In the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah, I remember the miracle that saved my father’s life
(RNS) — In a soul-stirring prelude to the Jewish Days of Awe (or High Holy Days), Ashkenazic Jews — descendants of European forebears — will gather in synagogues late at night on Saturday (Sept. 5) to recite the first Selichot, a collage of Torah verses and Hebrew poetic entreaties to God asking forgiveness for wrongdoings.
Sephardic Jews, those whose roots go back to North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula, began the Selichot services this year on the night of Aug. 13.
The recitations will continue nightly or in the early morning until Rosh Hashanah (or, for Sephardic Jews, Yom Kippur), the Jewish annual period of divine judgment, which begins at sundown Sept. 11.
Each year, at the first Selichot service, I cannot help but imagine the first Selichot night in Govrov, Poland, in 1939. That was where and when my father , as a 14-year-old, found himself.
A native of a nearby town, Ruzhan, he had planned to travel to a yeshivah in Bialystok. But the German army invaded Poland before he had the chance, and World War II began.
All of Ruzhan’s townsfolk fled ahead of the advancing Germans. On a Friday — the day before the first night of Selichot — they reached Govrov, just before…
