"These are now our children, the children of the entire Jewish nation"
On Asarah B’Teves 1945, thousands of people gathered in central Tel Aviv to pay homage to the memory of the six million kedoshim who had perished in the Holocaust. For the task of putting into words the collective sense of grief, longtime Tel Aviv mayor Israel Rokach chose Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rav.
“One would have to be the prophet Yirmiyahu to give expression to the heaviness that is in our hearts,” the Rav cried. “Who can describe the desolation of our people? Who can give voice to the sadness we feel?”
In that moving and dramatic eulogy, the Rav pointed out that mourning, weeping, and even lighting six million candles would hardly diminish the monumental loss.
“What we can do for their sake”, he cried out, “is to become fathers and mothers to the handful of children who have somehow survived this great tragedy. These are now our children, the children of the entire Jewish nation. Let us build homes for them — not mere orphanages, but family homes, parents’ homes, ‘batei avos,’ where all of us can be faithful and loving parents to these orphaned children.”
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