A Fire Blazes in My Soul
As I Conjure in My Mind
The Destruction of My Congregation
[Excerpted from Kinah written by the Shevet Halevi upon the destruction of European Jewry]
In the wake of the Holocaust, several Rabbanim and Chassidic Rebbes authored poignant kinos upon the destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. In these heartrending poems, they grieve and lament the brutal murder of six million Jews al kiddush Hashem.
Among the most famous Holocaust kinos were those composed by Harav Weissmandl, the Bobover Rebbe and Harav Shmuel Halevi Wosner, author of Shevet Halevi, who opens his lamentations with the famous words, “Eish tukad b’kirbi, A fire blazes in my soul…[upon] the destruction of my congregation”.
In 1985, forty years after the destruction of European Jewry, a public debate arose regarding the public recitation of these kinos on Tisha B’Av after the traditional Book of Kinos. One of the prime opponents was Harav Shach who asserted that we are not entitled to add or institute any changes into the traditional Order of Prayer.
In this letter, the Shevet Halevi responds that while he and his Beis Din did not institute an actual public amendment into the Kinos and “that I notified Harav Shach shlit”a of this…
“However, a man should tell himself, even in the beis medrash, words that arouse him to shed tears upon the murder of tzaddikim and the blood that spilled as water and upon hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews murdered with gruesome deaths, so we shall not forget what befell us. There is no flaw in this; on the contrary, it is a mitzvah, and any objection to this is nonsense.”
Harav Wosner himself did customarily recite the Kinah that he composed upon the Holocaust with his congregation in Zichron Meir.
At the close of the letter, he speaks out stridently against those who object to this custom: “Due to our many sins, we cannot fathom what is correct and incorrect, for the media dominates all, even the charedim.”
This responsa was sent to Hagaon Harav Yissachar Dov Goldstein, who was among the noted opponents to the recitation of Kinos upon the Holocaust at the time.
Bnei Brak, 1985. Personal stationery. Page size: 13×22 cm.
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