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Pilgrim to Unholy Places

Christians and Jews re-visit the Holocaust

by Raymond Pelly (Author)
©2017 Monographs 367 Pages
Series: Judaica et Christiana, Volume 26

Summary

Based in New Zealand, the author, an Anglican priest, made a number of pilgrimages 1995–2008 to the extermination (and other camp) sites of the Third Reich, 1933–45. These find expression in Diary entries that describe the sites as they now are and scope the problems they raise for both Jews and Christians.
The book thus places the Holocaust at the centre of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In face of the silence of God and the choiceless choices of the victims, the central question is how we – Jews and Christians – can talk agency either of God or the inmates. With a view to opening a conversation between Auschwitz and Golgotha, the author invites the Jewish interlocutor into a consideration of the Jewish victim Christ in the ‘no-way-out’ of the cross.
Can there then be mutual recognition between the many Jews of heroic faith and self-sacrificing love in the death camps and the victim caring Christ? Three examples are cited: a Mrs Levy at Auschwitz; the Paris Rabbi, Berek Kofman; and Janusz Korczak at Treblinka. These and others like them embody an ethic of caring that allow us to be hopeful about the modern world.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Foreword
  • Preface
  • Table of contents
  • Introduction: ‘Raids on the Unspeakable’
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • VI.
  • VII.
  • VIII.
  • IX.
  • Part I: Diaries / Memory
  • Auschwitz, 1995
  • Tuesday, 8th August
  • Wednesday, 9th August
  • Saturday, 12th August
  • Sunday, 13th August
  • Monday, 14th August
  • Tuesday, 15th August
  • Wednesday, 16th August
  • Dachau, 1995
  • Wednesday, 16th August
  • Thursday, 17th August
  • Friday, Saturday, 18th, 19th August
  • Sunday, 20th August
  • L’Viv, Cernitsa, Warsaw, Treblinka, 2001
  • Thursday, 12th July
  • Friday–Sunday, 13th –15th July
  • Sunday, 15th July
  • Monday, 16th July
  • Wednesday, 18th July
  • Thursday, 19th July
  • Friday, 20th July
  • Majdanek, Sobibór, Belźec, 2001
  • Saturday, 21st July
  • Sunday, 22nd July
  • Monday, 23rd July
  • Tuesday, 24th July
  • Wednesday, 25th July
  • Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim Castle, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, 2003
  • Friday, 1st August
  • Saturday and Sunday, 2nd– 3rd August
  • Monday, 4th August
  • Tuesday, 5th August
  • Wednesday, 6th August
  • Thursday, 7th August
  • Friday/ Saturday, 8th/9th August
  • Sunday, 10th August
  • Monday, 11th August
  • Tuesday, 12th August
  • Wednesday, Thursday, 13th/ 14th August
  • Berlin, 2003
  • Friday, 15th – Tuesday, 19th August, Berlin
  • Saturday, 16th August
  • Sunday, 17th August
  • Monday, 18th August
  • Tuesday, 19th August
  • Wednesday, 20th August
  • Thursday, 21st August
  • Friday, 22nd August
  • Mittelbau Dora, Leitenberg, 2006
  • Saturday, 2nd December
  • Sunday, 10th December, Dachau/Leitenberg
  • Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, 2008
  • Monday, 20th October
  • Tuesday, 21st October
  • Thursday, 23rd October
  • Friday, Saturday, 24th and 25th October
  • Part II: Reflections Theology / Ethics / Spirituality
  • 1. Hearing the Cries: The Self-emptying Pilgrim ChristPhilippians 2:5–11 on Kenosis
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • VI.
  • A. On Being a Pilgrim
  • 2. Pilgrim to Unholy Places: A Definition
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • 3. Thinking with Your Feet: The Pilgrim’s Way of Knowing
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • VI.
  • 4. Kneeling and Surviving: The Pilgrim and Prayer
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • B. Holy / Unholy
  • 5. Unholy Places: Site-specific Reckoning with Evil
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • 6. Holy Places I: Paul Celan and Grief
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • 7. Holy Places II: Paul Ricoeur and Memory
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • C. Jewish–Christian Dialogue
  • 8. Rachel Weeping For Her Children: Biblical Precursor of the Holocaust
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • 9. Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Agency, Divine and Human
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • VI.
  • 10. Auschwitz and Golgotha (1): Analogue or Adversary?
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • 11. Auschwitz and Golgotha (2): Impulses for a Shared Covenantal Ethic
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • D. Learning from the Shoah
  • 12. God as Co-Passionate: Abyss of Love, Victim-Survivor
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • 13. Christ and Horrors: Engführung: Narrowing / Impasse
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • 14. Recognition, Thanksgiving: Honour, Gratitude
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • E. Last word
  • 15. Real Hope in the Real World?
  • I.
  • II.
  • III.
  • IV.
  • V.
  • Appendix: On De- and Reconstructing Root Metaphors: The Analogy of the Sun
  • Bibliography
  • About the author

Raymond Pelly

Pilgrim to Unholy Places

Christians and Jews re-visit the Holocaust

About the author

RAYMOND PELLY is an Anglican Priest living and working in New Zealand. He has an MA in Theology from Oxford University and a Doctorate in Ecumenical Theology from the University of Geneva. Besides serving in numerous parishes, he has taught at Westcott House, Cambridge (UK); St John’s College, Auckland (NZ); and the University of Massachusetts, Boston Campus (USA). He was also Visiting Scholar at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1982/3 and 1995/6. His most recent work, 2005–2014, has been as Honorary Priest Associate at the Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, New Zealand, where he had a ministry of counselling, spiritual direction and education.

About the book

Based in New Zealand, the author, an Anglican priest, made a number of pilgrimages 1995–2008 to the extermination (and other camp) sites of the Third Reich, 1933–45. These find expression in Diary entries that describe the sites as they now are and scope the problems they raise for both Jews and Christians.

The book thus places the Holocaust at the centre of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In face of the silence of God and the choiceless choices of the victims, the central question is how we – Jews and Christians – can talk agency either of God or the inmates. With a view to opening a conversation between Auschwitz and Golgotha, the author invites the Jewish interlocutor into a consideration of the Jewish victim Christ in the ‘no-way-out’ of the cross.

Can there then be mutual recognition between the many Jews of heroic faith and self-sacrificing love in the death camps and the victim caring Christ? Three examples are cited: a Mrs Levy at Auschwitz; the Paris Rabbi, Berek Kofman; and Janusz Korczak at Treblinka. These and others like them embody an ethic of caring that allow us to be hopeful about the modern world.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Foreword

Father Pelly has undertaken a remarkable series of pilgrimages all the long way from New Zealand to Europe’s most unholy places viz. the death camps. With the deepest humility imaginable he has stood on grounds where just the remains of the death-machinery are visible, none of its victims. Still, he was able to hear their cries and, having learned about some of them from survivors’ testimonies and other sources, to picture who they were. This eyewitness testimony, set in the context of the historical background, raises many questions. These are explained as the book unfolds; and is followed by answers which, of course, remain open for the fuller discussion they definitely deserve.

Being a Christian theologian (Anglican), Fr. Pelly had to start from a clear Christian perspective. His key reference is Philippians 2, which is also at the basis of his definition of a pilgrim. However, the Hebrew Bible is never far away; Jeremiah 31, e.g., is a very important reference. The basic facts that Jesus was a Jew and most of the victims were Jews make it absolutely necessary to think about the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. So the author asks whether the two streams, the Torah and the Cross, could possibly meet, making explicit, however, that ‘this is a question, not a statement, an invitation to a dialogue between equals’. In Fr. Pellys view, this dialogue has a purpose: To make our world humane and sustainable, or, in Biblical parlance, to provide a sufficient number of people to save Sodom and Gomorrah.

A glance at the bibliography shows Fr. Pellys wide reading in the fields of history, holocaust, philosophy, and theology. The author has very much food for thought to offer both Jews and Christians.

Simon Lauer, Zurich

July, 2016←5 | 6→ ←6 | 7→

Preface

This book has been twenty years in the making. Not only did it involve pilgrimages to the unholy sites of the Holocaust, starting with Auschwitz, it also required prolonged periods of writing and re-writing imposed by the intractable nature of the subject matter itself. The text thus hammered out was for many publishers a puzzle. With its mix of scholarly rigour and personal feeling – not to speak of prayer – it didn’t fit easily into any pre-conceived list. Was the project to die ‘the death of a thousand rejections’?

It was therefore with gratitude and relief I leaned that Peter Lang Verlag, Berne, had agreed to include it in their series, Judaica et Christiana, co-edited by Rabbi Professor Simon Lauer (Zurich) – who has kindly agreed to contribute the Foreword – and Emeritus Professor Stefan Schreiner, Tübingen. In this connection I should also like to thank Simone Netthoeval and Johanna Lüder at Peter Lang Verlag whose prompt and courteous handling of all matters to do with the production of this book has been exemplary.

My sincere thanks also to Religious Communities that offered me hospitality on my pilgrim way. Initially the Sisters of the Love of God, Fairacres, Oxford; and then the Carmelite Communities in Auschwitz (the new one!), Dachau, Berlin, and Weimar/Schöndorf; finally, the Franciscan Community in Esterwegen, Emsland. Each in their different way offered friendship and encouragement along with space to write and to pray. To them I owe a debt I can never repay. If I single out Karmel Heilig Blut, Dachau, for special mention, it is because this has been the Community I have visited most often. There Sisters Elijah Bossler and Irmengard Schuster in particular were a constant source of informed support and understanding. No less vital to the development of my book were the wise and insightful comments of Sr. Maria-Theresia Smith, Berlin. ‘What is a Jewish person going to think when they read what you have written?’, she would ask, a comment that went to the heart of what I was doing.

It was at Karmel Dachau that I met (and talked with) the late Max Mannheimer, a Jewish survivor of Aushwitz; and besides him, other survivors who have been present or given talks at the Convent or in other centres on the Dachau Memorial Site. From them I got some idea of the sheer horror of what they as victim-survivors had undergone. While I didn’t benefit from the feed-back of an academic seminar or teaching situation,←7 | 8→ I want to thank most warmly two Jewish scholars, Rabbi Professor Paul Morris, Victoria University of Wellington, and Professor Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. The former read a draft of Chapter 9, Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, and encouraged me to keep going; and the latter, Professor Levine, scrutinized the entire MS with extraordinary attention to detail and made many telling observations. It goes without saying, however, that neither they nor any of the above-mentioned persons are responsible for the opinions expressed in my book or its general approach.

My final word of thanks must go to my wife, Barbara Craig. Not only did she put up with the absences from New Zealand (and initially, the US) necessitated by my pilgrimages, she also ‘kept the home fires burning’ and extended warm and loving welcomes to me on my return. Without her sustained and stalwart support, the present book could never have been written. It is therefore dedicated to her, and to our children, Carla and Tom.

Raymond Pelly

Wellington, August, 2016 ←8 | 9→

Details

Pages
367
Year
2017
ISBN (PDF)
9783034324335
ISBN (ePUB)
9783034324342
ISBN (MOBI)
9783034324359
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034321945
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0343-2433-5
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (January)
Published
Bern, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2017. 367 pp., 42 coloured ill.

Biographical notes

Raymond Pelly (Author)

Raymond Pelly is an Anglican Priest living and working in New Zealand. He has an MA in Theology from Oxford University and a Doctorate in Ecumenical Theology from the University of Geneva. Besides serving in numerous parishes, he has taught at Westcott House, Cambridge (UK); St John’s College, Auckland (NZ); and the University of Massachusetts, Boston Campus (USA). He was also Visiting Scholar at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1982/3 and 1995/6. His most recent work, 2005-2014, has been as Honorary Priest Associate at the Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, New Zealand, where he had a ministry of counselling, spiritual direction and education.

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