Publications
Alison Jordan and Rabbi Stuart Kelman, The Vidui: Jewish Relational Care for the Final Moments of Life, in Jewish Relational Care A-Z, ed. Rabbi Jack Bloom. Haworth Press, 2006, pp.375-388.
Alison Jordan and Rabbi Stuart Kelman, Rabbinic Contraction and Covenantal Education, Sh'ma Journal, January 2010.
Alison Jordan, The Deathbed Confessional, Sh'ma Journal, September 2003.
Alison Jordan and Rabbi Stuart Kelman, "The Rabbinic Leader and the Volunteer Leader," Religious Education: An Interfaith Journal of Spirituality, Growth and Transformation, vol.97, no.4, Fall 2002.
Alison Jordan, Vidui, in Mishkan R'fuah: Where Healing Resides, ed. Rabbi Eric Weiss. CCAR Press, 2013, pp. 73-74.
Yerusha - Inheritance
I began life as a Jewish girl in New York in 1947. My consciousness has been filtered through the circumstance of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. I knew that my immediate family and the families of my friends left Europe before the war. We understood we were not of the majority culture and we were also different from refugees and survivors. We were American Jews trying to understand complicated things. At a time when many adults could not yet comprehend or talk about the overwhelming facts or acknowledge individual and collective trauma, my friends and I were becoming increasingly preoccupied with big, unanswered questions. The adults' strange detachment, avoidance, and denial of personal loss became a defining substrate of our experience. In the juxtaposition of the recent calamity and unspoken expressions of distress, we children came to experience the anxiety, helplessness, grief, and guilt of our parents and grandparents.
This phenomenon was later to be identified as the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Some reflections:
1. we did not directly experience or witness horrific events - except in our dreams and newsreels
2. our parents and grandparents escaped the physical inferno, having no language for their suffering; in turn, we who were born in the United States experienced an unnamed, but particular subset of "second generation" issues
3. we did not know our parents' and grandparents' murdered loved ones, but we feel the invisible presence of these lost souls; we could not offer comfort, replace the missing relatives, nor properly mourn
4. we carry the guilt of being spared: we were born after the war, in America; and we escaped the experience of being born in a DP camp, of being refugees from "over there," the phrase Israeli author David Grossman uses to capture the language of fear, confusion, and distancing
5. we become uneasy and confused, dreading our responses to the creeping or persistent awareness of the magnitude of the destruction in the midst of our upwardly mobile lives
These last issues are multilayered, since we may experience guilt and shame that our parents lived comfortably during the war while their peers and relatives suffered and died; we may wonder that they did nothing to help; we may grieve that they appeared to turn away from the walking wounded and the dead; and perhaps most dangerous of all, we are terrified when we sense that our central role models--Jewish American adults--may feel stigmatized and humiliated.
6. finally, we may be living with the consequences of adults' unresolved trauma, expressed in such ways as depression, family strife, abuse, neglect, substance abuse, or suicide. Our common terror is the distorted confrontation with survival and annihilation. I believe this is fundamental to individual and group existential concern with who we are, (e.g., religious/ group identification vis-a-vis the Jewish and non-Jewish world); with the search for meaning and the horror of the destruction of meaning; and with the vicissitudes of living with the clear knowledge of death=annihilation.
There is a lifelong process of "working through" for individuals, families, and societies. For example, it took years before many survivors in the U.S. were able to speak, write, or teach about their experiences. Each successive shift contributes to the next phase of change or healing for the individual, the children, and the larger culture. In the sixties, silence seemed to give way to preoccupation: German sons and daughters demanded answers of their elders, the Holocaust became central to American Jewish identity. This process continuously evolves. For me, the freedom to fully share thoughts and feelings with very close friends throughout my life has been crucial for sanity and growth. My particular experience evolved from contemplation, study, and discussion to an awareness of the need to concretely experience the places where these things happened. For me it is not unlike the embedded, internalized idea of Jerusalem contrasted with the physical experience of being in that geographical, real place.
First I became ready to go to Warsaw, my father's birthplace, the place where so many Jews lived and died. Although Warsaw was completely destroyed and rebuilt, it was very meaningful to me to be in the place where my father lived as a child, to walk where my family walked, and to see, smell, touch the sky, trees and rivers that my relatives had known. On my second trip to Poland I walked on the unpaved streets of Lysobyki, my grandfather's village. A Gentile man showed us where the study house, synagogue,and mikveh (ritual immersion) once stood, spontaneously using the Hebrew terms. Despite a confusion of feelings, I was relieved and comforted to see the beauty of the place. Sitting at my desk at home I had researched the names and stories of my lost aunts, uncles, cousins, great grandparents. Being where these people lived and died, I was profoundly moved to say Kaddish for family and for every unknown soul in such places as the main Warsaw cemetery, Treblinka, Sobibor, forest clearings, and more. Something about making physical connection with the places that were previously images in my head has forever altered my relationship with that which had been untouchable.
While traveling in search of family history I took most of the photos posted to this site. I was able to trace the history of many relatives through Jewish Genealogy, Yad Vashem, Ellis Island, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. A newly found relative, Warsaw Ghetto survivor Chaim Wolgroch, tells his story in I Summons the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to Court. Chaim's son, David Wolgroch writes his experience in Creation out of Nothingness: Creatio ex Nihilo. I am grateful to David for connecting us all through JGen. We had the opportunity to meet in London last year and to reflect on our family's story, our very different histories, and our investment in a shared historical legacy. Before he died, I had the privilege of communicating with my father's cousin Chaim (z''l.) He made me laugh and sounded exactly like my Grandfather, also named Chaim. In 2009 Chaim Wolgroch died. His son David wrote a moving epilogue.
Perhaps the combination of temperament and circumstance shape one's spiritual development and unique path. Things unfold, often without benefit of insight or consciousness. Stepping back, and from the distance of years, it is more apparent to me that everything is connected, and that life stories are coherent as well as mysterious.
I have learned deeply at the bedsides of those who are dying and from first hand descriptions of Holocaust experience. Caring for people at the end of life teaches profound respect for the spirit of every being, responsibility to honor each encounter, and the promise to keep promises. The awful loss of life during the Holocaust and other purposeful murder is not the full tragedy. The intention to destroy spirit is unbearable. Human beings died in the agony of forced separation from their faith. Accounts of people helping each other to care for the body of a loved one or recite Vidui are profoundly moving instances of spiritual resistance during the Holocaust. We are now free to observe Jewish tradition in life and death. Just as we are obligated to remember our slavery, I feel obligated to embrace the gift that is ours. Judaism offers us joy and wisdom throughout life and in death. This is our awesome legacy and responsibility, perhaps it is a form of restitution:We can approach every spirit with humility and awe, we can honor every physical body with true respect. We can do this for each other and for the sake of something much larger. For me, it may be an ongoing, affirming practice of Teshuvah (repentance). I have found that it is my work and my promise to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust. It is my deepest hope and prayer to contribute to the living legacy of the Jewish people, in all our precious, G-d given diversity.