Why Did a Jewish Woman Prepare Pork During the Holocaust Before Eating It?

Abraham Saba zt"l, one of the exiled from Spain, writes in his book 'Tzror Hamor' about the words of the prophet Jeremiah "Set up for yourself road markers" (Jeremiah 31:21) that if they decree not to put on tefillin, as happened in the days of the sages of the Talmud and also in Portugal, one should make marks for oneself and tie a scarlet thread (red) on one's hand to remind you of the tefillin between your eyes.

In the book "In the Secret of Thunder" (Halacha, Thought, and Leadership During the Holocaust, A. Farbstein, p. 140), there is an event from the Holocaust period in the Bergen-Belsen camp, witnessed by the survivor Yonah Emanuel. Jews from Amsterdam were brought to the camp along with their rabbi, Rabbi Dasberg of Groningen. There, they were forced to do labor every day of the week.

And this is how Yonah Emanuel testified about what happened on Shabbat, which was a regular workday of breaking silk nuts: "It was easy work, sitting down, but in terms of Shabbat, it was a prohibition of labor, a prohibition of disassembling, which is forbidden by the Torah! I was sitting opposite Rabbi Dasberg, and suddenly the rabbi sighed and said: 'We are forgetting that today is Shabbat. I know we are allowed to work, but we must not forget that today is Shabbat, for which there is no permit. It is desirable for one of us to sit here and not work, not break nuts, so that we all feel that today is Shabbat.' We were astonished; in the situation of life-threatening danger, the rabbi was concerned that we were forgetting that today is Shabbat. We accepted the rabbi’s proposal, and that is what we did."

Preparing Pork

The grandchild of Holocaust survivors tells how his grandmother reminded herself of the commandments of keeping kosher alongside eating pork, and this is how he tells it: "The Nazis would only give Jews meat from carcasses and torn animals, and meat of impure animals. And indeed, they were permitted to eat it due to danger to life. Nevertheless, when my grandmother's mother, of blessed memory, received pork to eat once, she prepared the prohibited meat, saying that although we are allowed to eat, we must not forget the way and manner in which a Jew eats kosher meat. She recounted that when she received this meat, it was on the eve of the holy Shabbat, and on Shabbat night she obtained candles, and thus on the table were placed, next to each other, the holy Shabbat candles, and to differentiate between sacred and profane, the pork. And the act of preparing the meat was done with a Jewish feeling of "Set up for yourself road markers," and educating her children. But indeed, this is the law, since the prohibition on eating non-kosher meat and the prohibition on eating blood are two separate prohibitions, hence even when the eating of prohibited meat is allowed for danger to life, the eating of blood is not permitted, and the meat must be prepared."

Courtesy of the 'Dirshu' website