Chaplain Scott Matheney Delivers 35th Holocaust Service of Remembrance

On Sunday, April 6, Rebecca Carter-Chand, the director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, gave the Holocaust Service of Remembrance and Lecture, titled “Understanding Rescue During the Holocaust.”

Before the lecture, Chaplain Scott Matheney introduced the topic of Holocaust remembrance and gave thoughtful words to remember those who suffered during this time. He led a group of faculty and students in the service lighting of candles.

“The German devotion to knowledge and education did not prevent Germans from supporting the Nazis. Quite the opposite,” Matheney said. “The German state used this devotion to knowledge, engineering, and science to kill Jews and others more effectively and efficiently.”

“The Holocaust raises questions about Western civilization,” Matheney continued. “Western civilization rests on the premise that all individuals have value. The Nazis rejected this basic principle. The Nazis and their supporters did not believe that all people are created equal. The Nazis proclaimed that Jews, homosexuals, and Roma are not people.”

While lighting the candles, Matheney said, “We light 12 candles in memory of the 6 million Jews, 5 million Poles, Roma, Sinti, lesbians, gay people, transgender individuals, those with physical disabilities, those with mental disabilities, and anybody whom the Nazis just deemed unworthy. Those who were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe from 1933 to 1945. And we also light to honor the work of those who were rescuers, who were resistors, and who were liberators.”

Mary Kay Mulvaney, a professor in the English department and the director of the Honors Program at Elmhurst University, gave some introductory words for Carter-Chand.

“Dr. Carter-Chand holds a PhD in history and Jewish studies from the University of Toronto, Canada, and an MA in history from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada,” Mulvaney said. “Currently, Dr. Carter-Chand is the director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust that foster scholarship, teaching, and reflection on the intersections between religion and the Holocaust.”

During Carter-Chand’s lecture, she went over many aspects of the Holocaust, specifically relating to minority Christian groups who were around during that time, including the Salvation Army, Quakers, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“You are probably aware that stories of rescue are among the most popular narratives told about the Holocaust, for better or worse,” Carter-Chand said. “In popular culture and memory, they tend to highlight individual courage, altruism, and solidarity. Often, they serve a didactic purpose, inspiring people to develop compassion and a strong moral compass, as well as honoring those people who did some measure of good during very difficult times for Jewish survivors in the post-war period. Acknowledging rescuers was also a way to reaffirm the goodness.”

During her lecture, Carter-Chand spoke about the harrowing stories during the Holocaust and how many Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust were rescued by many groups, but she talked about a specifically harrowing story involving members of the Salvation Army.

“Bound by the same structures, Salvationists in Germany responded to Nazism and antisemitism differently than their co-religionists in occupied Europe, neutral countries, and beyond,” Carter-Chand said. “The political pull in Germany was all toward supporting the Nazi regime and in occupied countries, especially where there was a national resistance movement like in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. People were drawn toward their national resistance movement. They didn’t like the Nazis because the Nazis were occupying their country and to help Jews was part of that larger resistance movement.”

Carter-Chand explained that the Salvation Army in occupied Western Europe and neutral Sweden and Switzerland regularly encountered Jews, treating them the same as any other demographic group in need of the Salvation Army.

Carter-Chand also talked about a testimony she loved: that of a woman named Sealy Silberberg.

“Sealy was born in Czechoslovakia in 1922 and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. She fled Czechoslovakia in 1937 and eventually ended up in Belgium,” Carter-Chand said. “She got married, but her husband was arrested.”

Carter-Chand explained that in 1942, in the middle of the war, Silberberg found herself in German-occupied Brussels, pregnant and alone. She found her way to a Salvation Army women’s shelter, where she stayed for a few months. The Salvation Army knew she was Jewish.

“In other words, she was hiding in plain sight,” Carter-Chand said. “This is what they do. It’s a women’s shelter for vulnerable women is the term they would’ve used at the time.”

“As her due date grew closer, the Salvation Army advised her to go to the hospital to give birth, but to not take an ambulance as that would attract suspicion about her identity,” Carter-Chand continued, explaining that a few other young Jewish women staying in the shelter by that time arranged for a man to come and perform a circumcision. “We don’t know very much about this man.”

According to Silberberg’s testimony, the man was taken by taxi to the hospital in Brussels to perform the circumcision. Silberberg returned to the Salvation Army shelter for a few weeks with her baby.

“She also talks about how the Salvation Army would hold regular religious meetings, prayer meetings, they would want all the young women to participate,” Carter-Chand said. “Sealy felt that she didn’t want to participate, but she also felt like she didn’t want to openly criticize them because they were giving her help.”

At the end of the lecture, Matheney and Rabbi Steven Bob moderated questions and answers with Carter-Chand. One of the attendees asked, “What is next for Elmhurst University for the next 35 years for this work?”

“I would say that Holocaust memory continues even for generations that don’t have immediate memory,” Carter-Chand replied. “How do we continue this? I think it has to come, naturally, from the younger generation. There’s so much interest in the Holocaust. We see it with all the young people at our museum this time of year on their school trips.”

After many other Q’s and A’s, the lecture ended with Mulvaney giving a few words to honor Matheney and to thank him for his many years of service to the university.