A new book of psalms doesn’t praise God, but confronts Him over the Holocaust
Released on Jan. 27, genocide expert Menachem Rosensaft’s ‘Burning Psalms’ is a harsh condemnation of the lack of divine intervention against the Nazis – but it’s not a dismissal
NEW YORK — Nearly 80 years after Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, Menachem Rosensaft decided it was time to confront God. And so he penned “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.”
Released on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the collection of 150 psalms can be read as a stark contrast to the biblical Book of Psalms. Where the latter extols God as a loving, protective shield against evil and evildoers, Rosensaft’s psalms are an indictment of God for being absent amid the industrial-scale murder that was the Holocaust.
“It’s a matter of expressing some grievances with God. It’s a matter of addressing the absence of any divine intervention during the years of the Holocaust. It’s a matter of telling God: You parted the Red Sea for Moses but you did not crumble the walls of the crematoria and allow those inside to escape,” said Rosensaft, a scholar of genocide and the Holocaust.
An adjunct professor of law at Cornell University and Columbia University, Rosensaft has served in various roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is also a co-founder of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
While Rosensaft wrote the collection from the perspective of a son of survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen whose families were murdered in the Holocaust, he also channeled the voice of the brother he never knew. Benjamin Prejzerowicz was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of August 3, 1943, when he was 5 years old.
“You did not roar, did not even whisper… [A]nd yet You rescued David from his enemies but left me gasping for air, gas filling my lungs on a cold cement floor,” he writes in “Burning Psalm 18.”
Rosensaft completed the book, which he described as “a self-propelled catharsis of silent screams worthy of Edvard Munch,” three months before the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught, in which some 1,200 people in southern Israel were slaughtered and 251 taken hostage to the Gaza Strip. Compelled to address the modern-day pogrom, Rosensaft added a coda to his book, which includes the poem “Simhat Torah Requiem,” dedicated to the killed, wounded, hostages and survivors of October 7.

As much as Rosensaft wrote “Burning Psalms” to help make sense of his relationship with God regarding the Holocaust, he also speaks of his anguish about the deaths of children in Rwanda, Srebenica, Gaza, and the West Bank.
“Anyone with a heart, anyone with a soul must have deep compassion and empathy for their suffering,” he writes in the book’s forward.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Times of Israel: The book’s release coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is also the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. What role do you hope “Burning Psalms” plays in Holocaust remembrance?
Menachem Rosensaft: We will no longer be able to rely on the voices and words of the survivors who stood up, and stand up, to tell their stories.
I think something has to change drastically if we want the memories of those who survived to survive, if we want their memories to become a permanent part of our consciousness. It is up to us to bear witness to the witnesses.
Why did you choose to mirror the Book of Psalms to engage with this topic?
I find it jarring that we go about praising and thanking God for all these miracles without acknowledging that there were no miracles at Auschwitz.
For example, Psalm 148 is about all the elements of creation praising God — the sky, the stars. That’s incongruous within the context of the Holocaust. Reading it is a reminder of what didn’t happen [in the camps].
One of the saddest psalms to me is the one where you write in the voice of your brother Benjamin.

I always knew my mother had a child and that his name was Benjamin. It wasn’t until I was old enough to start learning about the Holocaust that I learned how my brother was killed. He was holding his father’s hand and they were sent to the gas chambers. My mother, who was separated from them, was selected to live.
It was not until I was a teenager that I found out my mother had a photo of her son. She never had it out on display, but I am convinced she looked at it every single day.
After she died in 1997, I realized the only place where Ben still existed was within me and that if I stopped remembering him he would disappear, he would vanish. I could not let that happen.
Do you now feel reconciled with God?
It’s not a matter of reconciliation with God, it’s a matter of expressing my grievances against God.
I think we have two choices. We can stop interacting with God and choose the idea that there is no God — “There is no God. There remains no God. And we have killed him,” as Nietzsche said — or we can choose the faith-based approach, which is that God is ever present.
But I think if we want to praise God for the miracles, then we have to confront Him for failing to provide miracles at a critical moment.
You finished the book three months before the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack. In the coda, which consists of several poems, there is a poem called “The Child.” Can you speak about that?

Children bear no responsibility for the violence and hatred in the world, whether starving in the Warsaw Ghetto or being murdered in the gas chamber, or wrapped in a shroud outside the hospital in Gaza.
Only when we understand why someone else is crying may we move forward, and I’m hoping that my collection of psalms pierces through people and gets them to stop and think and take suffering out of the political realm.
I’m hoping that readers of my psalms will come away with an appreciation of the absolute depths of horror and devastation, not just to remember backwards, but to be part of preventing such things in the future.
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