Rabbi Shimon Huberband & Preserving the Truth About the Holocaust

While the Warsaw Ghetto is remembered for its armed revolt, physical resistance wasn’t the only way Jews fought back. In addition to spiritual resistance, Jews held onto their autonomy by taking ownership of their story. Leading this effort was Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian whose clandestine and illegal ghetto-based scholarly organization Oyneg Shabes defied unbelievable odds to record Polish Jewry’s final chapter.

Oyneg Shabes was staffed by Ringelblum’s hand-picked assistants, most of them secular and left-leaning intellectuals like him. There was, however, one notable exception: Rabbi Shimon Huberband, a pious and gentle hassid who took on the job of documenting religious life.

Portrait of Rabbi Shimon Huberband

Though he’d grow to become one of Ringelblum’s most valuable assistants, Rabbi Huberband was an unlikely choice. Unlike the others, he lacked university training. Before the war he had been a Torah scholar living at the home of his father-in-law, a Hassidic rebbe. A prolific writer, Rabbi Huberband wrote in a variety of genres, publishing essays, poems and articles on Jewish law, a biography of Talmudic sages, and one notable piece of historical research – an article about Jewish physicians in his home city of Piotrokov, which attracted Ringelblum’s attention.

During the two years he spent working for Oyneg Shabes, Huberband proved himself an able historian winning the respect of other project members.

“Huberband was a methodical collaborator… who carefully adhered to the guidelines worked out by Oyneg Shabes staff,” wrote Professor Samuel Kassow in “Who Will Write Our History” the definitive history of Oyneg Shabes.

What makes this all the more remarkable were the conditions Huberband and the others worked under. In the overcrowded and disease-ridden ghetto, he lacked food, heating, even a place to work, and yet he carried on willingly and with remarkable diligence.

Emanuel Ringelblum

For Rabbi Huberband, the work was therapy, his strategy for healing from his own devastating losses. During the war’s first week, his wife, young son and beloved father-in-law were killed in a German bombing strike in the small Polish village of Sulejow.

Unable to remain in his now empty apartment, the Rabbi relocated to Warsaw where he remarried and joined Oyneg Shabes.

Like other members he recorded most of his observations in his own neat handwriting in notebooks the organization gave out.

Shortly before he and his second wife were deported to Treblinka, where they were murdered in August of 1942, Rabbi Huberband deposited his writings with other Oyneg Shabes members for safekeeping. They packed them into aluminum milk cans and buried them under the Warsaw sidewalk, informing colleagues in the US of their location.

While some of his writing survived, a great deal was destroyed by water which seeped into the containers during the five years that they were kept underground.

Though it’s commonly believed that Rabbi Huberband also buried the now famous writings of his cousin Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaczener Rebbe, recent research debunks this. What is more likely is that Rabbi Huberband introduced his cousin to Oyneg Shabes’s work which may have spurred the Rebbe to write and edit his Sabbath and Holiday talks into the volume we now know as the Aish Kodesh. Rabbi Shapira’s writings were hidden in milk cans together with other Oyneg Shabes documents.

Unearthing of the hidden “Oyneg Shabes” archives after the war. Warsaw, Poland (Photo: Yad Vashem)

Rabbi Huberband’s own writing, published in English under the title “Kiddush Hashem—Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust” (Ktav 1987), is a remarkable trove of information, painting a full-bodied picture of Polish Jewry on the eve of destruction.

The subjects the Rabbi writes about are varied; a quarter of the book is his own wartime memoir, including heart rending descriptions of the deaths of his family and his two stints in Nazi prisons. The rest of the book details religious life throughout wartime Poland, as well as daily life in the Warsaw ghetto. Huberband even includes a chapter of wartime jokes and puns such as “We eat as if it were Yom Kippur, sleep in succahs and dress as if it were Purim.”

Rabbi Huberband also devotes considerable attention to stories of martyrdom. Among them is the tale of the latter-day Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Avrom Mordkhe Maroco, the Rabbi of Wlodawa.

“On the second day of September 1940, a group of officers entered the rabbi’s home and carried out a search. During the search they found a Torah scroll. They ordered the Rabbi to tear apart the scroll or else they would burn him alive. The rabbi refused. They poured gasoline on his body and set fire to him alive. When the rabbi was transformed into a blazing torch, they threw the Torah scroll on top of him. The rabbi and the Torah were burned alive.”

Metal boxes and milk cannisters in which parts of the archive were hidden, Warsaw, Poland (Photo: Yad Vashem)

Also included is the moving story of Dr. Gonshar, a non-religious Jewish veterinarian who served as deputy mayor of his Polish town. When the Nazis demanded that he tear a Torah scroll, Gonshar, who had been known for his antipathy to religion and religious Jews, turned pale and refused. “No, I will not,” he told the Nazis. For this act he was beaten and ultimately died a martyr’s death.

Tragically, Rabbi Huberband met the same fate as the people whose memories he preserved.

In a moving eulogy delivered shortly after his deportation in August 1942, his Oyneg Shabes member Menachem Kon said “considering his devout piety one could only marvel at his tolerance of atheists and leftists. He always looked at the whole man. This is what determined his attitude and he despised falsehood. Rabbi Huberband was one of the finest personalities of our times.”

May his memory be for a blessing.

The post Rabbi Shimon Huberband & Preserving the Truth About the Holocaust appeared first on Aish.com.