deaths like the Jews in the German Crusade of 1096, proclaiming the oneness of God, “Shema Yisrael!”

Now, I found this document, and I was very happy because I wanted it to be true. But if it wasn’t, I was fine with that too. And I found that it was true. What I didn’t know is there’s a second account of Shema Yisrael in the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Zalman Lewental, in the eighth cache discovered in 1962… he wrote this in 1944, presumably. Now, here a lot of it is missing because it was found so late and it was damaged by water, so that’s what those dashes are. We don’t know the blanks; we can’t fill them in. And he’s describing his first few nights in Auschwitz, when he's separated from his family when they got off the train. And he’s thinking, “We’ll be allowed to see them every Sunday. There’s rumors going around that maybe we’ll see them once a month, our family.” And then he’s thrown into a bunk and told, “No. Your family's dead.” And he’s like, “They’re messing with us, right? You're telling me my family is dead. We came here to work. Why would they kill people? My wife could do some work… that can’t be true!” And then they find out it is true.

“The screams were still heard; slowly became weaker. The people were killed. The half who could not get into the bunker,” remember, they sometimes were at over capacity, and they cut the selection of people in half; half went to the gas chamber, half waited. So, these are the half that waited. “The half who could not get into the bunker remained sitting naked in the wooden barracks. A strong winter cold – listened to the screams and cries of those who – and with a cry of ‘Shema Yisrael’ on their lips and how they became silent and were killed.”

The last words of faith on these peoples' lips as they died, not just this rabbi and this one group of people. This probably happened tens of thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times, that the Jews, as they were being gassed in the chambers and shot in other places, they would recite Shema Yisrael, “Hear O Israel”.

Now we talked about Kiddush Hashem, the “sanctification of the Name”, and that was something that we hear particularly from Leib Langfus. He talks about that quite a bit. And look, I’ve done a lot of research on the name of God, so it’s something near to my heart and dear to me. And when I saw this, I was very moved. That there was a self-awareness that, when they were being killed and murdered by the Nazis, it was an act of sanctifying God’s holy name.

Now, Leib Langfus was expelled in 1942, and we actually have a photo of the event, which is unbelievable! He wrote a document describing how he was expelled from his hometown where he was the rabbi, and we have a photo of that expulsion. He may be one of the men in this photo, we don’t know. We don’t have a photo to identify Leib Langfus. This was before Facebook. He wrote a document called The Deportation that was discovered in 1945 and kept in an attic until 1970. And he describes, when the Jews were gathered in his town of Makow, Makova, how they were told by the Germans they were going to be taken for a work detail in the east. “We’re not going to kill you; we’re just going to take you to work. Jews don’t work. We’re going to take you to work, put you to work for the war effort.” And the people in the town are talking, “What’s happening? What do we do?”

“The most moving and bravest of the speakers was the last, the dayan of Makow.” Here he’s referring to himself in third person, which is quite interesting. “He dealt with the subject with complete frankness, warning against illusions and unwillingness to believe: people should be ready and prepared for the fact that they were taking us to an inevitable death. When leaving their houses, they should say farewell to all their nearest… to their wives, to their children. We were all going to lay down our lives for Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of the Name of God.”

And this is incredible, that this is a concept that first appears in Leviticus. It’s something that’s emphasized in Ezekiel, that through the way you behave, through your actions, you can sanctify God’s name. You can also desecrate His name if you’re a bad person. And what does that mean, to sanctify His name? Everyone looks upon you and says, “This is a decent man.” Or you sin and live a life of sin and people look upon you and say, “Oh, those people who worship the God of Israel, that’s how they act,” that’s a desecration of God’s name. And people who were martyred, who were murdered for the very fact of being Jews, were described as dying for Kiddush Hashem, for “the sanctification of the Name”.

And I’ve got to emphasize this point. I didn’t see this in the English literature; it’s discussed extensively in the Hebrew literature, that this was actually a question the rabbis asked. They said, “Up until now, when we talked about sanctification of the Name, what we meant was the Gentiles came to us and said, ‘Convert to Islam or we’ll kill you’, ‘Convert to Catholicism or we’ll kill you.’” And if the Jew said no and he was killed, that was the sanctification of the Name.

In the Holocaust, they didn’t give them a choice; they just killed them for being Jews. And not only didn’t they give them the choice, they rounded up thousands of Christians whose grandparents had been Jews. There were Jews who converted to Christianity and married other Christians, and they had children, and they had children. To the Nazis those were all Jews who needed to be killed.

And the rabbis said, “Look, they’re not only killing us for our faith, they’re killing the people, who from our perspective, left our faith. Is that Kiddush Hashem? When a Jew who converted to Christianity is killed for being a Jew?” And they decided it is. Because the man is being killed, or the woman is being killed, for the very fact that he’s a Jew. Not out of his choice, but simply that he’s a Jew. He’s being killed, and that is a sanctification of God’s holy name.

In The Particulars, Leib Langfus writes, “Among the transports arriving from Bedzin and Sosnowiec was an old rabbi. As residents of the immediate vicinity, the deportees knew that they were being taken to their death. The rabbi entered the dressing room in the bunker singing and dancing. He was privileged to die for Kiddush Hashem.” I don’t have words for this. If you told me this story and didn’t tell me the source, I’d say, “Yeah, I don’t believe it.” I wouldn’t believe something like that. It’s too much of a martyr story! It’s the story of Rabbi Akiva! He’s reciting the Shema while he’s being skinned alive! How can that be? Nobody does that! He’s screaming for his life! He’s not thinking about God! And these Jews went to their death joyous, some of them, for Kiddush Hashem, to sanctify God’s holy name.

I found an amazing document. It was written in 1963 and it’s about a rabbi who’s telling the story of what happened on October 29, 1941. He was in the Kovno Ghetto. Kovno was the second major Jewish city in Lithuania; today it’s called Kaunas. And on October 29th, there was an event that the Jews called the Great Action at something called the Ninth Fort; 2,007 men were murdered, shot to death, 2,920 women, and 4,273 children.

Now, the Jews are waiting for the selection. There’s 30,000 Jews; they didn't know who's going to be selected for death. It turns out about a third of the Jews were selected for death. They figured, “Well, you can’t work. We’re going to kill you.” Or “We don’t like the look of your face. We’re going to kill you.” For whatever reason they selected those people. There was an old rabbi there who came over to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, and he said, “Look, I know I’m not going to make it through the day. I can’t work, I’m a sick old man. I know I’m going to die, and I’m dying for Kiddush Hashem.”

Now, in Rabbinical Judaism every act of serving God is sanctified through a blessing. When you eat an apple, you say a blessing, “Baruch atah Adonai borei pri ha’etz”. When you eat a potato, you say, “boray pri ha’adamah”. When you drink a cup of water, you say a different blessing. Every sacred act can be sanctified to God. And this rabbi comes to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, this old rabbi from Poland, he says, “I know I’m going to die today. What’s the blessing over the sanctification of the Name?” That’s his thought hours before death! And the man died that day. And Rabbi Oshry wrote in 1963. He tells the story, and he gives the answer that he gave to that rabbi. The rabbi knew he was going to die, “We don’t know if that man is going to live or not, but I’m an old man. I’m sick. No way they don’t pick me.” And they picked him. He died.

He tells the story here on page 29 of his book, Mi’Ma’amakim, and this is the prayer. “Blessed art Thou Lord, King of the Universe, who sanctified us with His commandments, commanding us to love the awesome and honorable name of the One Who Is, and the One Who Was, and the One Who in the Future Will Be, with all our heart and all our soul, to sanctify His Name in public. Blessed art Thou, o Lord, who sanctifies Your name in public. Afterwards he will say Shema Yisrael and then deliver his neck for sanctification of the Name.” This is the ruling that Rabbi Oshry related based on an earlier ruling of a rabbi in the 16th century, which we’ll see in a minute. So, there was an actual blessing.

So, when we read about the sanctification of the Name, this isn’t some abstract concept. Leib Langfus was a rabbi, a dayan, he knew what he was talking about. I don’t know if he said these exact words, but they said something like this. They were proclaiming the sanctification of God’s name and the meaning of God’s name, because what is that statement, “the One Who Is, and the One Who Was, and the One Who in the Future Will Be”? That’s actually the meaning of God’s name.

Every Jew knows this from Adon Olam. It’s a prayer that’s recited by virtually every Jewish community in the world. This is from the Sephardic community of Constantinople 1863 but open any prayer book and they have this prayer. It’s, “Adon olam asher malach,” that’s the tune I learned growing up. Many people know the Israeli tune from Uzi Hitman from 1976. That’s much more popular today, but I’ll sing the one I learned. “B’terem kol yetzir nivra, l’et na’asah b’cheftzo kol, azay melech shemo nikra, v’acharei kichlot hakol, levado yimloch nora, v’hu hayah, v’hu hoveh, v’hu yihyeh b’tif'arah.” Which means, “And He is He who was, and He is He who is, and He is He who will be”. The exact words that we see in the prayer of the sanctification of the Name.

In the 12th century there was a rabbi named Yoseph Bechor Shor, and he writes in his commentary on Exodus 3:14, “This the meaning of the name: Hoveh, (He is), Hayah, (He was), and Yihyeh (He will be).” Now what are they saying here? And I have a much longer teaching on this called The Great ‘I AM’ Revealed, I’ll just give you the short version. There are three Hebrew forms of the verb, “to be” - Hayah, Hoveh, and Yihyeh, “He who was, He who is, He who will be”. When you take them together and combine them into a single word, you get the name of the God of Israel that appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the Tanakh, 6,827 times, the name Yehovah. You not only get that name, you get it with its pronunciation.

And when they recited that prayer before they went to their deaths, they knew what God’s name was. They knew it was Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and whether they knew the pronunciation or not, they knew the meaning of the name was “He who was, He who is, and He who will be”, Hayah, Hoveh, Yihyeh.

This actually appears in the Book of Revelation, and I bring this only to show that this continues as a thought in Jewish culture going back to the 1st century AD. And in my teaching, The Great ‘I AM’ Revealed, I bring other Jewish sources from outside the New Testament. I bring the Targum for example, that shows this is in Jewish culture. But it goes back 2,000 years, all the way from the 1st century, in the Book of Revelation and the Targum and other sources, through to the 20th century in Auschwitz. That’s incredible. I was talking to this scholar, and he said, “Well, that’s just the folk explanation of the name.” I said, “If so, it’s a very persistent one.”

“And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.’” Which is Hayah, Hoveh, Yihyeh, and it appears five times, with some variations, in the Book of Revelation. And like I said, it appears in other Jewish sources, and then we find it as the prayer over the sanctification of the Name, or part of that prayer, in the Holocaust. And why is that prayer being recited? Because it’s the meaning of the Name! And while you’re sanctifying the Name, it is appropriate to proclaim the meaning of that name, and in a coded way to proclaim what that name is.

There was a rabbi in 1723 who wrote a book, his name was Rabbi Joseph Hahn. And he’s quoting from an earlier rabbi named Josel of Rosheim in the 16th century. And this is actually the source of Rabbi Oshry’s prayer, of his blessing over the sanctification of the Name. This was a period in Germany when there were martyrdoms; it wasn’t an unusual event. “When a persecution takes place, let him say the confession.” And what’s interesting about this is, this is the expanded version. Rabbi Oshry gives us the short version.

Rabbi Joseph Hahn explains the Scrolls of Auschwitz and what the dayan of Makow, Leib Langfus, was talking about! He has all these references to this, but people miss it because they don’t know the Jewish context of the Scrolls of Auschwitz! You’d think you would know that. You’d think it would be important.

“When a persecution takes place, let him say the vidui,” the confession, and then he gives you a short version of the confession. You know what it is because you say it 11 times on Yom Kippur. He doesn’t need to waste ink on it. “‘My God and God of my fathers, Ashamti, bagadati, I have sinned, I have offended, I have betrayed. Behold, the time has come for my life to be taken from me and to deliver it into Your hand for Kiddush Hashem, for the sanctification of your unique Name…’”

That’s quite interesting; it says, “your unique Name”. The “unique Name” is one of the titles of the Tetragrammaton. In English we say Tetragrammaton to refer to the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, the four-letter holy name of God. In Jewish literature they call it the Shem Ha’meforash, “the explicit”, or “unequivocal name”, or often they call it Shem Ha’meyuchad, “the unique name”. Why the unique name? Well, the thought of the rabbis was that any angel or deity can be called "god." Moses is called a god. The gods of the pagans were called gods. Anybody can be called lord. There’s only one that can be called Yehovah, and therefore that’s His unique name.

The instruction goes on, of Rabbi Joseph Hahn, according to Josel of Rosheim. “At his end, let him say in accordance with the joy of Rabbi Akiva, to fulfill the verse, ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.’” That’s the second verse of the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:5. This is the actual blessing, “‘Blessed art Thou Lord, King of the Universe, who sanctified us with His commandments, commanding us to love the awesome and honorable name of the One Who Is, and the One Who Was, and the One Who in the Future Will Be… Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu Adoni Echad.’ With these words in his mouth let the persecuted person deliver his life for Kiddush Hashem, for the sanctification of His Blessed Name.”

And what you see here in Joseph Hahn’s passage quoting from Josel of Rosheim, which then in the Holocaust is actually implemented, are five elements that we actually see in the Scrolls of Auschwitz! And I feel like they unlock the Scrolls of Auschwitz in a way that I haven’t seen other scholars do because they’re not looking at it from the perspective of the faith of the people that actually went through this.

There’s the Vidui, the confession; Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of the Name. There’s the meaning of the name, Hayah, Hoveh, Yihyeh, “The One Who Was, the One Who Is, the One Who Will Be.” There’s Deuteronomy 6:5, “V’ahavta et Yehovah Elohecha b’chol levavcha u’v’chol nafshecha u’v’chol me'odecha”, “And you shall love the Lord, your God,” which is not just some vague statement. What they’re thinking about when they say that is the part with all your soul, which means your life, “Put your money where your mouth is or your soul where your faith is.” And then, as they’re dying, "Shema Yisrael." Everyone please stand.

Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us here today to learn about the history of Your people who suffered persecution. And Father, when they suffered persecution, they didn’t go to their deaths boldly, they went to their deaths acknowledging their sin. Father, they went to their deaths for the sanctification of Your Name. Father, they went to their deaths proclaiming Hayah, Hoveh, Yihyeh, the meaning of Your name, they went to their deaths proclaiming their love for You, expressed through giving up their lives. And finally, their last words on their breath before they died were, “Shema Yisrael Yehovah Eloheinu Yehovah Echad.”

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!


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  • Eric Sperger says:

    I consider myself pretty well read on WWII death camps but have never heard of the Auschwitz Scrolls. It’s hard to hold back the tears. Thank you for sharing this-may we never forget.

  • Rae Lloyd-Jones says:

    Nehemia, can I ask you something about the Sanctification of The Name in how one lives and dies, in relation to a New Testament Manuscript of Revelation, from the Cambridge University Library? I edit for an author (who you know) who is currently working on/provenancing Renewed Covenant manuscripts/writings in Hebrew. In the manuscript I am looking at, CUL Ms. Oo 1.16, at Revelation 14:13, which differs somewhat from our Greek/English translations, it says in the Hebrew, and this is a transcription from the Cochin letter forms into modern block Hebrew: קדושים המה המתים על קידוש השם מעכשיו ואמת
    I was working through this CUL Ms. Oo 1.16 transcription today, and when I came across Rev.14:13, I remembered your presentation on the Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz – I remembered you talking about this very Hebrew/Jewish concept of Sanctifying God’s Name in the manner of one’s death.
    I am not a Hebrew scholar, I have struggled for years to learn Torah-Hebrew – even though I have tried so hard, so I am still unfortunately reliant on people who know more than me. I just want to know, is THAT what THIS verse in the Cambridge manuscript of Revelation, 14:13, is talking about? That this is the hope of the set-apart ones, those who walk in the mitzvot of Yehovah and look to Messiah’s coming, and kiddush HaShem at their death? That certainly makes more sense to me, in a concrete way, than what we have in our Greek-to-English translations, “blessed are the dead that die in the lord”. The verse reads like this, from the CUL manuscript, in my friend’s translation, “Blessed are they who die on account of the sanctification of the Name from now on! And what the Ruach says is true: that they rest from their works, for their works follow after them”.
    Looking forward to your thoughts.
    Rae
    Australia

  • Paul Case says:

    We should NOT say ‘kill the Jews’.
    We should NOT say ‘Nuke Iran’.

  • Jean Ellis says:

    Free speech is still under attack.

  • rich Armentrout says:

    This was fascinating and powerful and so necessary to be shared. Please make this available to everyone. We are still uncovering the truth that happened while many are trying to cover this truth up and rewrite history. Thank you so much for your tenacity and dedication to finding truth. May YAH continue to bless you and surround you with HIS favor as with a shield ????.

  • Linda Sack says:

    Nehemia, this is powerful and so important. Thank you for your service to YaH, it impacts so many lives and mine especially.
    I went to Yad Vashem a couple times and looked for family names. My grandfather’s name was Saccutto, but he used to tell me stories of how their family suffered persecution in Portugal and they fled to Holland way back in the day of the edict of 1492. They eventually ended up in Italy.
    He said many changed the spelling of their names to avoid being recognized as Jews. Zacuto was possibly the name to begin with. Or even Succoth. One family member changed it to Sancto to sound Catholic.
    When my grand mom had her first child the mid-wife gave my grandfather a paper to bring to the court and register the birth. They couldn’t make out her writing so they shortened it to Sack. He was told to bring this paper when any other children were born. So all the children were Sack and he and my grand mom remained Saccutti. ( Which they messed up as well and altered it from Saccutto to Saccutti.) What a travesty.

  • Cyndie Simmons says:

    Thank you Nehemia for sharing this incredibly painful past history, especially during our times when people are trying to deny the Holocaust ever existed and erase history. My aunt Lucy was a little girl when her family went into Auschwitz and to this day she cannot talk about it. I so appreciate all you share with the world! May יהוה Yehôvâh continue to bless all the work of your hands my friend!!

  • Debra Wilcox says:

    Oh my! This moved me, profoundly! I know that the Holocaust was real, as I know that genocide is real, as well as, apartheid. People can pretend that history does not repeat itself. But, it does and will…if good men, women and children don’t stand up against evil. Thanks, Nehemia, for the history lesson. Thanks too for reminding us to stand for TRUTH! Thanks for reminding me to love God… The Eternal …Yehovah with every fiber of my being, not just in the good times but, particularly, in the hard, bad and life-threatening times! Shalom.

    • Debra Wilcox says:

      By the way, I stand up for America and Israel. My dad served during WWII in the Army’s 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion and was apart of the liberating forces of Dachau. My mother’s uncles and her father served in the Army, too. Truth! I know the real history that is never taught in schools…like your talk about the Lost Scrolls of Auswitz.

  • Roni Walters says:

    While sections of this were difficult and almost unbearable, they need to be taught. I shed many tears watching it.

    One thing I like about being a homeschooler is I can teach history as fact. The holocaust and its atrocities aren’t some made-up event, but actual, documented, provable truth. Thank you for this teaching. I’ll be adding it to our curriculum. And I’ll make sure we have a box or two of tissues handy.

    Blessings on you and Makor Foundation!

  • Oscar Hernandez says:

    I’m not a Jew (that I know of) but I openly wept through this podcast. I find it hard to type as my hands are still wet with tears.
    John’s gospel also records when Yeshua informed Simon Kefa by which death he would glorify God. An explicit kiddush HaShem in the first century.

  • Jay Baxtresser says:

    Shema Isreal!!!May His name be sanctified!!!

  • Joann Marie says:

    I am glad I watched this. I noticed you mentioned having Aspergers and being obsessed with the truth… those things are true of me as well. Thank you for all you do to bring truth to whoever will listen…

  • Pam Drobny says:

    Nehemiah, I share your intense concern over why this is not being taught in our schools and universities. Rather the opposite- filling minds with propaganda laden with lies. This was profound on so many levels. Thank you. I finished reading “Gated Grief” by Leila Levinson. The daughter of a GI concentration camp liberator discovers a legacy of trauma. She knew nothing of her father’s experience until she found letters in a basement trunk. Filled with photographs and notes from Nordhausen. More proof of the horror.
    Bless you, Nehemiah.

  • Maria Tuckey says:

    I am amazed that Yehovah continually reveals more history confirming the truth of the past even as more people are denying that the Holocaust even happened. Thank you for your part in uncovering these discoveries and sharing them with us. This is a warning, an enlightening and a reminder to repent and be ready to stand for truth and Yehovah’s name regardless of what it may cost us…even unto death.

  • Glenn Chase says:

    Powerful! ” Nehemia” this is the Reason we support your effort’s.
    I guess I don’t have the word’s to express the need to uncover the Info still at large!
    My Wife has from the first time we experienced your teaching, Said Nehemiah is truly called out by Ya Ho Vah and I must Agree!
    Truly a Revelation of the History of Gods Chosen! Truth will always prevail.
    GREAT MESSAGE– Thank You

  • Samuel Bell says:

    My wife watched as soon as it was published, then she encouraged us to listen together. Powerful, incredible, full of information and inspiration! The whole world needs to know!

    Sam

  • Guillermo Guerrero says:

    Thanks Nehemia… excellent as always!! May Yehovah bless you!

  • John WIckes says:

    Nehemia, I’m only at the 16 min mark, this is too powerful to be support team only…
    Thank you
    Blessings

  • Pam Drobny says:

    Tearful. Faith inspiring. Wake up call to America and our world….never again! Use every opportunity to speak out against antisemitism. Sanctify His Name. Thank you Nehemia.

  • Rocky Jackson says:

    Having the privilege to actually meet two living Holocaust survivors changed my life forever,
    Hearing this message on top of what a very elderly man seemly out of nowhere tells me what happened to him at 17 ..
    Along with the testimony of a woman who survived with her aunt as a child whom her family was murdered.
    It begs me to ask myself this question am I going to be found with the faith to sing the Shema in the midst of my last moments of life.

  • Laurie Giesler says:

    Amazing, saddening, inspiring … so many emotions!

  • Daniel Diegmann says:

    On one hand, my heart bleeds, on the other hand, I see purpose, for warning and soberness with what may come again. Not only, “Never again” but also, “Not, on my watch.” May YeHoVaH, keep an guard His people in the Land and outside His Capital throughout His globe.

  • Valerica Lunde says:

    Toda, Nehemia Gordon! This is very sad. Thank you for sharing the truth with us! You are a good speaker and a good writer.

  • Daniel and Elissa Galusha says:

    Nehemiah, you were so informative, with details that needed revealing. Seems it’s 1933 all over again. P. S. we miss you up here in North West. Dan & Elissa

  • Jodie O'Dell says:

    Wowzers. This episode was enthralling, and I think I cried several times. I felt like I was there. I can’t waot to share it with my family. Thank you, Nehemia, for bringing these stories. We need to know!

  • Roxanne Lane says:

    Thank you Nehemia. May Yehovah bless you and keep you in all your endeavors.

  • Marcella Wilson says:

    I have known the general stories of the Holocaust, but I did not know the details you revealed. It is both awful and inspiring.Thank you for giving voice to their suffering and triumphs.

    Will anyone ever attempt to recover the other lost scrolls? Don’t their stories and records deserve to be uncovered and told? Isn’t it time?

  • Kirk and Sandra Iventosch says:

    My heart is broken anew. Thank you Nehemia. To die for the sanctification of His Name, this I can do. But to live for it? This you do.

  • Kimberly Keyes says:

    Wow! I don’t even know what to say. Very touching, sad, encouraging, all at the same time. Thank you. There is no way I would have learned of this if not for you sharing it. May Yehovah bless you for your obedience to bring the knowledge you have been given to the nations.

  • Alexander Kuvshinov says:

    Thank you for sharing, Nehemia.

    I live and pray in hope that martyrdom is not the only way to sanctify Yehovah.

    2 Peter 3:9
    The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness; but is patient with us, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance

    Shalom

  • Devorah Shaltiel says:

    Nehemia, Yehovah is sending us warnings and messages! Blessed is Yehovah who is a strong tower! It breaks my heart to hear that the Nazis laws on who is a Jew are more lenient than Rabbinical Halacha! Just think with genealogy and technology which was then in it’s infancy now moving on to perfection no one with a jewish grandparent is safe regardless of what religion they practice.

    For example Bnai Anousim are running home and the doors are being shut in their faces. It feels like our brothers are being sacrificed for the sake of peace plans and land partitions. Even the Negev is up for dispute. In order to frustrate the plan of Yehovah? Let Yehovah arise and His enemies be scattered!

    Nehemia, being a descendant of Caribbean Jews, I have felt the sense of urgency to return. We are coming in all colors and flavors. The price and sacrifice are very high. However, you would understand.

    You mentioned Iran. If Iran or any of our enemies fails to destroy Israel then it will try to depopulate with psychological pogroms and spiritual deception. Which is well on it’s way. We cannot afford to be naive and passive.

    I’m having trouble digesting the inquisition (Shabbos Police) but the Shoah is hard to swallow.

    So, I really appreciate this thought provoking and sensitive topic. You delivered the message with great precision and wisdom. May Yehovah bless and prosper you!

  • Karen Polcsik says:

    Thank you Nehemiah, for this information and sobering account. Everyone needs to hear this. In a world so obsessed with materialism, just the account alone of those who were stripped of their humanity and cruelly annihilated should be a wake up call for the complacent. Add to the fact that their statement of faith (the Shema), their confession, the meaning and sanctification of the Name of YHVH is so powerful that everyone, regardless of their faith background, should be brought to their knees. This has not been that long ago and these eye witness accounts are extraordinary. If only it was possible that more of the “scrolls” could be unearthed. Many blessings to you and your research. Thank you for searching for the truth and being so faithful.