Moshe Prager has been a pioneer in Holocaust research. His work “Horban Yisrael Be’Erupa,” which appeared in 1948 was the first comprehensive book about the extermination of European Jewry.
He is the author of many books. The large 40 column study on the Holocaust which appeared in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, was written by him.
In recent years he has established in Bnei Brak a unique research institute called “Kiddush Hashem Archives.”
Last week we met with Prager, who is on a visit here, at the Boro Park home of Rabbi Moshe Lipshitz, a mutual friend. Prager spoke about his institute.
“When institutions in Israel and elsewhere, devoted to the research of the Holocaust, refer to Jewish resistance and heroism during the period of examination, they usually mean the Ghetto revolts and the participation of Jews in underground movements and partisan groups,” Prager said. “However there were also other kinds of heroism and resistance which were much more widespread and involved hundred of thousands of Jews. I am speaking of moral heroism and spiritual resistance. I am speaking of Kiddush Hashem. I mean the heroism and courage displayed by Jews trying to observe the laws of our religions, even when such observance meant death! I mean the self sacrifice shown by Jews endeavoring to help fellow Jews, even which such help involved great personal risk.
“In the years immediately following the war I visited the D.P. camps in Europe.” Prager continued. “In talks with the survivors I heard of numerous such acts of heroism.”
“In every death camp there were many Jews who fasted on Yom Kippur, who held a Seder, who gathered for prayer. In every death camp there were Tefillin some times only a Tefillin Shel Yad or Shel Rosh. They were smuggled into the camps and hidden there is most ingenious ways.”
“I heard stories about the great Mesiras Nefesh, shown by Jews to help fellow Jews. Even in the worst conditions they preserved the Tzelem Elokim. For example in Auschwitz Jews were employed in the warehouses where were kept the possessions taken away from the deportees.
These Jews were strictly isolated from the other Jewish inmates. At great personal risk they would throw over the barbed wire fence articles to the other Jews, who would exchange them with Polish workers at the camp for bread or other food.”
It was from these reports of survivors that Prager’s “Nitotzi Gevurah” (Sparks of Glory”) was born. The book has appeared in four different Hebrew editions and was published in an English translation. Some of the stories were translated into other languages. Two have been included in the text books of Israel’s schools of all trends.
A separate chapter in the story of Jewish spiritual resistance against the Nazi murderers comprise the Ghetto songs. The Jews were starved, degraded, enslaved, tortured, killed — but they kept on singing. Prager collected Ghetto songs and in his Holocaust anthology “Min HaMetzar Karathi” published by Mossad Harav Kook in 1955, he printed 180 Ghetto songs in seven languages. Since then his collection of Ghetto songs has grown to 2000.
For many years Prager continued to collect stories of Jewish moral heroism and spiritual resistance. To his great regret he discovered that this was an area in a great measure neglected by Holocaust researchers.
“A disproportionate amount of attention has been given to the crimes and misdeeds of Jewish Ghetto policemen, Jewish Kapos and Judenrat members,” Prager said.
“These people constituted only a small minority but those who remained loyal to the traditions of our religion and continued to be devoted to their fellow men, even in the most dangerous of situations numbered hundreds of thousands.”
“It is this aspect of the Holocaust which must be saved from oblivion. It is especially this aspect which we have to bequeath to coming generations,” Prager declared.
When he realized that one man cannot possibly collect all the material relating to this aspect of the Holocaust, Prager established his own research institute, Hasidic young men, whom he had personally trained, glean from the vast Holocaust literature instances of moral heroism and spiritual resistance. The young researchers also conduct interviews with survivors.
“There are whole areas which have not yet been researched,” Prager said.
“The attachment to their religion and the devotion to their fellow-Jews by members of the Hungarian Jewish forced labor units (Munka Tabor) which were employed in German occupied territories, have not yet been told. Likewise untold is the story of the moral fortitude and Jewish devotion displayed by the circa half a million Polish Jews, who after the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939, were deported to Siberia and the Arctic region.”
The institute has set itself another task. To transmit to future generations the beauty of traditional Jewish life, especially in the Shtetels of Eastern Europe, before World War II. Prager has been collecting for years, pictures and photos of Jewish life in the not too distant past. The institute now has a collection of 40,000 photos.
Kiddush Hashem Archives are housed in a five story building in Bnei Brak called “Gal Ed Likdoshe Hashoa.” Most of the floors are occupied by a Kollel of Gur Hasidim. The ground on which the building has been erected originally belonged to Prager. He donated it to the Kollel and the institute.
Organizations of Ghetto fighters and partisans in Israel have recently evinced a great interest in Prager’s project and have offered their cooperation and assistance.
The institute has outgrown the present facilities and is negotiating with Shmuel Weinberg, the mayor of Bnei Brak to erect together with the municipality a “Beth HaEduth” (House of Testimony). It would house the institute, its archives, a permanent exhibition on spiritual resistance during the Holocaust, as well as a museum about Bnei Brak, the city of Torah and Hassiduth where Hasidim and the world of Eastern Europe’s Yeshivas have risen to new life.
The Jewish Press, Friday, August 21, 1981