COMMENTARY / OPINION
‘A Survivors’ Haggadah’* By Alex Grobman, PhD
April 04, 2023 – During the first Passover after liberation, considerable numbers of the she’erith hapletah (the surviving remnant) came to the Munich area to celebrate in Sedarim in large and small Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) camps, and at the Jewish hospital at St. Ottilien, noted Saul Touster, a professor of law. The Deutsches Theater Restaurant, a popular eatery frequented by Nazi officials, hosted Sedarim for 200 participants, including primarily survivors living outside the camps, together with a number of representatives of the Allied Forces, civilian government and relief agency personnel. At that point, there were about 6,000 of them. Haggadot were printed in Palestine, England and the U.S. Some were printed by the Jews themselves in Germany and Holland.
Among the Haggadot produced by the survivors, “The most finished in its extraordinary decorations and woodcuts, and the most comprehensive in paralleling Exodus and Holocaust,” was first published in Yiddish and Hebrew by Zionist groups Achida (United Zionist Organization for the Saved Remnant in Germany) and Nocham (United Pioneer Youth), which later became the “A” Haggadah. Yosef Dov Sheinson, arranged, designed, edited, chose the woodcuts and rewrote the classic opening line that established the tone and theme for the Haggadah: “We were slaves to Hitler in Germany.”
Rabbi Abraham Klausner
Shortly after publication of the Haggadah, Levi Shalit and Israel Kaplan, two editors of Unzer Weg (Our Way), which became the largest Yiddish weekly in Germany, took it to Chaplain Abraham Klausner, a Reform rabbi. In the first issue of Unzer Weg, Klausner, who had been instrumental in helping found the paper, was paid the highest tribute when the Shalit wrote “Rabbi, friend, brother, you have become one of us.” At a time when the survivors needed someone who understood who they were, what they had experienced and their need to control their own destiny, Klausner treated them with respect and dignity. He really had become one of them.
Klausner decided the Haggadah should be used for a Seder in Munich, which he would conduct. He wrote a two-page English introduction, and had the American army reprint the Haggadah through army press facilities using better paper. A new cover was designed with the tricolor insignia “A” for the U.S. Third Army of Occupation in Bavaria, with the date of April 15-16, 1946.
