Cornell Law School professor Menachem Rosensaft will present a reading of his searing new poetic work, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, on April 21, inviting the campus community to reflect on the Holocaust through a deeply spiritual and emotional lens.
The event will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in White Hall, Room 110, and will include a Q&A session following the reading. It is free and open to the public.
Rosensaft, adjunct professor of law and a prominent voice in Holocaust remembrance, draws from his family’s harrowing experiences in Nazi death camps to reimagine the Biblical Psalms. Written in the voices of Holocaust victims, his poems ask wrenching questions of faith, despair, and divine silence. “I want them to get a sense of the psalms and hopefully make use of them going forward on their own trajectory through life, and through spiritual life,” he said.
His psalms replace liturgical comfort with anguished pleas. In one poem, Psalm 7, he writes: “…pursued not by lions / but by vultures / scavengers / rabid dogs in human disguise… I waited for You to save me / but You / watched our enemies / trample our lives / into a dust of ashes…”
Rosensaft was born in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp in 1948. His mother, Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, saving fellow prisoners and 149 children during the Holocaust. She later testified against SS officers at war crimes trials. His father, Josef Rosensaft, survived multiple camps and became a leading advocate for Holocaust survivors.
The personal loss cuts deep. Rosensaft’s half-brother, Benjamin, was five when he and his father perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1943.
Through his poetry, Rosensaft seeks to take Holocaust remembrance into what he calls “the spiritual realm.” He said, “I’m hoping, in terms of Holocaust remembrance, that my psalms can somehow contribute to relating to the dead, to relating to the experience on a spiritual level.”
An internationally recognized advocate for human rights, Rosensaft is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. His prior works include Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen and the anthology God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes.
At Cornell, Rosensaft hopes students will connect with the emotional depth of the psalms—and carry them forward. “The Psalms are a spiritual escape valve, if you will, for human emotion,” he said.
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