Ephraim Oshry, 89, a Scholar in Secret
During the Holocaust, Dies
By Douglas Martin -- Published October 5, 2003
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/nyregion/05OSHR.html
(Yiddish/Hebrew names of books
& places below were added by Yos'l.)
Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, whose interpretations of religious law helped
sustain Lithuanian Jews during Nazi occupation and were buried in tin
cans for retrieval and publication after the Holocaust, died on Sept.
28 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 89.
Rabbi Oshry was a young rabbinical scholar in Kaunas (Kovno, or Kovne
in Yiddish), the second-largest city in Lithuania, when the Nazis
invaded on June 23, 1941.
After the city's Jews were herded into the ghetto, the Nazis made him
custodian of the warehouse where Jewish books were stored for a planned
exhibit of "artifacts of the extinct Jewish race." Rabbi Oshry used
them to make interpretations of religious law, traditionally called
responsa ("Shaylos
U-T'shuvos"), to help people continue to live as Jews in seemingly
impossible circumstances.
Could a penniless widow remove gold from her murdered husband's teeth?
Rabbi Oshry said no, because it would be a desecration of his corpse.
Could one perform a Caesarean section on a dead woman? The rabbi said
that "when saving a life is involved," avoiding the desecration of the
dead is of lower priority.
But he determined that even to save his life, a Jew could not buy a
Christian baptism certificate, and he said a Jew had no right to commit
suicide.
Rabbi Oshry did more than bring centuries of rabbinical precedent to
his judgments on questions of observance. He held secret nightly
worship services in various hideouts and helped people maintain Jewish
practices, including continuing to bake matzos under the threat of
death.
Indeed, he saw the persistence of Jewish life as the highest kind of
resistance against the Nazis. Many Jews might not survive, he said, but
Judaism would.
"One resists with a gun," the rabbi said in an interview with The New
York Times in 1975, "another with his soul."
Rabbi Oshry's mother and two sisters died in the Holocaust. He is
survived by his wife, Fraida; his daughters, Chana Weinstock of
Brooklyn, Chaya Greenberg of Monsey, N.Y., and Leah Greenbaum of
Brooklyn; his sons, Moshe, of Israel, Dov, of Brooklyn, Jacob, of
Monsey, Zelig, of Brooklyn, Yisroel, of Brooklyn, and Yehuda, of
Monsey; and 40 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren.
After three and a half years of Nazi occupation, Soviet troops
liberated the Jews in the ghetto of Kaunas (Kovno). Rabbi Oshry took 65
children on a circuitous route to Rome, gathering more along the way.
There he set up a yeshiva in a large villa donated by an Italian Jew.
He moved to Montreal, where he set up another religious school, and
finally to New York, where in 1952 he became rabbi of the Beth
Hamedrash
Hagadol on the Lower East Side.
At first, more than 1,000 people a day came to services at the
synagogue, one of the city's oldest. Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum, who
succeeds him as rabbi, said that congregants had dwindled, as many aged
and moved elsewhere, but Rabbi Oshry worked tirelessly to keep the
synagogue going.
About 15 years ago, Rabbi Oshry established a yeshiva for gifted boys
from 14 to 17 years old in Monsey, N.Y.
Rabbi Oshry was born in August 1914 in the town of Kupishok (Kupiskis
in Lithuanian), near the
city of Ponevezh (Panevezys), in north central Lithuania. His father
died when he
was 11. He studied with legendary rabbis at the Slobodka yeshiva, which
was widely known in the world of Jewish scholarship.
During the occupation, he carefully recorded the questions of
Lithuanian Jews as well as his responses, writing them on bits of paper
torn from cement sacks he carried on forced labor and burying them in
tin cans.
He dug up the cans after he was freed and began writing out his notes
when he reached Rome. He continued for years, taking care to cite the
precise history of rabbinical opinion behind each decision.
Such responsa have been part of the Jewish tradition for about a
thousand years, with more than 250,000 decisions recorded. The
Holocaust brought up many new and exceedingly difficult questions that
many rabbis struggled to answer, though probably few with more personal
experience than Rabbi Oshry.
He ended up writing five volumes of questions and answers ("Shay-los
U-T'shu-vos Mi-Ma-a-ma-kim"), which he published himself in five
volumes, one at a time, in Hebrew. In 1971, Volume 2 won the National
Jewish Book Award for best book on the Holocaust; in 1974, Volume 4
received the same honor. A book of excerpts in English was published by
Judaica Press.
Some questions had more relevance to life after the Holocaust. One
young woman asked if she could have the number tattooed on her arm by
the Nazis removed. Rabbi Oshry answered no, because it would erase a
memory of the great crime, which was exactly what the evildoers wanted.
The rabbi firmly believed that it was recorded memory that enabled the
Jews to persist spiritually. In his Yiddish book "Khurban Li-te" or
"Churban Lita" ("The
Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry"), he referred to the sum of holy
scripture as the Book, and wrote:
"Jews were somehow able to part with everything that defined their
place in life — home, business, job — but the one thing they could not
part with was the Book."
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