After World War II, were the souls of the victims of the Holocaust reborn into new physical bodies?
That’s the question Sara Yoheved Rigler will raise when discussing her latest book, “I’ve Been Here Before: When Souls of the Holocaust Return” (Menucha Publishers), on Tuesday, Nov. 29, at 7 p.m. at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Pikesville, 1726 Reisterstown Rd. The event will be presented by the Etz Chaim outreach center for Jewish studies.
Born in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Rigler, 74, who has written seven Jewish spirituality books, said she did not have any immediate family members who survived or perished during the Holocaust.
“[But] as a child, I had [this] very strange hatred and anger toward everything German,” said Rigler, a resident of Jerusalem’s Old City. “I would not buy a German product, would not take a ride in a Volkswagen and would not let my father take my picture when he bought a German camera. I didn’t know where they came from.”
Later, Rigler came to a conclusion about the origins of her anti-German sentiments. “I understood that the idea of reincarnation [was] the only thing that made sense to me … that I had lived and died in the Holocaust,” she said.
Rigler said she did not reveal this opinion to anyone until about a decade ago when she told a close friend. To her surprise, the friend told her she also believed she had died during the Holocaust.
“When her mother would put her to bed at night at the age of four, she would look at the pillow and have this waking vision of being in the back of a truck with all these other women,” Rigler said. “And some of them were collapsing to the floor. And she saw herself rise up out of the truck and say, ‘Now I’m free.’
“It would be two decades before she learned that the Nazis’ first experiment in mass murder was to put people in the back of a truck and pump carbon monoxide gas from the engine back to the back of the truck,” she said.
Rigler would spend the next seven years researching the subject. In time, around 450 people born after 1945 answered her online survey acknowledging they experienced dreams, phobias, flashbacks, panic attacks and other occurrences indicating a past life during the Holocaust. Another 100 people sent her emails stating the same sentiment.
Rigler said she believes tens of thousands of people living today are “souls of the Holocaust.” She said she chose to write her book, in part, to help such individuals realize they are not alone.
“Virtually everybody who talks to me says, ‘I thought I was the only one,’” said Rigler. “Everybody thinks they’re the only one. They think they’re weird, and I wanted to just let people out of the closet and realize they’re part of a very large phenomenon.”
In addition, Rigler said she hopes her book demonstrates “although the Holocaust was a terrible, terrible chapter ending, it wasn’t the end of the story for any soul.”
Pikesville resident Sherry Mauer, co-chair of the Nov. 29 event with Linda S. Elman, said she read “I’ve Been Here Before” in an Etz Chaim book club.
“Many people in the book club didn’t really know much about [these] reincarnation or past-life regression type of things, and we were just fascinated,” said Mauer, a Beth Tfiloh congregant. “People who really were very left-brained, who didn’t really believe in this … after reading this book said, ‘You know, there might be something to this.’ … There are so many people that have stories in this book that are very, very specific, especially the people [who] have no connection to the Holocaust, to Judaism, to reincarnation.”
By a twist of fate, Mauer met Rigler while visiting a friend in Israel and persuaded the author to come to Baltimore to speak about the book.
Asked what she most wanted readers to take away from “I’ve Been Here Before,” Rigler referenced the 16th-century mystic Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, who she said argued “there are no new souls coming down. We are all old souls. And when we see our behavior, the behavior of the people who are in our life, as in the context of past lives, we will have much more compassion and understanding for people’s behavior.”
For information about the event, visit etzchaimusa.org/rigler or gordoncenterfortheperformingarts.thundertix.com/events/204544.
A former Baltimorean, Jesse Berman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.
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