Sefirah? What’s Sefirah?    

T
he Pesach Yom Tov we recently celebrated afforded me the opportunity to daven Shacharis on Chol Hamoed in the shul of the Bostoner Rebbe shlita. I was an occasional mispallel there after my family moved to Brighton when I was all of seven years old. Looking around the shul I waxed nostalgic, taking in the sights: the same benches I had sat on more than half a century ago, the social hall where I bested a bochur a number of years my senior at the Pirchei table-hockey championships, and, of course, the matzah bakery where my father and the previous Rebbe zichronam livrachah baked matzos on Erev Pesach. Then, I took a long, hard stare at a plaque above the chazzan’s amud that, when I was a young child, seemed to be the most puzzling thing I had ever read. The simple marble slab reads, “In sacred remembrance of our six million brethren who were murdered during the Holocaust 1939–1945. Eretz al techasi damam.”

Gazing at this plaque brought back the memory of the first time I, a child of Holocaust survivors, saw it and wondered what it meant. Six million were murdered. Where? How? By whom? Holocaust? What’s a Holocaust?

I came home from shul and asked my mother what this was all about. Sure, I had heard about “the war” in the course of various conversations my mother had with her siblings — who had also established families, b’chasdei Hashem, in our neighborhood — as well as with my siblings and me. It was some mystical, otherworldly term that really had no concrete meaning to me. Until I saw the plaque. I still couldn’t comprehend the little bits of information I had heard, but now I knew it was bad, really bad.

Incredibly, conversation about this topic was uncommon when we were growing up. Many heroes of the she’eiris hapleitah chose to move forward and build new lives, leaving the horrors of their past behind them. Their children would be spared the graphic details, and would have the ability to lead blissfully innocent lives, such as mine.