On the evening of March 4, 1962, the Young Leadership Cabinet of the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe to receive guidance before traveling to Poland. What follows is an excerpt from their exchange that evening.
Young Jewish leadership: “We are going on a pilgrimage to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, going to Warsaw and Auschwitz. As we get deeper and deeper into the [assigned preparatory] readings, we’re all having many problems with the questions that the Holocaust and Auschwitz bring.... What did the whole thing mean?”
The Rebbe: “...If history teaches us something that we must not repeat or must emulate, the best lesson can be taken from the destruction of the Second Temple. We witnessed something so terrible, it must bring every Jew to become more identified with his Jewishness...every one of us has an obligation to fight Hitler, [which] can be done by letting that which Hitler had in mind to annihilate, not only continue but grow bigger and on a deeper scale. Hitler was not interested so much in annihilating the body of Jewishness as he was interested in annihilating the spirit. [He decreed that the spiritual and moral ideas that the Jewish people embody] must not infect the German people, the Russian people, or the Polish people...
“If you influence a Jew not to become assimilated but to profess his Jewishness, his pride and inspiration and joy, this is defeating Hitlerism. If someone does his best in his personal life to be Jewish [so that] everyone sees that in the street he is a Jew, that his home is a Jewish home, that he is proud, and that it is not a burden but his pride, his life defeats the idea of Hitlerism.
“When you go to Auschwitz, you must profess there that Auschwitz cannot happen again. You can assure it by becoming a living example of a living Jew.”
