Not Just One Day......

Yom HaShoah, for me, a daughter of two Shoah survivors, is always.

Growing up in the shadow of this horrific chapter in our history, reliving the memories of its atrocities and never forgetting it are a part of who I am and what I am.

I am the young child in the Ghetto who is pushed to become a thief and steal a potato so that he can feed his starving younger sister.

I am the mother who is desperately trying to calm and silence her baby for fear of having their hiding place disclosed.

I am the teacher in the Ghetto who does all she can to educate the young children and make them understand that which no human mind can grasp, that which is inconceivable.

I am the Rabbi who tirelessly tries to explain to his desperate listeners that G-d is not ignoring them but merely temporarily hiding His face.

I am the partisan who lives in the forest, defiantly resisting and determined to overcome death.

I am the Kapo who was forced to make a difficult choice of either electing death or becoming a false god who would decree who by fire and who by water.

I am the doomed who was selected to be the one who removes the corpses from the gas chambers as I study the familiar faces painted with agony. I see their blank look and frozen eyes staring at me, begging me to live and tell and to Never Forget.

I am the daughter of an elderly sick mother who is desperately trying to ignite the spark of Hope in her dying soul.

I am the young woman who was part of the string quartet that was standing at the entrance to the crematoria, playing the scratched violin as we were dancing our brothers and sisters to the “End of Love.” *

I am a Jewish Yisraeli soldier who visited the Nazi death camps and promised all the innocent victims that their spilled blood will forever light my Life’s path and the path of our future Jewish generations.

I am all of them and many nameless more. I am them, not only one day a year, not only every single day of the year but every single day of my life as well.

* ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ … came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.” -  Leonard Cohen

A Tale of Two Museums

 

                                                                           

Once upon a time, there was an evil man, a very evil man. He had a dream. He wanted to erect a museum to commemorate “the extinct race.”

That man was Hitler. His dream was to annihilate European Jewry and turn the Jewish Museum in the city of Prague into a museum that will hold Jewish artifacts aimed at reminding the world of a race that once was.

The Jewish Museum of Prague was founded in 1906. Initially, it was intended for the purpose of preserving artifacts from neighboring synagogues which were liquidated as part of the reconstruction of the Jewish quarter. When the Nazis took over they closed it down and hired Dr. Karel Stein, a historian and one of the founders of the Museum, to catalogue the many various Jewish artifacts that were gathered by the Germans.

As we all know, Hitler’s plans did not exactly go as he intended them to. The “extinct race” simply refused to disappear, refused to vanish. The Museum, invariably, remained “The Jewish Museum” holding the largest and most comprehensive collection of Judaica items. Nowadays, it contains about 40,000 artistic objects. It also holds about 100,000 pieces of written materials. All are a testimony to a thousand-year-old community from a city that the New York Times refers to as “the Paris of the East, the Jerusalem of the West,” a testimony to the cultural wealth of a People that left a big mark in the annals of the history of mankind.

Fast forward several decades, and let me take you to a different region of the world where another museum was recently erected. Unlike the Jewish Museum of Prague that has been a beacon of a civilization that enriched the history of humanity with its gifts and contributions, we are left here with a blank expression as we watch a multi-million dollars’ ghost and ask, what does it commemorate? Shall I venture to call it the “Museum to the race that has not yet been born?” It is a “museum” that holds nothing but a dream of destruction, empty pages waiting to be filled with imaginative narratives, steeped in the fairytales of “A Thousand Nights and One Night,” aimed at rewriting history. Its empty halls will hold an imaginative history that lives and thrives only in the minds of those who have not been born yet, those that toil so hard to ignore facts and create new ones merely to fool a gullible world.

Yes, you guessed right. I am talking about the new “Palestinian Museum,” the one that exhibits bare walls, empty shelves and lonely display cabinets. But fear not, soon, the emperor’s new clothes will be hanging there and its many visitors will marvel at them, write about them and push a blind humanity deeper and deeper into the dark abyss from which only a miracle can save it

Faith

   




                                                                         

 “Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” - Martin Luther King Jr.   

When I read King’s words, two images from two different cultures, two different historical experiences pop into my mind. The first is taken from my own heritage and relates to one of our forefathers Ya'akov (AKA Jacob). I am referring to his dream in which “he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Bresheet, AKA Genesis 28:10-22)

    The second image comes from the African American experience. It is expressed in the words of one of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes. In his poem Mother and Son, he writes, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair….. And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light.”

The thread that connects the two and which they both share is the message of faith. Both stem from a dreary present. The Biblical Ya'akov is on the run for fear of his life. Hugh’s plight is the result the racial policy that plagued his reality and the reality of his ancestors.  Both the ladder in the dream and the staircase in the poem lead to unknown realms. Most importantly, they both offer hope.

    Unlike the stairs in the poem, however, Ya'akov’s ladder, his stairway to heaven, seems more sturdy, more reassuring and has the reaffirmation of G-d’s promise to Am Yisrael: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying.  Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.  I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you”

    This promise is reiterated later in Yirmiyahu (AKA Jeremiah) 46:27:"Do not be afraid, Ya'akov my servant; do not be dismayed, Yisrael. I will surely save you out of a distant place, your descendants from the land of their exile. Ya'akov will again have peace and security, and no one will make him afraid.” It is faith in the promise for a better future that kept us, Am Yisrael, going.

    It is also faith in a better future that the words of the mother in the poem are so drenched with:

    “ So boy, don’t you turn back.  Don’t you set down on the steps   ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.  Don’t you fall now— For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’,”

    The message of both experiences is loud and clear. We must continue to climb and never give up, no matter how hard, rocky and sometimes dark the journey towards our goal is.

I will end with another quote by another favorite poet, Rabindranath Tagore, “Faith is the

bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”

These are hard times for us, Am Yisrael, in particular, and for the whole world, in general,

but we must not despair. There is the light at the top of the staircase and beyond the 

edge of dawn even though we may not see it. All we need is, like the bird, to spread our wings and soar beyond and above the dismal present towards the light that is there and into the bright and glorious future that awaits us!

For me, it is Yom Ha'Shoah

                                                             


This week, the world marks the International Holocaust Memorial Day. I am grateful to the wide recognition and acknowledgement of the suffering of many, Jews and non-Jews who died in that sad chapter of human history. I pray that mankind learns the proper lessons from its past mistakes and prevents them from repeating them. On this day, I hear and read “Never Again,” the motto of Jew and Gentile alike and I continue to hope.

Here in Israel, we commemorate that appalling and not so distant past on the 27^th day of the month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. We call it Yom Ha’shoah.  

Personally, it is that day, not the International one, that bears a deep meaning for me. It is the day that sends quivers through my spine. It is the day that strums the inner chords of my essence and pulsates at the point that only one like myself, a Jew, a daughter of two Shoah survivors can understand.

And before anyone rushes to accuse me of holding myself at a higher level than the rest, let me explain.

The memories of my childhood in the young nascent state of Israel, growing up under the shadow of the Shoah, under the loving care of two broken souls who had barely escaped the inferno, is what has given me that insight and a greater greater awareness of the magnitude of that episode in our history. Being raised on stories about Moishele, and Avreimaleh, Reuveleh and Shulamiskeh, innocent souls whose life was taken at a young tender age is what has bestowed upon me the gift to grasp and appreciate the extent of the atrocious nature of the Shoah.  I share so much with these individuals. Like me, they spoke Yiddish, a language soaked with humour, with mentchlichkyite ( humanness) and Yidishkayit (Jewishness). Like me, they heard Yiddish lullabies and bedtime stories about Biblical and Jewish heroes, the threads that connected their fate with mine.

They were all my family, the family I never got to meet, yet heard so much about. Their fresh memory is tattooed not on my arm but on my heart. They appear in my dreams at night and shine their eternal blessing on our people during the day. Their blood which runs in the rivers of Jewish history cleanses our Jewish Spirit and gives us the strength and the tenacity to go on living.

For many of us, Jews and Israelis, Yom Ha'Shoah is not merely about “Never Again” but rather about Remembering and Reminding. For how can one vow “Never Again,” if one fails to remember what one should never forget and never repeat?