JACK RABIN. M. D.

1235 EAST FOURTH STREET

LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA 90802

TELEPHONE 436-7131

Jun. 4, 1977

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

c/o Schocken Books

200 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10016

Dear Simon:

Please forgive me the familiarity of addressing you by first name. I think you will understand when I tell you that I was an American infantry soldier and was among the first to liberate Nazi slave and murder camps in the advances of the Third Army at the end of World War II. Those memories and the duties that I owe the Jewish people and mankind are indelibly engraved upon me as a result of that experience. There is not one day nor a single night that I do not think of the Holocaust. You are an active principal of that memory and to you I feel brotherhood because but for the fate that my father left Poland in time for me to be born in this countryI would not have escaped the terrible fate of most of our European Jews. Living Jews seem always to be either direct survivors of a disaster or to have benefited by one generation that managed to escape in time to avoid that disaster.

Your book "The Sunflower" has been on my mind for many months. It is my hope that you will take time to read my thinking concerning the important question that you asked.

I addressed you in a familiar sense because I believe that for us there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who are willing to accept into themselves some experience of the Holocaust and those who will not. There are those that seek to understand or find significance from the terrible events and those that ignore or avoid the subject. To avoid the subject, this watershed of moral history, is to avoid responsibility to God and the understanding of Human responsibility. All who seek understanding do thereby not evade responsibility and also seek God – however distant or remote He may seem. A religious or moral person must come to grips with what makes evil and good, transgression, sin and ultimately forgiveness. You have condensed it all into the one confrontation and experience.

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

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A Jew who does not take the experience of the Holocaust into himself – who does not identify with or at least to some small measure feel the suffering – has betrayed his heritage.

A Christian who does not face the problem of the Christian causation of the Holocaust, of the guilt that devolves on Christianity for the centuries that it taught that the Jews is to be despised and hated, cannot be considered as a God fearing religious person but only as another Idolator with a profession of faith and belief but not a responsibility either to God or man. Christians must learn to face that criminal churchly teachings created an atmosphere making it possible to hate and despise the Jews and to tolerate such hate and despising as not inconsistent with Christianity. Those teachings and the toleration of such teachings created the terrible climate in which the Jews have suffered for two millenia and set the stage for the awful murders and atrocities for the six million Jews in this century. Shall the Christian ministers and priests protest: "We only meant you to hate the Jews, to despise the Jews – but not to murder the Jews"?

The dying SS man in "The Sunflower", despite his Catholic childhood and youth, did not send for a priest to hear his confession and to provide the words of forgiveness or absolution. He knew that any priest that had not spoken out against the murders, the Nazis, the anti-Semitism was contaminated, if only as an accomplice, in the sin of murdering Jews. The dying Nazi knew that forgiveness from a priest for his crime would be tainted and unclean.

The only hope of the dying SS man was to turn to repentence and to seek forgiveness of his victims. But the victims were dead and beyond earthly communication. So he sought another suffering humiliated Jew as the representative of his people – in the hope that such a Jew would be an ear of God to hear the confession, know that one criminal did repent, and provide perhaps a drop of forgiveness for his sin against the Jews. The dying man had taken a correct approach to reconcile his soul with the Eternal. In his limited understanding the dying man probably felt that only a Jew could serve as his priest.

Could the Jew, the single Jew Simon, forgive? There are three lines of forgiveness. God can forgive; the victim can forgive; and the sinner can forgive himself. The forgiveness of God, when granted is complete. The forgiveness of the victim can plead for the sinner with God. forgiveness of the self by the self enables one to live untroubled in this world. It is almost like having sinned in such innocence as not to recognize that one has sinned. But it seems doubtful that self-forgiveness can reconcile the sinner’s soul to God.

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

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Forgiveness by the victim is a holy forgiveness, a reconciliation that eliminates hate and should serve to prevent future evil between humankind. It provides a foundation for peace in the world and should calm the angered spirit of God as He beholds His creation.

It is this last form of forgiveness that concerned Simon the Jew. The questions he had to ask himself were:

1. Do I have the authority to forgive? Can such violation of the commandment "Thou shall not murder" be forgiven by any human agent?

1. Who do I forgive? What do I forgive?

1. To what extent can I forgive? What kind of forgiveness, absolute or limited?

1. If I forgive what is the meaning of that forgiveness in respect to my people, the victims of yesterday, today and tomorrow and the continuing war the children of God must wage against evil?

Simon could have "forgiven". But what would that forgiveness be? Would it be so complete as if the Nazi's sin and crimes had been completely expunged? As if they had not existed? As if they had been washed clean away by the blood of the lamb? The blood of his victims? Or was it to be a partial forgiveness, leaving a percentage of clinging guilt to the soul of the Nazi so that it was not completely clean as it approached God? Was the forgiveness to mean that Simon the Jew could love, in the Christian sense of love, the Nazi despite the horrible crime? Was it to mean that Simon could reconcile himself to the murderer so that Simon could live without the pain of the murderers' crimes? Crimes that would continue even after the death of the murderer. And if Simon were to forgive the murderer was he not also to forgive those who created the climate and historical conditions that made the murders possible? To forgive also those that looked on the crimes with indifference? To forgive those who refused help to the victims? To forgive those who made no move and remained silent in the face of the evil even though they had the capacity to act and speak – indeed shout to the heavens and to the half sleeping, mostly indifferent world of the atrocity that Cain was deliberately and methodically murdering his brothers because they were of a different belief or a different race? Would Simon, by forgiving the Nazi, also forgive those Jews of today and the future that do not help their

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

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brothers? Once the Nazi were forgiven by a Jew where would that forgiveness stop and what would be the ultimate significance of the forgiveness? Would it mean the perpetual toleration of mass murder, of mass atrocity and the indifference of mankind? Could any human even attempt to forgive this crime or the indifference that permits the crime?

By what authority could Simon feel authorized to forgive? Was the authorization of the Nazi sufficient? Would not Simon also need the authorization of his murdered people? And did not the murder of that people mock the only God that could confer the forgiveness?

If Simon had taken it upon himself to act for the victims would he not have betrayed those victims again and compounded the crime? In Jewish religion and law. I believe that it is stated that only the victim can forgive. Simon was and continues to this day a victim of Nazism and of the indifference of the world. Should he forgive that? Could he forgive the one repentent Nazi, if only for the sin against himself, while he himself or his people continued to suffer?

The Nazi did repent, and now that he was near death and out of danger of his fellows for repentent conduct, he made an offering to Simon. Or rather he bequeathed to Simon his belongings. The Nazi recognized that even after his own death it was possible that Simon could still forgive him. Simon knew that the offering would provoke and enhance the spirit of forgiveness if it were accepted but acceptance of the offering of the package of personal belongings also meant betrayal of Simon's suffering comrades to increased suffering and probable prompt painful death. The personal belongings were most probably clothes and documents that would have enabled Simon to disguise himself and have a chance to escape, to have some freedom, to live!

The refusal of the package by Simon marks him as a very singular human – a special Jew, one of the Just. Simon had been clearly tested by God and set aside his personal interests to share in the common lot of suffering humanity and his fellow Jews. He recognized the repentence of the Nazi and remembered the obligation. After Simon was liberated and regained some health and strength he paid a "shiva" call on the SS man's mother and added mitzvah to his silence. Simon did a private personal service for the dead enemy, an act of personal forgiveness that did not affect his status with his people, and provided some measure of relief of suffering to the dead man's innocent mother. It was the special act of a Just man.

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

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The Holocaust is the work of men but in that colossal crime God posed questions and it is in the answers we give that we acknowledge and affirm allegiance to God and the laws that God has given to us. The Holocaust poses a question to mankind and especially to those who profess to be religious. It is through the study and response to that question that one can determine his relation to God and the validity of his beliefs.

Simon, a suffering humiliated Jew victim, could have in his brief moment of power tormented the Nazi and vocally have denied forgiveness. But Simon sat quietly and listened with horror but without hate, and with some measure of pity for the tormented soul. Simon did not forgive but neither did he deny forgiveness to the dying man. He heard the confession and understood the repentence. Simon was silent throughout and he did not verbally abuse or reproach the dying man for it is prohibited by Jewish law to oppress the penitent.

Simon knew, despite Simon's question to us, that he had no authority to forgive; that it was beyond his duty to do more than listen. The suffering of the SS man was between the man and God but the Jew was conceived as the conduit for the final prayers of the penitent dying man to God and to the remnant of the Jewish people for forgiveness. In part it was to transmit that final prayer to the Jewish people that Simon was preserved to this world. The remaining and continuing Jews in this world can only answer or think about that prayer affirmatively if it is accompanied by true repentence from those that have sinned or have been accomplices in the sin of anti-Semitism. Maimonides taught that repentence begins in thought and is followed by words of confession and the penitent must break with the sinful past and endeavor to correct the wrong.

I doubt that the dead SS man even in his repentence, or any repentent murderer of the Jews, can be forgiven or should be forgiven unless the world that created such monsters comes forward with some assurance that there will not be a future victimization or otherwise the act of forgiveness, even by God, would be futile. The world itself must be the surety, the offering, for the monsterous sin of the Holocaust.

I bow in respect to God who created you, to the questions that you pose and the answers that your life gives.

Shalom,

[handwritten signature]

JACK RABIN, M.D.

JR/dc

Mr Simon Wiesenthal

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FOOTNOTES

1. 1. I use the present tense. The Holocaust must always be considered as being in the present – as the Exodus, the Covenant and the receiving of the Law at Sinai.

It involves us all.

1. 2. LEV. 25-17

1. 3. Pope John XXIII started the process for the Catholic church. Unfortunately the church has now regressed.