ABSTRACT
In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis occupied many blocks in the center of the city; of some 400,000 of its inhabitants, few survived; the buildings themselves were methodically razed to the ground after the 1943 uprising. In the Jewish tradition, funeral rites have great and sacred significance. The Jewish presence in communities throughout Eastern Europe left hardly any physical traces; buildings were either deliberately destroyed by the Nazis, ravaged by war or abandoned to decay later. The destruction of markers of Jewish life, if not as total as in Warsaw, proceeded beyond repair. The very term “Holocaust,” introduced in the late 1960s as shorthand for the near total destruction of European Jews, is problematic. Both Christian and Jewish theologians have struggled with the answers; traces of the question are also to be found in much of Holocaust literature and art in general.
