'[For] many people, I was the first person they ever confided in. Or if they did tell someone, the person thought they were crazy,' said Rabbi Yonassan Gershom of Minnesota, who spoke Tuesday and Wednesday at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, founded by psychic Edgar Cayce.
Gershom takes the stories seriously. He practices a form of Jewish mysticism, or kabbalah, where, he said in an interview Tuesday, reincarnation has been accepted for centuries.
The rabbi said the Holocaust past-life accounts have come to him unsolicited, starting in 1981 when a young non-Jewish woman told him about her dread of anything related to the Holocaust. He hummed for her a Hebrew hymn sung by many as they went into the gas chambers. She sobbed that she had been killed in the Holocaust.
Another woman, raised southern Baptist in Raleigh, heard of Gershom's interest. In a letter, she described being petrified of high black boots as a child.
' My mother set them near the woodstove so I wouldn't touch it and get burned,'
she said. Years later, the woman wrote, she recognized the boots on Nazi soldiers in a movie about Hitler. 'I felt then that I had been there,' she said.
Gershom, 42, is director of Shevet Shalom (Tribe of Peace), a loose national network of several hundred people who seek to combine Jewish practice with New Age belief in psychic powers. [1996 update: this organization no longer exists.]
Some mainstream rabbis are more than skeptical. 'Reincarnation is not accepted in Judaism except by some fringe element,' said Rabbi Stuart Althshuler at Temple Israel in Norfolk. "The uniqueness of each individual soul is an extremely important Jewish tenet, " he said.
David Kupfer, a Virginia Beach psychologist and son of two Holocaust survivors, had mixed feelings to Gershom's work.
'My basic response is that i'm touched in a positive way by people who are sensitive to those who were killed in the Holocaust,' Kupfer said. Though he did not experience the Holocaust, Kupfer sometimes feels as though he remembers it.
However, he said that he has concerns that the reincarnation stories could call into question the real suffering of Holocaust survivors.
Gershom said he initially kept the stories to himself: 'I didn't want to be accused of sensationalizing a great tragedy,' he said.
But he became convinced of their worth, partly because most of the subjects were non-Jews, recalling details of the Holocaust or of European Jewish life that they normally would not know.
'These are sincere people,' he said. He believes they may have chosen non-Jewish lives this time around because they had only marginal Jewish faith in a past life. When persecuted for Judaism, they identified the religion erroneously only with suffering.
'Even if these are only fantasies, dreams, delusions, 'he said Tuesday, 'they show how deeply the Holocaust has penetrated world consciousness.'
[End of newspaper article]
Update notes by Gershom: This article, which published before my books came out, is an example of the tendency of the gentile press to focus on the cases of Jews returning as non-Jews. Even though this comes from a mainstream press, and was written by a reporter who was very sympathetic to my work, it still tended to focus on Jews returning as blue-eyed blonds. Compare with the focus of the article in the American Jewish World /A> and the two Jewish stories by Rabbi Zalman Schachter, both of which which address cases of people who returned as Jews, and also those non-Jews who have converted to Judaism. See also section Q-8 of the current FAQ on this website for further discussion of these issues.