Hineni: Visit to Buchenwald inspires defiance

          The following is a letter by Milwaukee Jewish Federation president and chief executive officer Hannah Rosenthal to her deceased father, Rabbi Frank F. Rosenthal, on the occasion of the trip Hannah and her family recently took to Europe.

          As we approach the High Holy Days, I remember you telling me how important it is to pay attention to and honor the concept of memory. As you were the only survivor of your family, I always knew it must be so painful to have to mourn everyone in your family — all of them murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

          I have tried to honor their memories, and regularly think about how different the world would be if they had lived. I worry if I have passed on the profound necessity for memory to my children without you here to help me.

          But an amazing thing happened this summer. Shira and Francie asked me to bring them to Germany and Poland — to trace your life, and honor the memory of the family we have never known. So of course I did.

          It was hard for the kids and their husbands to hear the stories — to go your old home, the school you learned in (now a market), see the pictures of the grand Beuthen synagogue where your father was rabbi and where you became a bar mitzvah, to go to the small museum about Pastor Herman Maass who helped save your life, to see where you were rabbi in Mannheim (also now a market), to visit every Holocaust memorial we could find — from Berlin to Auschwitz (also our family cemetery).

          But the most stunning moment was when we went to Buchenwald, the camp in which you were incarcerated. The kids felt it was the place they could be the most defiant.

          So we took a picture to memorialize it — and we held up a sign that says “HINENI,” I am here. Shira spoke of how they tried to wipe us out — but hineni, I am here. Francie, ever the archeologist, was looking on the ground for something, perhaps of your family to physically touch, saying hineni, I am here.

          And I stood there and realized that indeed I have passed on the importance of memory. Again, hineni, I am here to pass the torch, ever honoring the memory of family and the six million, I am here to help build a vibrant Jewish community, and perhaps I am here to help ensure that “never again” has real meaning.

Hannah