From the Kingdom of Memory by Elie Wiesel

Author:Elie Wiesel [Wiesel, Elie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80643-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Kaddish in Cambodia

ON THE EIGHTEENTH DAY (in the Hebrew calendar) of Shevat I found myself in the dusty, noisy village of Aranyaprathet, on the border between Cambodia and Thailand, searching desperately for nine more Jews.

I had Yahrzeit for my father, and I needed a minyan so that I could say Kaddish. I would have found a minyan easily enough in Bangkok. There are about fifty Jewish families in the community there, plus twenty Israeli Embassy families, so there would have been no problem about finding ten men for minchah. But in Aranyaprathet?

I had gone there to take part in a March for the Survival of Cambodia organized by the International Rescue Committee and Doctors Without Frontiers. There were philosophers, novelists, parliamentarians, and journalists—myriad journalists. But how was I to find out who might be able to help me with my problem?

I would have liked to telephone one of my rabbi friends in New York or Jerusalem and ask his advice on the Halakhic aspects of the matter. What did one do in such a case? Should one observe the Yahrzeit the following day, or the following week? But I was afraid of being rebuked and of being asked why I had gone to Thailand precisely on that day, when I should have been in synagogue.

I would have justified myself by saying that I had simply been unable to refuse. How could I refuse when so many men and women were dying of hunger and disease?

I had seen on television what the Cambodian refugees looked like when they arrived in Thailand-walking skeletons with somber eyes, crazy with fear. I had seen a mother carrying her dead child, and I had seen creatures dragging themselves along the ground, resigned to never again being able to stand upright.

How could a Jew like myself, with experiences and memories like mine, stay at home and not go to the aid of an entire people? Some will say to me, Yes, but when you needed help, nobody came forward. True, but it is because nobody came forward to help me that I felt it my duty to help these victims.

As a Jew I felt the need to tell these despairing men and women that we understood them; that we shared their pain; that we understood their distress because we remembered a time when we as Jews confronted total indifference.…

Of course, there is no comparison. The event which left its mark on my generation defies analogy. Those who talk about “Auschwitz in Asia” and the “Cambodian Holocaust” do not know what they are talking about. Auschwitz can and should serve as a frame of reference, but that is all.

So there I was in Thailand, in Aranyaprathet, with a group of men and women of good will seeking to feed, heal, save Cambodians—while I strove to get a minyan together because, of all the days of the year, the eighteenth day of Shevat is the one that is most full of meaning and dark memories for me.

Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum was a member of the American delegation.

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