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For Hanka Kornfeld-Marder, who remembers



Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Yizkor and Memorial in Jewish Tradition
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Part I: Theology and Practice
Hashkavah : Memorializing the Dead in Sephardi Practice
Yoram Bitton
Remembering the Dead: By Us and by God
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Remembering the Dead as Halakhic Peril
Rabbi Daniel Landes
Memorializing the Shoah
Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD
Sites and Subjects: Memory in Israeli Culture
Dr. Wendy Zierler
Part II: Historical Insights
Would Jeremiah Have Recited Yizkor ? Yizkor and the Bible
Dr. Marc Zvi Brettler
Hazkarat N shamot ( Memorial of Souls ): How It All Began
Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof, PhD ( z l )
Kaddish and Memorial Services
Rabbi Jakob J. Petuchowski, PhD ( z l )
Yizkor : A Microcosm of Liturgical Interconnectivity
Dr. Eric L. Friedland
Service for the Souls : The Origin of Modern Memorial Services, 1819 to 1938
Dr. Annette M. Boeckler
Part III: The Liturgy
The Traditional Yizkor Service
Translation and Commentary by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman
Part IV: Interpretations and Reflections
What Happens When We Die: Intimations of Immortality
Rabbi Lawrence A. Englander, CM, DHL
The Age of Amusement
Rabbi Edward Feinstein
Remembering through Forgetting: Yizkor as Unshared Experience
Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand
Hard to Plan the Day
Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, DHL
Why Art Thou Cast Down?
Rabbi Andrew Goldstein, PhD
Where Do People Go When They Die?
Dr. Joel M. Hoffman
Remembering Abraham Geiger
Rabbi Walter Homolka, PhD, DHL
An Ongoing Conversation with Empty Chairs
Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur
Ode to Mortality
Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar
What Is Yizkor For?
Catherine Madsen
Empty-Handed before Adonai
Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, PhD
The Hippo of Recollection Stirring in the Muddy Waters of the Mind
Rabbi Charles H. Middleburgh, PhD
Re-membering: Yizkor and the Dynamics of Death
Rabbi Jay Henry Moses
Prayer for the Dead; Promise by the Living
Rabbi Aaron D. Panken, PhD
When the Golden Shields Are Gone
Rabbi Jack Riemer
A Soul-ar Eclipse
Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
Adonai Is Now Their Portion
Rabbi Jonathan P. Slater, DMin
To Tear and to Sew
Rabbi David Stern
Remembering Our Past in Service to Our Future
Rabbi David A. Teutsch, PhD
For I Pledge Tz dakah on Her Behalf
Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, DD
A Time to Re-Member
Dr. Ron Wolfson
Remembering Our Summers in the Autumns of Our Years
Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel
Appendix A: Full Text of Hashkavah , the Sephardi Memorial Prayer, with Translation
From Seder T fillot: Book of Prayer , published by Union of Sephardic Congregations, 1983
Appendix B: El Malei Rachamim : A Chronicle from the Chmielnicki Pogroms
Translation and Commentary by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman
Appendix C: El Malei Rachamim : Music of 1888
Composition by Eduard Birnbaum
Notes
Glossary
About the Editor
Copyright
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Acknowledgments
As a good deal of the book makes clear, the Yizkor liturgy is inextricably tied up with the communal memory of Jewish martyrdom: first, the Crusades; and second, the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century. I am, therefore, particularly grateful to Dr. Carole Balin for drawing my attention to recent scholarship on the subject. In addition, my thanks are due to Yoram Bitton, who supplemented his discussion of Hashkavah by identifying geographic place names in the complex document memorializing the Chmielnicki pogroms (Appendix B). He also drew my attention to the musical heritage of El Malei Rachamim and made available the fascinating manuscript of 1888 (Appendix C). I am grateful to the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College for use of this valuable resource. Appreciation goes also to Dr. Mark Kligman, who offered help in issues of musicology.
I would be remiss in not giving special mention to two scholars of enormous importance who are no longer with us: Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof, PhD ( z l ) and Rabbi Jakob J. Petuchowski, PhD ( z l ). Freehof s classic article first appeared in the Hebrew Union College Annual (1965); Petuchowski s contribution comes from Prayerbook Reform in Europe (1968), a publication of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. I am grateful to these two institutions for allowing me to reproduce the two articles in question.
The goal of this series is, in part, to make available English translations of the liturgy and some of its attendant source material that is otherwise unavailable to most readers. In that regard, I thank two scholars for their help. First and foremost, Dr. Joel M. Hoffman, who regularly translates the liturgy of this series, went beyond the call of duty, as usual-this time, in the enormous task of translating and annotating the memorial from the Chmielnicki period (Appendix B), a literary masterpiece whose every line contains implicit allusions to other instances of biblical and Rabbinic literature. In addition, Dr. Annette M. Boeckler was kind enough to help translate the German of the 1888 manuscript from Königsberg. My thanks are due to both of these contributors who never fail to involve themselves in the project as a whole and who make valuable suggestions throughout it.
As with previous volumes in this series, I wish to express enormous gratitude to the many colleagues, artists, composers, poets, philosophers, theologians, and critics whose contributions make this series the rich resource that it is. I continue to be blessed also with support from my extraordinary publisher, Stuart M. Matlins, founder of Jewish Lights, and from Emily Wichland, vice president of Editorial and Production there. It was Stuart who first approached me with the idea for the Prayers of Awe series, as suggested to him by Dan Adler in response to a High Holy Day program developed by Rob Eshman, editor in chief of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles , and David Suissa. Their program sprang from an idea first conceived by Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City. Emily continues to amaze me in all she does: her abundant wisdom, skill, patience, and perseverance are precisely what an author most desires. For her copyediting, my thanks go again to Debra Corman. I happily include as well all the others at Jewish Lights, especially Tim Holtz, director of Production, who designed the cover for this book and typeset the English text.




Introduction
Yizkor and Memorial in Jewish Tradition
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, has served for more than three decades as professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. He is a world-renowned liturgist and holder of the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair in Liturgy, Worship and Ritual. He has written and edited many books, including My People s Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries series, winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and Who by Fire, Who by Water -Un taneh Tokef, All These Vows -Kol Nidre, and We Have Sinned: Sin and Confession in Judaism -Ashamnu and Al Chet, the first three volumes in the Prayers of Awe series; and he is coeditor of My People s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries , a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is a developer of Synagogue 3000, a transdenominational project designed to envision and implement the ideal synagogue of the spirit for the twenty-first century.
Memory is dear to Jews. As Isaac Bashevis Singer is said to have commented (I wish I could remember where), We Jews have many faults; but amnesia is not among them. In insisting on memory, we are apparently in good company, however, because God too (we say) can be importuned to remember. That, at least, is the claim of Yizkor , known in English as the memorial service, originally a relatively modest liturgical staple attached in Ashkenazi tradition to the Shacharit ( morning ) service for Yom Kippur. As we shall see in greater detail later, the custom arose in Germany, following the devastation of Rhineland Jewry during the Crusades, a trauma that was exacerbated in the fourteenth century when Jews were attacked for causing the Black Death. The practice of Yizkor then spread eastward, where Polish Jews added a prayer commemorating the Jewish victims massacred in the 1648 Cossack uprisings under Ukrainian leader Bogdan Chmielnicki. They also extended this slightly elaborated Yizkor for inclusion on the last day of the three festivals (Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot). All of this is primarily true of Ashkenazi Jews only. Most Sephardi congregations follow their own custom of memorializing the dead: an even more modest unit of prayer called Hashk