“And Every Single One Was Someone”
This week we commemorate Yom HaShoah.
I met Ilan Greenfield 46 years ago at a month-long Jewish retreat. An Israeli, Ilan is the son of the founders of Gefen Publishing House, specializing in English-language books of Jewish and Israeli interest. Ilan is now the CEO and Gefen has offices in Jerusalem and New York.
Gefen, which was founded in 1981, publishes about 40 titles a year. One of its books is titled “And Every Single One Was Someone”. It has no plot and is very difficult to read because the lettering is tiny. Even those with extraordinary vision will need reading glasses.
There is only one word in this book: “Jew”. It is printed in a 5.5 font. To give you a sense of the size of the word, here it is in 8 point font:
“Jew”
My computer does not allow for smaller print.
“Jew” is printed six million times, representing the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Each page has 40 columns of 120 lines. “Jew” appears 4,800 times on every page. The book is 1,250 pages and weighs over 7 lbs.
The “author,” Phil Chernofsky said “… pick a ‘Jew’. That could be you. Next to him is your brother… your uncles and aunts and cousins and your whole extended family…”
Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, has a database with four million nine hundred thousand names and biographical information. It also has the testimonies of countless Holocaust survivors. At the end of the testimony, the survivor is given a disk with a copy of their testimony. Every survivor I know lost loved ones. Their loved ones are part of this book.
Most of us cannot imagine six million of anything. It is an overwhelming number. Each page turned in this volume (again, 4,800 “Jews”) ironically makes it even more unimaginable. And yet, it is up to us to keep their memory alive. The more we learn about every one of them, their stories, their families—the more testimonies and biographies we read, the more we pay tribute to their precious souls.
— Rabbi David Woznica