Child's Play

Copyright Rabbi Eli Hecht
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What a joy this morning. It's Lag B'Omer again! The bus arrives and happy faces of sweet little children come jumping off the high bus step. School friends run into the yard laughing and racing one another to the playground. The morning has started for parents, teachers and children. Once again, our school parking lot is full of cars and school vans. Very little ones from the daycare center are being gently, ever so gently walked to their classes where they will be cared for and loved. Music is piped into the classrooms, giving a feeling of freshness to their daily environment. The school pulses with the spirit of pure happy children - a delightful feeling to have. Childhood is a special paradise!

The day of Lag B'Omer is a special one. In our city over 1,000 children meet for fun and play. Schools partake in special trips and related fun activities. There is no study this day - only time for a children's holiday! Some bring jump ropes, basketballs and other excited ones have their own sets of bows and arrows.

Many years ago the great sage, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, stated that as long as he lived there would be no need for G‑d's rainbow to be seen in the sky. The rainbow is a sign of G‑d's promise to Noah and the world that no destructive rain would ever destroy the world. Indeed, during Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai's time there was no rainbow for his merit protected the world; and so the children have their bow and arrows with which to remember the great rabbi.

Today I also remember how about 50 years ago Jewish children celebrated Lag B'Omer. In the book, Lodz Ghetto, there is a description of Lag B'Omer in the ghetto in 1942. Josef Zelkowixz was an ordained rabbi who served in the Polish army and then joined the Yivo Research Institute of Vienna. He died in Auschwitz in 1944. The following is an excerpt from his writings:

"May, 1942

  Lag B'Omer: how does it look in the ghetto? It⬢s wrapped  in clouds and rain. The skies are gray and send a cold wind and snow. Lag B'Omer, and it snows! And you, son of the earth, where will you send your children? Where will you find fresh, free air for them to breathe? And anyhow, where do you find children in the ghetto? This species dies out before it even reaches the stage of development recognized as childhood. And if such a creature is lucky enough not to die, he immediately turns into an old Jew.

There are no children in the ghetto. Little Jews do not go to work before the age of ten, but they stand in line at kitchens, bread stores - Jews eleven years old and older already go to work. Their faces are not covered with beards, they have no wives, but they go to work, all right.

The children of the ghetto are workers. They earn ten pfennig an hour, eighty pfennig a day. Their wages are small, and their jobs are hard, too hard. For eight hours a day they're locked between the walls of a factory or workshop, which sometimes lacks even the most basic sanitary conditions. They must report, like soldiers, at seven in the morning. For each lateness 50 pfennig are deducted from their wages. And to be at work by seven, a little Jew must be up at six. And the more hours he is awake, the more hours in the day he is hungry. He often gets nothing to eat at in the morning, and he has to work several hours before they give him a watery soup for his 50 pfennig, and 5 dkg of sausage, which many times weighs only 4 dkg.

It's hard for a child who works the morning shift, from seven a.m. till 2:30 p.m. But it's even harder for those who work the evening shift, from 2:30 to 11:30. Often these children fast until they get to work, where they still have to wait until seven in the evening to finally get their soup.

If working is hard for a child on the evening shift, going home from work is even harder. Since people are permitted on the ghetto streets until only 9  p.m., there is not a soul around when the little Jew returns from his job. Walking along the ghetto fence, he is often stopped by, "Wohin?" (Ger: "Where to?")

Children have to work in the ghetto, or they may be taken from their parents and sent away somewhere. On the other hand, it they work they are citizens of the ghetto, useful and protected. Little, 11-year-old Schutzjuden (Ger: Protected Jews, like those who lived under the  special protection of pre-eighteenth-century German rulers).

Instead of running in the fields, or going to the warm forest to play with wooden swords and bows and arrows, ghetto children go to work. Lag B'Omer or not, the work machine sucks in their tender little bodies and grinds them into scrap. Just as it did with their parents. Even if their legs are not yet swollen from hunger, their backs will become bent and their breasts sunken, and their eyes will look as distant and as cold and gray as today's sky."

How sad and tragic is his description. One feels the dreaded end for the anguished children. Woe to us that we witness such reports.

In spite of the odds, we continue to repopulate our nation.

On Lag B'Omer the children are the masters of the world. They run fearlessly unrestricted, playfully, bursting with energy that only children have. With every breathe, excited laughter and happiness burst from deep within their hearts. It is for our precious children that give us the reasons to live and work.