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Editorial
The Editors

The tragic experience of the Holocaust has profoundly affected, and still affects, the course of Jewish history and the social and religious evolution of the Jewish people. It also affects dramatically the relations between Jews and Christians. After all, this indescribable event took place on a con tinent which used to call itself Christian, and there exists a shocking parallel between the antiJewish measures once enacted by the Church and those of the Nazis (see Roy Eckardt, Elder and Younger Brothers, New York, 1967, pp. 12-14). It is therefore amazing that so few serious studies have been made on the origin, the consequences and the implications of this event. In fact a number of Jewish authors have tried to grasp the dimensions and the meaning of that experience, but very few Christians have done so. Perhaps this is understandable: what happened in the Holocaust experience is too great, it transcends human imagination and human intelligence. Only slowly do facts, circumstances and causes of decisive historical events penetrate the mind and heart of man. On the other hand, those who have lived this experience and bear its mark in their flesh cannot remain silent. They must speak and try to express the significance of what proves to be a mystery of human and divine history.
Actually, all descriptions and explanations hitherto given of the Holocaust are unsatisfactory. However, the growing number of studies and reflections on this event show many aspects which can make us increasingly aware of its depth and meaning. This is certainly not an easy or joyful dis covery. A serious consideration of this experience challenges both God and man, faith in God and faith in man; it questions the sense of human life and of Jewish and Christian faith. Only in the perspective of biblical experience, in which faith has led the people of ~God through the depths of darkness to new light and hope, can something of this twentieth-century reality be understood.
It is our hope that this issue of SIDIC, which collects some reflections of Jews and Christians on the Holocaust, may contribute, not perhaps to understanding this event, but to purifying and renewing both the relations between Jews and Christians and our faith and hope in God, whose ways are higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth (Is. 55:9).