When Stuart Matlins visited Auschwitz in 2012, he stood on the railroad tracks leading into the camp and silently screamed to God, “How could you let this happen?” Matlins, editor-in-chief and publisher at Jewish Lights and Skylight Paths Publishing, calls it “a devastating experience. I have been blessed from childhood with a strong faith,” but in that moment it was severely tested. Deeply distressed, Matlins could find little comfort in anything he read.
In 2013, Matlins read a sermon at the Washington Post’s On Faith blog by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Speaking at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, Rosensaft had asked, “Can we believe in God in the aftermath of the Shoah? Shouldn’t an omniscient God have had to know that the cataclysm was being perpetrated? And shouldn’t an omnipotent God have been able to prevent it?” Matlins invited Rosensaft to dinner and asked how he could reconcile such evil with a good God. “God was not in the evil,” Rosensaft replied. “God was in the goodness people did in spite of the evil.”
Matlins asked Rosensaft if he would edit a book focused on post-Holocaust theology. Instead, Rosensaft suggested a book about how the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have dealt with their painful legacy. How have memories of the events traveled through their lives? How has the suffering of their families affected them?
Published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights, Jan.) tells the stories of almost 90 children and grandchildren of survivors from 16 countries and six continents, ranging in age from the mid- to late 20s to the 70s. The oldest of the contributors was born in Europe during the war, but none had their own memories of the period. “We approached the contributors based on accomplishments in their respective fields, and taking into account their nationalities and religious and political perspectives,” says Matlins, to give a range of experiences.
God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes reflects Matlins’s vision for Jewish Lights and bookends another significant volume, I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, which he published in 2002. Each of those books, and every one he has published under the imprint, illustrates that “from the very beginning, we wanted to help people understand Judaism in everyday life, and the relevance of the Jewish wisdom tradition to people of other faiths,” Matlins says. All of them were created to remind readers “if we don’t preserve our memories, we have no future.”
