A Yizkor Prayer for those who were abused as children

The Awareness Center wants to thank Rabbi Robert Sax and the Rabbinical Assembly for creating a very special Yizkor prayer for including this meditation for survivors of abusive parents.  To the best of our knowledge this is the first prayer of it's kind to make its way into a prayer book for the High Holidays. 

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A Yizkor Meditation in Memory of a Parent Who Was Hurt
By Rabbi Robert Sax
Mahzor Lev Shalem - For Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
Published by The Rabbinical Assembly

Dear God,

You know my heart. 

Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish. 

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. 

I do not want to pretend to love, or to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child.

Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. 

I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 

—robert Saks