The Book And The Sword

A Life Of Learning In The Shadow Of Destruction

David Weiss Halivni

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367290405
• eBook ISBN: 9781000314946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

David Weiss Halivni emerges his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern printed form but as it was in its original form, the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages.

1
Before

My Life in Sighet

I do not remember when I came to Sighet for the first time to live with Grandfather. But I do remember what I was learning. I was learning Chumash, the Pentateuch, with Rashi's commentary, and that means I was about four years old. I lived with Grandfather, Rabbi Shaye Weiss, for more than ten years, until we were separated by Josef Mengele, in Auschwitz, when we both stood before him and he sent Grandfather to the right, to death, and me to the left, to struggle and hard labor.

Mother brought us to Sighet, a small town in northern Transylvania, Romania, after her marriage with Father broke up, after she had vainly protested Father's unorthodox means of making a livelihood—after a long time of cantankerous quarrels between them, which I remember well but was too young to understand. Later, I was told that the reason Mother brought us to Sighet was that she did not trust Father with my education. I was precocious, and Grandfather was a great Talmud scholar, while my father was not. But I do not think that this was the true reason, for at the age of four I had not shown any signs of such precociousness as would warrant the drastic move of abandoning house and family and bringing us all to Sighet.

We came to Sighet from Khust. I was not born in Khust but a few kilometers away in Kobolecka Poljana, then in Czechoslovakia, now in the Ukraine, either in 1928 or, most likely, in 1927. The confusion is due to my not having been registered at birth. I was born during the High Holy Day season and my parents waited to register me until they had more time. Thus, the Hebrew and the English dates of my birth do not coincide.

Father, called Zallel Wiederman (we went by the name of Weiss since we lived with Grandfather), followed a "wonder rabbi" by the name of Wiesel (a relative of my friend the writer Elie Wiesel). The wonder rabbi, so the story has it, suddenly began to perform miracles like healing the sick (the trademark of all miracle makers) and knowing the kosher or non-kosher status of a mezuzah (the piece of parchment containing scriptural passages that religious Jews attach to their doorposts) without unrolling it to see whether or not it was correctly written. Father became the rabbi's gabai, a kind of right-hand man, handling all his affairs. I was born in this wonder rabbi's house.

This poor rabbi, the story continues, lost his miracle-making powers just as suddenly as they had appeared, and people stopped visiting him. Father lost his livelihood and moved with the family to Khust, where I stayed for the next two or three years, until Mother brought us to live with Grandfather in Sighet. The wonder rabbi, too, left Kobolecka Poljana—for what destination nobody knew. He disappeared from the scene and was considered dead until he appeared in Sighet a year or so before our deportation to Auschwitz. He was paralyzed and moved in a wheelchair. He asked to see me, and I came. When he saw me, he was moved to tears. Was I the last confirmation of his former miraculous powers, the last residue of his glorious days, or did his tears portend the imminent destruction whose scope not even he could have imagined?

THE HOUSE to which Mother brought us in Sighet had many hardships. It was a house of poverty where bread was literally a rare commodity, where I slept on a straw sack. (I remember that when the straw had to be changed, usually before Passover, it was a struggle to acquire the money to change it.) Grandfather, who, as I mentioned, was a great scholar, was a Belzer chasid. There was only one other such chasid in the town of Sighet; the majority of the Jews were either Sigheter or Viznitser chasidim. So Grandfather was the "wrong chasid," and therefore, for many years, even though everyone recognized him as a scholar, he did not have an official position. Only later in his life did some members of the community council—particularly two: Beryl Landau and Shlomo Weiss—arrange for Grandfather to be given some support, albeit very meager, and ostensibly he was placed in charge of supervising the community schools, the kols chadorim, which meant that he visited them several times a week, spoke to the teachers, perhaps explained some difficult passages of the Talmud to them, got acquainted with the students, and suggested promotions. When I came to Sighet, I also became a student of one of Grandfather's schools.

The money that was given to Grandfather for this work was hardly sufficient for even a small family, and it was almost impossible to support a household that had suddenly increased by four new members—Mother, myself, and my two sisters. His was a household that already had two unmarried daughters in their late twenties, which at that time, of course, was considered beyond marriage-able age. Above all, in those regions, one had to have a considerable sum for a dowry to marry off a daughter, and Grandfather had not enough for a single daughter, let alone two. Now, with our being there as well, he had to worry about our day-to-day existence; he had neither the patience nor the opportunity to procure dowries, and the daughters remained unmarried.

The older of my two aunts, Channa Yitte, became desperate, I think, and got married but faced tragedy, which added more pain and tension in the house. She married a cousin, Yisroel Yehuda Katina, who was suffering, so it seems, from an inherited disease, which his family knew but Grandfather did not know when he arranged the marriage. There was some hint of trouble to come when Grandfather's brother, the grandfather of the chosen, the bridegroom, was not enthusiastic about the shidduch, the match. Only later did we understand that while he clearly could not come out against the marriage of his grandchild, he already knew the fatal nature of the disease. Yisroel Yehuda died when he was twenty-seven, leaving two orphans, a boy and a girl. For a while the two children and their mother lived with us, which made Grandfather's house even more crowded, and more edgy. Later, Channa Yitte moved in with her in-laws in a village close to Khust—and finally she perished in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Hitler took her because of her children, and they were gassed together. As a rule, mothers went with children.

The other sister, Ethel, stayed and never got married. Not being married, she had every reason to resent our presence in Grandfather's house, and as she occasionally disciplined me I was convinced that she disliked me especially. I remember that at age seven or eight, I found an outlet for my negative feelings toward this aunt. According to custom, during the reading of the Torah in the synagogue—or, more correctly, after completing a portion of the reading—a mi'sheberach is made, a prayer for someone's recovery from a sickness or some other supplication. I figured that it should work the other way, too—negatively. If you curse somebody or pray for that person's having a seizure, or some other misfortune, I surmised, that also would be achieved. And in my child's imagination, I thought that my aunt who disciplined me disliked me, and I used the occasion of the Torah reading to say a negative prayer against her. Only much later, when we arrived together on the ramp at Auschwitz, did I learn that this same Aunt Ethel did not in fact despise me but was deeply caring, and respectful of my learning.

In a sense, not being married was lucky for Ethel because she had no children, and when she arrived in Auschwitz with us she apparently survived the selection by Mengele only to die somewhere else in the concentration camps. I lost track of her and have never been able to find out what actually happened to her.

We were three siblings. One of my sisters, also called Channa Yitte, was three years older than I, and my other sister, Leitzu, was four years older. Leitzu suffered from something like cerebral palsy; I don't know exactly what it was. I remember that my mother told me that when my sister was little they had taken her to doctors in Vienna, but there was no hope for recovery. Her hands and feet were always curled and she could not straighten them out; she could not stand and could not grasp anything. She used to lie, all the time, on a bed with a sack cover, and her needs had to be attended to. She could not feed herself or perform any other everyday activities; but intellectually, she was superior. She knew several languages, knew exactly what was going on in the house, and participated in conversations with great intelligence. She liked it when someone held her hands—"smoothing," we called it, for when her hands were held she felt a sense of their being smooth. She particularly liked for me to come and sit with her and hold her hands. But her sickness added tension in the house and I suffered also, psychologically. I remember that she could go out only in a carriage, but the carriage had to be much bigger than a normal carriage for infants. When we went out in the street and I walked with her, children used to taunt her, saying, "Such a big girl, still in a carriage!" Leitzu was apparently already accustomed to this insult, but it pained me every time.

A lack of income, two girls unmarried, as well as my sister's sickness and the hatred that Mother instilled in us against Father, who was still living in another city, should have made life almost unbearable at home. Yet when I recall my childhood, I would say that it was not an unpleasant one—for I took to learning, and learning took to me.

I was considered a child prodigy, someone with whom the entire community identified and in whom it took pride, and this lifted our spirits at home. In a sense, it justified Mother's coming to Grandfather's. Had I stayed with Father, I probably would not have developed into a precocious child; and as it was, the community generously identified itself with its ilui, its child prodigy, the ilui of Sighet. My precociousness compensated greatly, both at home and outside, for the struggle and hardships that we experienced at home.

The community in Sighet expressed its appreciation of my learning in different ways. There were no cars in Sighet. When you called a doctor you had to provide him with transportation, with a horse and buggy. Whenever I walked in the street and met Dr. Krauss (the husband of Dr. Gizelle Perl, who survived the Holocaust and later wrote a book about being a doctor in Auschwitz), he would stop his horse and buggy and pick me up, a gesture that showed he approved of my learning and acknowledged my special status. And when Leizer Hoch, a learned butcher, went to the slaughterhouse every Wednesday, walking out of the town with a book in his hand, if he saw me he stopped. If it was an ordinary weekday, he would give me a single coin, a leu. If it was Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of a new Jewish month, he would give me two lei. On Chol Hamoed, the intermediate days of Passover or Sukkot, I might get five. People on the street used to stop me, or come up to the window of our house to look at me. I really felt a part of the community. It was the love of the community that sustained me, or perhaps created defenses for me, allowing me to overcome the circumstances in the house, the unbearable situation it could so easily have become.

The community's support of me was to extend even into the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen, where there were Polish Jewish kapos who generally were not kind to Hungarian Jews, which for this purpose included our area, too. These kapos met people who told them of my Talmudic knowledge and they treated me better for it, and now and then gave me an extra piece of bread.

AT THE age of four, then, I came to Sighet and joined the kols chadorim. Apparently, my ivre, my Hebrew reading, was not yet proficient, because I remember that the thirdgrade teacher, Reb Alter, used to listen to my reading to help me practice it and become more fluent in it—usually an indication that there are still flaws. No wonder that this same Reb Alter never accepted the idea that I was different from or had a better mind for learning than other students. Years later, he used to repeat, "When he was my student, he wasn't better; he was worse even!" "Worse" meant worse than my nearest rival, Naftali Elimelech Schiff, who somehow, at the age of eight or nine, developed a mental illness and disappeared as a competitor.

So it seems that at the age of four, beginning to study Chumash, I did not display anything special or extraordinary. That started when I was five. I say this on the strength of certain sayings which, years later, were still repeated in the community as things I had said when I was five. I was then sitting all day long in cheder, in school, under the tutelage of the teacher, reading out loud from the Chumash, with the commentary of Rashi, the foremost medieval commentator, whose annotations on the Bible are based on the Midrash, some sources of which may date back to the first century. I remember particularly the biblical story concerning Jacob and his daughter Dinah. The text says that when Jacob met his brother Esau, after having fled from him, Jacob had eleven children—his eleven sons. Rashi asks, "Where was Dinah? Jacob had a daughter as well, and this makes twelve." Rashi explains that Dinah is not mentioned because Jacob was afraid to have her meet Esau—the medieval Jew's perennial fear of having a non-Jew meet a Jewish woman—and so packed her in a box. I remember that I asked in school, "If someone asked how many children my mother has, would we say two because I am not there? What difference does it make where I am? So long as I exist I should be counted part of the family; and so, too, with Dinah." Apparently, this incident developed wings in the community.

Another saying that was quoted in my name, at the age of five, concerned the manna in the desert. According to tradition, one could sense any taste one desired in the manna, with the exception of garlic. The reason given for the exception is that garlic is harmful to pregnant women. When our teacher recounted this to us, I challenged him, arguing that if the taste of the manna was determined by the selection of the eater, and if the manna potentially contained all tastes, and whatever one desired one had, why couldn't one choose garlic also? If it is harmful to a pregnant woman, let the woman not desire its taste! The teacher did not know the answer. Neither did his supervisor (who was not Grandfather). "The whole town was stirred," as the Book of Ruth says. A simple question had been asked by a five-year-old and nobody seemed to know the answer. Eventually an answer from tradition was produced. I do not remember who quoted it, but it was said that it is written in a book that the mere potential taste of garlic is sufficient to be harmful to a pregnant woman, even if she was not to evoke the taste itself. I do not know how many people were convinced by the answer, but the question raised my reputation in town.

BUT THAT did not yet make me exceptional. That I date from the time I surprised Grandfather while we were in the bath. We did not have running water in our house; hardly anyone in Sighet had running water. If we needed hot water, we heated it on the stove. But there was a public bath, in addition to the mikveh (the ritual bath), with separate rooms containing bathtubs, two to a room. Of course, this sort of bathing cost about five times more than going to the mikveh. Grandfather used to go there once a week to take a bath and took me along. We shared the same bathtub, and the man who was in charge of the bath, Froim the Beder, who knew Grandfather, looked away and allowed me to go in with him for one price.

I remember we were coming out of the bath, toweling ourselves dry, and I told Grandfather that I thought I remembered the names of all our forefathers, the patriarchs, who lived from the time of Adam to the time of David the King. I was already aware of the misbnab in the Sayings of the Fathers that counts ten generations from Adam to Noah and ten from Noah to Abraham, but the mishnah does not list the names. I don't remember whether I did indeed know all of them, or missed a few and Grandfather filled them in, but anyhow I came very close. I added, "Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, Yehuda, Peretz, Chetzron, Ram, Amindav, Nachshon, Salmon, Boaz, Oved, Yishai, and David" beyond the generations mentioned in the mishnah—thirty-four names in all, which I remember to this day. We were not supposed to study or mention holy names in the bathhouse, but Grandfather was so stunned that I had gathered up these names on my own, consulting the Book of Chronicles (of which we had a torn copy at home), that he could not resist allowing me to list them then and there.

He shared the story with others, and this was the beginning of people coming up to me in the street to ask, "Who was the twentieth person?" or, "Who was the twentieth grandchild of Adam?" As time went on and I acquired knowledge of the Talmud, the questions persisted and changed accordingly: not "Who was whose son," but "How does the forty-eighth page of the Talmud begin?" "How does it end?" "How many times is Rabbi Yosef mentioned in such-and-such a tractate?" "What does he say the forty-fourth time?" and so on. Sometimes, not very often, a person would place a needle on a word in the Talmud and ask, "What is written at this spot on the pages beneath?"

I recall that I once came to Visheva, the hometown of my future wife, Tzipora, and met a Mr. Jakobowitz, who was engaged in the lumber business. He told me that he would give me fifty lei, a considerable sum, if I told him the sixty-fourth statement of Rava, the famous Talmudic sage, in Tractate Bava Metzia. I told him, and then stretched out my hand, expecting him to give me the money. He looked at me and said, "How do I know that you gave me the right answer?" It was a logical objection, but of course I could not leave it at that, so I said, "Well, if I tell you the twentieth, the twenty-fifth, the fortieth, and so on, will you give me the money?" In this same vein, at the age of nine, I learned by heart two hundred dapim (folios)—four hundred pages of Talmud—with Rashi's commentary and that of his disciples the Tosafists, and for this received a prize, provided by the Feuerstein family of Boston, which was enough to support the whole family for a week or two.

So excited was I when I received the money that I rushed out of the room, forgetting to thank the examining rabbis. When I was summoned back into the room with the reproach "Don't you even say thank you?" I was deeply embarrassed. But I quickly got out of the embarrassment by quoting to them from the Talmud, from the very same tractate on which they had examined me, from Bava Metzia 12a. There the Talmud first quotes the rule "An object found by a man's son or daughter, who is a minor . . . belongs to the man himself." "For what reason?" the Talmud inquires. "Because," explains Samuel, "when the minor finds it he brings it hurriedly to his father. [It is therefore assumed that when he picked the object up he did so on behalf of his father.] . . . a minor has no right to acquire anything for himself." "If I have no right to acquire anything for myself," I exclaimed triumphantly to the examining rabbis, "if I am merely a courier, then let my grandfather thank you!" The somber rabbis could not resist a forgiving chuckle.

When I was in Visheva, I of course visited the rabbi of the town, the renowned chasidic rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager. He examined me, and apparently was sufficiently impressed that he told his family that such a son-in-law he would like to have for his granddaughter Tzipora. Years passed, the world went up in flames, the Jews of the region were deported to Auschwitz, and the survivors dispersed across the world. I met Tzipora in New York in 1949. We both attended Brooklyn College, and after graduation in 1953, we were married.

IN 1942 I visited Ungvár (Uzhgorod), the largest city in Transcarpathia. I had a cousi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 BEFORE My Life in Sighet
• 2 ON THE WAY Life in the Ghetto
• 3 DURING The Story of a Bletl
• 4 LIBERATED Life after the Holocaust
• 5 AFTERMATH My Life Now
• 6 REVERBERATIONS In Retrospect
• IN LIEU OF AN INDEX
• A HADRAN
• GLOSSARY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS