Are we sitting ducks just because our generation didn’t experience that level of suffering?
Like all of Abie’s lyrics, the words are perfect in their simplicity, plaintive and honest.
Sometimes, a levayah works out — meaning every single maspid speaks beautifully, appropriately, fittingly. The essence of the niftar is reflected in everything that is said. This was the case at a levayah I attended last week.
A pasuk was mentioned more than once: Vayamas Yosef v’chol echav v’chol hador hahu. We were taking leave of a Holocaust survivor, a Yid with numbers on his arm, and along with him, an entire generation.
On a sunny Thursday three weeks before Rosh Hashanah, a few hundred people contemplated the image of a 15-year-old boy from Grosswardein, all alone in the world, faced with the loss of his parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends, and the choices he made, on his own.
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