Menachem Rosensaft is many things: an adjunct professor of lawat Cornell Law School, a poet, a genocide scholar, a lawyer, a historian, former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, a grandfather.

But at his core, he is the son of two survivors of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

He tapped into that fundamental identity to rewrite the biblical Book of Psalms. "… In what may well be the ultimate manifestation of chutzpah," his introduction says, he wrote from the point of view of those who survived the death camps, and those who died - including his 5 ½-year-old brother, Benjamin - and many other family members.

"Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz" will be published by Ben Yehuda Press on Jan. 27. The publication date coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The biblical Book of Psalms celebrates a merciful, compassionate God who protects us from evil and evildoers. And yet, Rosensaft writes, " … no divine loving kindness manifested itself at Auschwitz or Treblinka, at Majdanek, Babi Yar, Ponary, or Bergen-Belsen."

That disconnect animates his poems.

In his version of Psalm 23, based on perhaps the most famous of the psalms - "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. … Though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff comfort me" - Rosensaft wrote: "a psalm to the emptiness, no shepherd, only foes, no festive table, only bitter soup, moldy bread, no green pastures, no still waters, only blood-drenched rat-infested mud. He is always hungry, she is always cold, their heads anointed, by blows, shadows walking, through the valley of death, Adonai's fog-wrapped house, forever."

Rosensaft spoke with the Chronicle about his new book.

Question: How did your parents talk to you about their experiences?

Answer: Very openly, but also age-appropriately. I was born in the Displaced Persons Camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany in 1948, and my father was the head of the Jewish committee that administered the camp for five years after the end of World War II.

My parents spoke to me freely and forthrightly, and so I grew up knowing about the horrors and knowing what had happened to them, what had happened to their families, what had happened to their friends, what had happened to their communities.

But I first knew about their life in the DP camp, about the Jewish physical, cultural, and spiritual rebirth there, so that by the time I learned about what had happened before, as a child I saw it through the prism of what I knew came afterwards, which didn't make it any less awful, but at least it put it in a context where destruction wasn't the end. What I knew was that for my parents at least, the Holocaust was not the last chapter of their lives. There was a continuum, which made it easier to absorb the horrors.

Q: Did your parents believe in God?

A: My father was once asked whether he still believed in God after Auschwitz. His answer was, "Look, I don't hold God responsible for Auschwitz. But at the same time, I'm not giving him any medals for it, either." That's why my parents didn't like to use the term "Holocaust" or the Hebrew term "Shoah," because both imply some sort of divine manifestation. My father preferred the Hebrew or Yiddish term "Churban," which refers to a catastrophe perpetrated not by God but by human beings.

At the same time, at the Passover seder, there is this line from one of the Psalms: "I was young and I was old, and I have never seen a righteous man forsaken and his children begging for bread." My father refused to recite these words because, he said, he had seen too many righteous persons forsaken and their children abandoned to starve to death.

Q: Why did you write your psalms?

A: A few of them I had previously written, because I've been writing poetry for most of my life. My intuitive writing genre is poetry. My first master's degree is in creative writing and in poetry. A few of my psalms were published in my previous book of poetry, "Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen."

These psalms, for the most part, wrote themselves. They reflected and recorded emotions. There were images that came into my mind, and that I had to write down, but in many instances, I have no idea where they came from.

When I started this project, which took me over a year-and-a-half to complete, I didn't think it would go anywhere. And as I was writing, I kept on saying, "Oh, you have to stop, you can't be seriously doing this." Then the psalms, the poems, kept forcing themselves on me, kept forcing me to continue, because I felt this was something I needed to do, I had to do. I had to keep going. And at one point I found myself with 150 psalms.

Q: How do you reconcile a compassionate God with the Holocaust?

A: If God had the power to stop it and didn't do it, then that's not a God I want to pray to. If we look at the psalms, take them at face value and address God in the context of the Holocaust, it has to be confronting God and asking, "What happened? Where were you? Why didn't you do anything?"

And by the way, it's not just a Jewish issue. What were Jesus' last words according to the Gospel of Matthew? They were a phrase from Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" This is precisely the question that, to me, needs to be asked of God after the Holocaust. We have to confront God, not expecting an answer. But at the very least, if there is a God who is listening, God should know that we are seeking answers. God should know that we are angry, that I am angry.

Q: Were there any surprises as you were writing?

A: I found myself imagining the voice of the dead, either before or after they were killed. And you know, it was not only my 5 ½-year-old brother's voice in a gas chamber, but other voices. In other words,this image, this impression of people until the very, very end, hoping for, waiting for, some kind of deliverance that never came. What would their thoughts have been? What did they feel? What, if anything, did they say to God?

Q: The book's "coda" includes poems about the Bosnian genocide and the Israel-Hamas war. Why?

A: I didn't want anybody who reads my psalms to think that they exist in a vacuum. They need to be read and heard in the context and with an awareness of what is happening today. God's silence or God's absence wasn't only during the Holocaust. The theological, spiritual, intellectual dilemmas and precipices that we have in confronting the Holocaust didn't just end in 1945. They apply to other genocides, they apply to other crimes against humanity. They apply to other forms of horrific violence where there is no divine intervention.

Q: Do you believe in God?

A: Yes, but my belief in God is actually a belief in a divine presence. There is a concept in Judaism called the divine spark. And to me, the divine spark was present in every victim of the Holocaust who remained human, who refused to become dehumanized. It was in every camp inmate who shared a piece of bread with a fellow inmate, or in a parent who comforted a child walking into the gas chambers.

My mother, in Bergen-Belsen together with a group of other Jewish women inmates, kept 149 Jewish children alive through the winter to liberation. My mother was instrumental in creating a kind of a children's home there. I see that as a divine presence within her. There was a divine presence in every non-Jew who risked their life to save or hide or help a Jew during the Holocaust, and the same divine presence was absent from the perpetrators. It is a spirit that exists or is absent within oneself.

One of the great Hasidic masters, the Kotzker Rebbe, asked the question, "Where is God?" And then he answered, "Wherever you let Him in."

We are aware of the difference between good and evil, and that awareness is not just an intellectual abstraction. We are aware of the importance of altruism, of helping others. We are aware of the need to think of others, to be decent, to respect others, and all of that that has to come from somewhere, and I want to believe that there is divinity in that.

Q: You dedicated this book to your twin grandchildren and your brother, Benjamin, who was your mother's son. Why?

A: These psalms are my legacy to my grandchildren and, I hope, to their children and to future generations. Because the one lasting thing we are able to transmit is some moral, spiritual cohesion that can be carried into a future, which seems more and more precarious or unknowable. And maybe, just maybe, with this book, with these psalms, Benjamin will not disappear with me; perhaps his memory, the fact that he lived and how he died, will not vanish.

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