ABSTRACT

What was the meaning of the holocaust for survivors of the Holocaust? That the Holocaust would be seen as invested with meaning by a certain large number of survivors could have been anticipated well in advance of conducting the study. For those survivors who remained atheists throughout the years, catastrophes like the Holocaust could have no connection whatever to a nonexistent diety. In connection with God's will and the Holocaust it is particularly revealing to compare survivors who retained their faith with survivors who lost their faith. Messianism, while hardly obsolete, does not seem to have seized hold of the modern post-Holocaust consciousness. Atheists and other nontraditional-minded Jews were quite readily able to impose their own interpretations on the conception, apparently even more so than in the case of chosenness. Most, but not all survivors who lost faith in God during the Holocaust simultaneously discontinued belief in Judaism's truth.