David Weiss Halivni remembers the ghetto this way: "Whoever participated in that life, even for a short time, became a wounded relic of human cruelty, a creature of a blemished universe. The people of the ghetto are no more. But their fear and anguish persist, and will plague humankind until the end of days."
In Biblical cadence and phrase, the Columbia University scholar tells of his life as a Holocaust survivor in The Book and the Sword, just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is a spiritual odyssey that begins with early Talmudic erudition as a precocious child in an impoverished family in Romania shadowed by the growing Nazi threat.
As a person renowned for his excellent memory, "it is startling that I have almost no recollection of the days I spent in Auschwitz," he writes. But he remembers vividly the day he was barely 17 "when we were standing in Auschwitz before Josef Mengele," when Mengele signaled David's beloved grandfather to the right and death "and me to the left." And he remembers his risk in another concentration camp to save a page, a bletl, of the Torah.
His odyssey continued after the war, through years of struggle adapting to the loss of his family and to a new land, and then a new emergence into an academic life, first as a rabbi and scholar at Jewish Theological Seminary and then at Columbia, where he has taught for 35 years, full time since 1986.
For him, learning was always a key to survival. He writes:
"It was learning that made my life as a child bearable, insulated me from what was happening in the ghetto, and reached symbolic heights with the bletl, the page of holy text in which the German guard wrapped his snack; and it was learning that allowed me to resume my life after the Holocaust and to enter academia."
Now 67, Dr. Halivni is as rooted in the future as in the past. He has just returned from the University of Nanjing where he helped start the first center for Jewish studies in China and addressed the country's first academic meeting of Chinese, Jewish and Israeli scholars.
"I feel a kinship with the suffering of many Chinese, in their struggle to survive," he said in a recent interview.
And he is devoted to his students, to whom he teaches Jewish family law and Talmudic texts and for whose lives and careers he continues to be a mentor long after graduation. At present, he is particularly proud of three students who recently earned doctorates with him and are now in tenure track positions at NYU, Maryland and Emory. Ten years ago he promised a young man at graduation time that he would officiate at his wedding one day, and this past June he traveled to Israel to do so.
In his class on family law with 25 undergraduates, he describes how Jewish family members fulfill their obligations to one another - what they owe and what they should receive. Most students are Jewish and read texts in Hebrew; but one is a Korean woman from a heavily Jewish section of Queens, whose father told her it would be smart to know the neighbors better.
Dr. Halivni is a small, gentle man with a kind smile whose book-lined office walls in Kent Hall bear great leather volumes of Talmudic literature and rows of reference studies. The calm permanence of this scholarly architecture fits his academic title: the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization.
On a table sits his own newest book, his tenth, 197 pages subtitled A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction. A group photograph on the title page shows the young David Halivni with four family members: his aunt, grandfather, sister and mother, all of whom perished in the Holocaust.
Its title comes from an early Jewish Biblical interpretation, Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy 4:2: "The sword and the book came down from heaven tied to each other. Said the Almighty: 'If you keep what is written in this book, you will be spared this sword; if not, you will be consumed by it.' We clung to the book, yet we were consumed by the sword."
Dr. Halivni is acutely troubled by how little we have learned from the horror of the Holocaust: "With all of the books that have been written about that period and about the war, we are still consumed by the sword," he said. "Just look around you; look at Bosnia. There is so much progress in so many fields, yet they kill each other. Why it continues is one of history's great questions."
The story of the bletl is central to Dr. Halivni's book. He was a stone worker helping to build a tunnel in the Wolfsberg concentration camp when he saw a German sentry with a greasy sandwich in a stained wrapper and recognized the paper as a page from the Shulchan Aruch, the most authoritative book of Jewish law. When he begged for it excitedly, the guard reached for his gun, then softened and gave it over, and, though soiled and partly illegible from the grease, it became for the inmates "a visible symbol of a connection between the camp and the activities of Jews throughout history," Dr. Halivni writes.
The bletl, dangerous to be seen, was entrusted to a Moshe Finkelstein, who carried it always, even slept with it, and showed it at secret services. Toward the end of the war, both men were taken to the Ebensee extermination camp, and they met there once. "I asked him about the bletl. He tapped his hip, and that was enough of a sign that, despite the horrible conditions, which killed perhaps as many as 90 percent of us, the bletl was safe and secure." "Soon after we parted, Mr. Finkelstein collapsed. Before there was time to remove the bletl from his body, he was taken away to the crematorium. When Mr. Finkelstein's body went up in smoke, the bletl went with him."
The Book and the Sword is available in bookstores now. Dr. Halivni continues work on his next book, the seventh in a 10-volume study of the sources and traditions of the Talmud, which has gained him world renown as a scholar of a tradition he is determined to keep alive.
(Note: Photographs of Professor Halivni are available; call 212-854-5573)
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