Customer Reviews

The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors

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What an important piece! This is a very valuable and carefully researched study on the theological meaning of human suffering in the Holocaust. This book focus primarily on how the survivors interpreted their Holocaust experiences and how their experiences affected their religious beliefs and observance. This is an excellent book and a very important study that will be very much appreciated by historians in years to come!

This book/study by Rabbi Reeve Brenner is a great service not only to the victims of the Holocaust but is also a great gift to future generations who are going to see these findings by Rabbi Brenner's research as extremely valuable.

One word: EXCELLENT!!!

This remarkably thoughtful and carefully researched study reports on the changes in religious belief and practice undergone by Holocaust survivors as a result of their ordeal. Most valuable are the personal testimonies of the survivors.

A sensitive study, carefully constructed and empirically based, that supplies substantial, balanced insight where before there were only opinions and surmise. The full range of the victims' religious feeling is revealed, often in their own agonized reflections. Everyone concerned about the contemporary religion, responses to catastrophe, and the state of Jewish belief will want to read this book.

The originality of the theme, the accuracy and vastness of the research - over 700 questionnaires and 100 in-depth interviews and the eloquence of language - surely cast this as one of the important books to emerge from the evergrowing literature of the Holocaust.

Rabbi Brenner's book is a rich footnote to Arendt and Orwell.

An invaluable and long overdue contribution to Holocaust studies. Such personal testimony for survivors reminds us that despite the unspeakable horrors, human dignity and decency and faith were never fully stifled.

Brenner's personalized accounts, the data enhanced by the anecdotal material, provides new depth for understanding, greater than Rabinowitz's New Lives or Elie Wiesel's moving, quasi-mystical account of that time.

He offers in this book a most important understanding of the changes that have occurred thus far. Sociologists and the general community will find this book enlightening.

We are dealing here with an extraordinary achievement, an encyclopedic study which should prove to be one of the very few volumes with staying power and definitiveness to be worthy of a place on a reading and reference bookshelf in the libraries of generations of Jews to come... Page after page, the book lifts the veil which reveals the Jewish innermost soul, the richness of the Jewish mind and character... Among the most uplifting, spirited, and valuable books on a subject whose depth we are now beginning to explore.

The author conceived and carried through his project with great skill. His judicious comments about his findings are enhanced by a sophisticated sense of the limitations of this sort of investigation. His balance of history, ideas, data, excerpts, and interpretation is evocative and enlightening, resulting in a text which is, for this sort of work, even pleasurable reading.