c. 1998 Religion News Service”For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”_ Ecclesiastes 3.

UNDATED _ The cries for Jewish males to come out to the street were heard and followed by Romek Zaks at the beginning of World War II in Poland. The only boy among seven siblings was herded to the edge of town, where he was told by soldiers with machine guns to dig a ditch.

It would be his burial place. The Nazis murdered the unarmed boys and men, then covered them with the newly dug soil.

Rose Kaplovitz could only pray that her brother _ not yet 16 _ was not buried alive.

Toward the end of the war, with four sisters already in concentration camps, her father had to endure one final humiliation in his daughter’s presence: taking her hand in his and walking her over to the Germans. Only one child, her youngest sister, was permitted to stay in the Sosnowiec ghetto. She would survive the Ober Alstadt concentration camp. Her parents would perish.

Today, the Beachwood, Ohio resident will never forget or forgive the people responsible for those crimes. But she has decided her own response to the Holocaust is to go beyond telling her story to community groups. She wants to be a voice for love and compassion.

“If I would hold all that hate within me, I would be the most miserable person,” she said.

This is a special time in the historical record of the Holocaust. As the living memory begins to fade with the aging of survivors, there is great concern that the voices of the slaughtered innocents never be forgotten. From the Vatican to the Austrian government, the approach of a new millennium has prompted painful soul-searching and acknowledgment of responsibility for the horrific crimes of the past century.

At the same time, many Jewish Americans are also engaged in self-reflection, asking how one comes to terms with such a defining moment of evil in the context of attempts at repentance by non-Jewish groups.

The title of a new booklet produced by the Orthodox Union for study in congregations puts the question boldly: “When Should We Stop Hating?”

The book is frank in recognizing lingering anger. In the introduction, Rabbi Eliezer Shore notes that when he was growing up, his family would not buy German products, and when something bad happened to Germans, Poles or Ukrainians, they would quietly remark, “It serves them right.”

Though hatred of Germans may be understandable, is it right, the study booklet ask readers. And if it is justified, should it be perpetuated?

“If I teach my children to hate Germans, is it not I who am perpetuating hatred in the world? But if I do not express my own feelings, if I do not teach them to hate, am I not profaning my grandparents’ blood?” contemplates Shore.

There are no easy answers, said Rabbi Yaacov Haber, author of the study booklet.

“As a Jew, as a Jew who tries to be an observant Jew, what I’m really taught from day one is not to hate, but to love,” said Haber, director of the Department of Jewish Education of the Orthodox Union in New York.

“Here we come into a situation where how can you not hate?

How can you forgive? That’s the tension. … It’s a very deep, personal question. It’s a probing of the soul.“

His own response? He would never buy a BMW while a survivor still lived, but he would not turn his back on a German who acknowledged the nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

“I think that there’s two types of hate. There’s a hating of evil and a hating of people. I think what we have to do is to make that distinction,” Haber said. “It’s the evil that we’re against. It’s not the people.”

Playwright Faye Sholiton of Beachwood, whose recent work “The Interview” focused on the remembrances of Holocaust survivors, said she used to be in the never-buy-German category.

But her perspective changed as an observer at a 1982 dialogue in New York between Holocaust survivors and Germans. She emerged with an awareness of “how tortured their souls were” and that there were Germans willing to take responsibility for their actions and their country’s actions.

Her own attitude is “still evolving, but if I meet someone who is German now, I no longer feel afraid to speak frankly,” she said.

“I can be angry at someone and not hate them,” she added. “Hatred is what caused the Holocaust in the first place.“

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Kaplovitz came here in 1947. She was 17 and hadn’t been to school in eight years. Her youth had been spent in terror, in ghettos and concentration camps, being spit on and hit and reviled in her own land.

She would never feel comfortable in a German car, and she would consider it a sin to forget what happened.

“Germany as a whole has to be responsible,” she said. “I was born to a mother. Where is her grave? … Even that privilege was taken away from me, a gravesite for my parents.”

But Kaplovitz makes distinctions among those responsible for the criminal acts and their descendants.

When she came to Northeast Ohio, it was a German-American teacher who befriended her and drew her out to attend dances and join the student council. When she got married, the teacher sent her three plates to hang on the wall. She still has the three plates.

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Some non-Jewish groups are going back and looking critically at their roles in the Holocaust.

In Austria, history books have been rewritten to portray the nation not as Hitler’s first victim, but as an ardent sympathizer of the Nazi leader. In Switzerland, reparations are being offered for the financial assistance the nation’s banks provided to the Nazis.

Following messages of repentance from bishops in Germany, France, Poland and the United States, the Vatican recently expressed “deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters.” After touring the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., last fall, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, said, “The bitter truth for so many Christians of that terrible time was that they did not connect the message of their faith to their actions in the world.”

But do such statements go far enough?

Rabbi Yaakov Feitman of Young Israel of Beachwood lost all his grandparents during the Holocaust.

“No apology from the pope or anyone else is going to bring them back,” he said.

What the Jewish community is seeking from other groups is acceptance of full responsibility and complete repentance for actions that contributed to the Holocaust, Feitman said. No excuses. No rationalizations.

“Within Jewry itself, there is a great deal of analysis and really torturous self-criticism” over whether Jewish people in countries such as the United States did what they could to combat the Holocaust, Feitman said.

Coming to terms with the Holocaust in no way means forgetting the evil that was committed, people agree.

“Forget? We can’t forget. We have an obligation. We are very much a people of memory,” said Rabbi Lawrence S. Zierler of Kehillat Yaakov in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

It’s not even about forgiving, Sholiton said. `It’s more about not hating,” she said, “and taking from that terrible time something we can learn and teach.”

DEA END BRIGGS