Resistance of the Soul

“To be Jewish is a lot more than just following the laws,” says Erin Miller. “It’s engrained in you.”

In 1942, a Jewish hospital in Lithuania’s Kovno ghetto called upon Rabbi Ephraim Oshry to resolve an ethical dilemma. The Nazis had shot a pregnant woman in front of the hospital; the baby could be saved with a cesarean section, but the procedure would surely kill the woman. Oshry determined that the baby had a higher likelihood of survival, so the doctors performed the operation.

Oshry documented this incident—along with many others that tested Jews’ devoutness—on cement sacks, which he buried in the ghetto. After the war, he retrieved and published these responsa (legal opinions) as the five-volume She’eilos Uteshuvos Mima’amakim [Questions and Responses from the Depths]. Now, Erin Miller (CAS’17, SPH’18) is working with Michael Grodin, a professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at the Boston University School of Public Health (SPH), on the first complete English translation of this manuscript.

Miller, who was raised Jewish and attended Hebrew school, knows firsthand that “to be Jewish is a lot more than just following the laws; it’s engrained in you.” During the Holocaust, “it was never a question of whether the Jews were going to continue to follow Jewish law. To give that up would be giving up their humanity,” she says. Under the threat of death, the Jews held worship services, baked matzos, and said blessings over their meals.

In ordinary conditions, rabbis consult texts like the Talmud and confer with colleagues to help Jews live according to religious law. For example, Miller says, a rabbi might counsel a transgendered person about which side of the mechitza (division that separates men and women) they join during prayer service, or offer guidance to a young couple considering in vitro fertilization (there’s much controversy over egg and sperm donation, for instance). During the Holocaust, however, the rabbis were deprived of their religious resources. Oshry is the best known among many rabbis who relied upon their own judgment in unthinkable circumstances.

Miller chose BU for the opportunity to study the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. A premed psychology major with a minor in Jewish studies, she connected with Grodin through BU Hillel and was immediately drawn to his research on the responsa, for which her role is to oversee production and assist with editing.

“Some stories from the responsa are uplifting in the commitment and dedication of the Jewish people to their faith, and others are incredibly difficult to read,” says Miller, who was “deeply saddened by the unimaginable choices Jewish people had to make and the extremely difficult answers rabbis had to deliver.”

She was particularly struck by Oshry’s recollection of a man who had come to him for guidance after the Holocaust. He had been hiding from the Nazis in an underground bunker with a group of fellow Jews, when an infant had begun crying. While attempting to stifle the cries, the man had suffocated the child. Miller was moved by Oshry’s sensitivity to the man’s suffering.

“You can only imagine the terrible agony the person who was asking this question had to be going through, the guilt for the life that was lost in the process of trying to save others,” she says. “Rabbi Oshry said that this person did not have to repent. It didn’t absolve the person’s guilt, but it probably helped him feel a bit more at peace about the choice he had to make.”

Miller hopes this translation will better establish the responsa in Holocaust history as a story of resistance equal in might to better-known narratives like the Warsaw Uprising. It’s important to recognize that “the Jews did not just go like lambs to the slaughter,” she says. “The responsa tells a unique story we don’t talk about that often: how religious Jews maintained their humanity and their way of life in a time of unimaginable suffering, and in turn spiritually resisted the obliteration of the Jewish tradition.”

As Oshry said in a 1975 interview in the New York Times, “One resists with a gun, another with his soul.”