Menachem Rosensaft did not mean for his poems to sit on a shelf unread. He wants his reworking of the Biblical Psalms, inspired by his family’s experiences at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, to have an impact – especially on Cornell students and the campus community.

“I want them to get a sense of the psalms and hopefully make use of them going forward on their own trajectory through life, and through spiritual life,” said Rosensaft, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School.

Rosensaft will read poems from his latest book, “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz,” on April 21, 6-7:30 p.m., at White Hall, room 110. A Q&A discussion will follow.

The Biblical Psalms, which are liturgical poems in the Old Testament, express gratitude and devotion to God. They are meant to bring comfort and a sense of refuge to readers, Rosensaft said. “The psalms are a spiritual escape valve, if you will, for human emotion,” he said.

For example, Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. … Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” – has become a staple of funeral readings.

“The Psalms are used in order to express the interaction with God on an emotional, spiritual level, as opposed to a strictly intellectual level,” Rosensaft said.

That’s what Rosensaft is trying to accomplish with his psalms, as well. But his psalms are written in the voices of World War II Nazi death and concentration camp prisoners, overcome with confusion and despair about their predicament – and God’s disregard.

An excerpt from his Psalm 7: “… pursued not by lions/but by vultures/scavengers/rabid dogs in human disguise/I so wanted You/Adonai my God/to rescue me/I waited for You to save me/but You/watched our enemies/trample our lives/into a dust of ashes/with tools of death/You did not destroy.”

His family’s experiences in the death camps provided the inspiration. His mother, Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, was deported to Auschwitz, where she was forced to work under Dr. Josef Mengele. She saved many prisoners by smuggling them medical supplies and surreptitiously tending their wounds. Together with a group of other women inmates, she also kept 149 children alive at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany until their liberation in April 1945. She was a key witness at the first post-war trial of the SS officers, guards and functionaries at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

His father, Josef Rosensaft, was deported to Auschwitz but managed to escaped on the way. He was captured and again was sent to Auschwitz, and then several other concentration camps. He weighed 79 pounds when he was liberated. He was the leader of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen in the Displaced Persons camp that was established there, went on to found the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Survivors, and was a fierce advocate for Holocaust remembrance.

Menachem Rosensaft’s brother, Benjamin, who was his mother’s son by her first marriage, was 5 years old when he died in 1943 together with his father in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

“I’m trying to take Holocaust remembrance into the spiritual realm and deal with the questions, the anger, the disappointment, the knowledge of the horror,” said Rosensaft, who was born in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp in 1948.

He has carried on his parents’ activism for human rights and peace. Among many other roles, he was a founder and the first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. And he is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of Jewish communities around the world, based in New York.

“I’m hoping, in terms of Holocaust remembrance, that my psalms can somehow contribute to relating to the dead, to relating to the experience on a spiritual level,” he said.

He has written several other books, including “Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen” (Kelsay Books, 2021), and edited “God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015).

Rosensaft’s reading is free and open to the public.