Continuing the awesome shiur.

Lots more hints here, for those can decode them, a little.

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[The Rav now starts to speak about the Kohen Hadols in the times of the Temple, and how in the Second Temple unworthy people bought the office of Kohen HaGadol, and so they would die when they entered the Holy of Holies, and would have to be pulled out by a chain.]

So, they used to pull the Kohen Gadols out with a golden chain.

They used to do hitbodedut [in the Holy of Holies], and would say there just three prayers [in order to minimize their time in the Holy of Holies, to avoid being struck down dead]: That a woman shouldn’t miscarry, that people wouldn’t need to use gemachs[1], and that there would be a Jewish government.

Even the very worst Jewish government, this is better than the British who were here.

They used to do pogroms here, every two years.

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[The Rav starts talking about the famous photograph from World War II, of the small Jewish boy in a cap with his hands raised.]

That child – they went to Poland [from living in Eretz Yisrael], they ran away from the pogroms in 5697. And there, there were also pogroms. On the 14th of Elul. B’kitzur, they killed his father and mother in front of him, and his brothers and sisters, and he was left an orphan in the house. There was no-one.

The aunt came, the sister of his mother, and took him to hers. And now, they had to register with the Nazis, everything was ‘organised’, there were registration lists, everything.

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And all those who came from Eretz Yisrael, they had Anglo-Palestine passports, British passports.

They were called ‘British Citizens’, whoever travelled to chul received an English passport. He was called ‘British’.

Now, the Germans – every Jew who was from Eretz Yisrael, they didn’t burn them in the crematoria. They made them a special place in Bergen-Belsen, a very special, special, special place.

They had a bounty of food there, so that they would stay alive, so it would be possible to exchange them.

You are British, you aren’t called ‘Jews’. You are Brits.

They didn’t do anything to them. They fed them, for four years, until the end of the war, when they were going to do a prisoners exchange.

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[The Rav refers back to the child with the arms up from the Warsaw Ghetto].

So he, when they were putting everyone else on the trucks from Warsaw to Bergen-Belsen, the Germans checked the lists [to see if he was on the lists of citizens of countries the Germans wanted to keep alive].

Everything was done according to the lists.

And he wasn’t registered on the list – his aunt hadn’t registered him. She didn’t know where they were going. To Auschwitz, to Treblinka, she didn’t know where. So, she decided not to register him, so they didn’t take him. They couldn’t find him [on their list].

So the Nazis said to him: Listen, according to the lists, you aren’t registered, a boy aged seven.

So, they took him off the truck, and then they told him to put his hands up, and then he was photographed.

That he was pictured with his hands up is because he was being allowed to live, not being sent to die.

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They knew that they were sending everyone to destruction.

But, the Israelis who came [from Eretz Yisrael], who escaped from the pogroms, they took those to a special place, and gave them special cabins in Bergen-Belsen, and looked after them so that they would stay alive.

So, this was this child, who stayed alive.

Then, he was seven years old, and today he’s already 97. 85 years have passed, this was 5700. Today, he would be 92 years old exactly, if he is still alive.

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So then he told us the story, how they ran away from the pogroms here [in Israel], the pogroms that the British themselves organised.

So the Kohen HaGadol used to pray that the rulership wouldn’t be removed from Jewish hands. Three prayers: that a woman wouldn’t miscarry, that the government wouldn’t be removed from the Jews, and also that people wouldn’t require gemachs.

That was it.

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TBC

Translated and excerpted from Shivivei Or 428.

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FOOTNOTE:

[1] I.e. that the nation’s parnassa would be so plentiful no-one would have to ask others for loans or assistance.

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UPDATE:

I went to check out more about that boy from the Warsaw ghetto, and whaddya know? The Rav was correct, that he survived.

This snippet comes from the Institute for Historical Review site, HERE:

Contrary to legend, though, the “ghetto boy” was not killed. He survived wartime internment in Warsaw and in a German concentration camp.

Several decades after it was taken, a New York physician, Tsvi C. Nussbaum, revealed that he was the lad in the famous photograph. “I remember there was a soldier in front of me, and he ordered me to raise my hands,” Nussbaum later recalled. After his uncle intervened, the seven-year-old boy was allowed to join the rest of his family. Along with relatives, young Nussbaum was deported from Warsaw in 1943 to the Bergen-Belsen camp in western Germany. After liberation at war’s end, he moved to Israel, from where he migrated to the United States in 1953.

In 1990 he was living in Rockland County, New York.