The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors

New York, N.Y.: The Free Press, 1980. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Fair. xiii, [3], 266, [4] pages. DJ has wear, tears, chips and soiling. Red dot on top edge. Includes Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Afterword, Notes, Selected Bibliography, and Index. Chapters include The Religious Behavior of Holocaust Survivors; The Faith of Holocaust Survivors; The Meaning of the Holocaust; Seven Theological Questions; and An Afterword. Reeve Robert Brenner (born 1936) is an American Reform rabbi, inventor and author. Since his ordination at the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in 1964, he has been a U.S. Army chaplain stationed in West Germany, senior staff chaplain at the clinical center of The National Institutes of Health, and served a number of congregations. As the first rabbi on the faculty of St. Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, PA, he taught Jewish religious thought and philosophy. His first major work, American Jewry and the Rise of Nazism, received the YIVO Jewish Scholarship Prize. His book, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, is the result of nine years of research conducted among survivors in Israel in order to explore the ramifications of the Holocaust upon their own personal belief and practice as Jews. This book was a finalist for the 1981 National Jewish Book Awards. The research for this book inquires into the manifold dimensions of the meaning and import of the Holocaust, the Nazi massacre of Jews during World War II, for survivors. It is particularly concerned with the effects of the concentration camp experience on the religious beliefs and practices of Jewish survivors. To understand its religious impact, one thousand Holocaust survivors--concentration camp survivors and others who survived outside the camps--were contacted according to random sampling techniques for a representative cross-section of the survivor community. Lists of survivors were secured from various Halocaust-related institutions and organizations, including Jerusalem's prestigious Yad Vashem, The Tel-Aviv-based organization of Nazi victims, and Kibbutz Lochamei Haghettaot. From these, 708 were willing to cooperate and be interviewed; 608 were interviewed by mail, and 100 by personal interview. They were asked more than a hundred questions concerning their religious beliefs and practices, their thoughts and ideas, at the designated time periods before the war, during the war, immediately after the war, and today. The results have been tabulated and analyzed in this book. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors reveals the victims' frank and thought-provoking answers to searching questions about their experiences: Was the Holocaust God's will? Was there any meaning or purpose in the Holocaust? Was Israel worth the price six million had to pay? Did the experience in the death camps bring about an avowal of faith? A denial of God? A reaffirmation of religious belief? Did the Holocaust change beliefs about the coming of the Messiah, the Torah, the Jews as the chosen people, and the nature of God? Drawing on the responses of seven hundred survivors, Reeve Robert Brenner reveals the changes, rejections, reaffirmations, doubts, and despairs that have so profoundly affected the faith, practices, ideas, and attitudes of survivors, and, by extension, the entire Jewish people. Many survivors carried their deepest secrets and innermost beliefs silently, from internment to interment. But Brenner's quest provided the impetus for many survivors to end their silence about the past and come forth with their feelings. In poignant vignettes scattered throughout the book, their answers to these profound questions are offered, disclosing ardent, overpowering passions and sensibilities.