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Published: April 13th 2010
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Remember
This memorial candle table for Yom Hashoa was set up in the lobby of the office building where Mandel is located. I had a lovely visit back to California for Passover and spent most of my time with family enjoying the spring. I returned to Jerusalem last week, just in time for a crazy day-long sand storm, which was so intense that I could barely see across the valley outside my balcony. It gave me good reason to spend the day at home, listening to the wind howling around the shutters, with my foot elevated; on Friday I misstepped on an uneven sidewalk and lightly sprained my ankle. It has been an opportunity to reflect on how much I have enjoyed not having a car this year and how lucky I generally am to easily navigate the dozens of steps and stone-paved walkways that are part of my everyday routine. Fortunately, it's not a bad sprain and I have good people around me who have helped me out with food and getting where I need to go.
Living This week begins a series of national commemorations, beginning with Yom Hashoa (Holocaust Memorial Day) and continuing next week with Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) and Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day). Yom Hashoa began Sunday night with a ceremony at Yad Vashem, the national
California Spring
This has nothing to do with Israel, but this cherry tree at Descanso Gardens in La Canada, CA was so beautiful, I couldn't not share it with you. Holocaust museum. On Monday morning at 10:00 there was a siren and for two minutes the country came to a standstill. People stood in silence; if they were on the roads, they stopped their cars and got out to stand beside their cars. The radio stations played sad songs all day and TV stations showed documentaries and films about the Holocaust. In office buildings tables with memorial candles were set up in the lobby. The sense of loss and grieving was palpable all day.
At Mandel we had a day of special programs around various issues of the Holocaust. We were together when the siren sounded. We saw a play about a Jewish German man in San Francisco whose business partner, a non-Jewish German, returned to Germany in 1932 and ended up going over to the Nazi side. It was a rather bombastic, hit-you-over-the-head play, both in the script and in the production. I think it was an attempt to show why Germans became Nazis, and perhaps in 1938, when the play was written, it was compelling. But to my mind, in 2010 a better choice in trying to understand what happened would be to read
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. (Actually, everyone should read that book - it's one of my favorites!)
We also had a discussion about how cinema has dealt with the Holocaust and the tensions between providing the opportunity to bear witness, the desire to create art and the moral implications of making a profit off of the unbearable suffering of other people. We listened to a lecture about the wide sweep of Jewish theological answers as to why God allows suffering, in which the lecturer suggested that the Holocaust represents the first time in Jewish history in which some Jews completely reject the idea of Divine reward and punishment and still consider themselves religious. And finally, we heard the story of a survivor, Alona Frankel, who is probably best known for her children's book,
Once Upon A Potty. When she was a little girl, her parents smuggled her out of the Lvov ghetto in Poland; she spent the war hidden by a family who was paid for hiding her. Her immediate family survived the war and they came to Israel soon thereafter. She was delightful, warm and charming, but with an iron-strong core; it would be a mistake to underestimate her!
All around me there was discussion about the role of the Holocaust in the Israeli psyche. I was told that there are 40,000 survivors who are still living in Israel. But Alona Frankel told how when her family came to Israel, her mother wanted to tell about the traumas they had endured but that their Israeli family didn't want to hear about it. That was quite common. There is a terrible tension between the helplessness of the Jews during the Holocaust and the powerful strength of the Israelis. The victimization is seen as shameful, and yet there are new efforts to call everyone who went through the Holocaust, both those who survived and those who didn't, "heroic." And of course, there are current political implications; at the ceremony at Yad Vashem there was talk about Iran and its government's threat to destroy Israel. That resonates horrifically with the still-raw wounds of the Holocaust. And others decry the use of the Holocaust to justify ruthless use of strength towards the Palestinians. I know of several groups of Jews, Palestinians and Germans who met on Yom Hashoa to discuss the intricacies of their relationships.
In the Torah it says that God visits the sins of the parents upon the children for three and four generations. I think that is how long it takes for a severe trauma to be worked out of a family. That is true for a society as well. We are still within that period following the Holocaust and it is understandable to me that at the same as we can sanely discuss various intellectual aspects of the trauma, its political and cultural implications, at the same time as we try to stay on the meta level, we still are in the midst of it as a people, and we have a lot of healing to go. It calls for compassion and patience, perhaps especially here in Israel.
Learning We are beginning a new trimester post-Passover. We have a seminar on pluralism, which I think will be quite interesting. We will also continue our project workshops and our Israel conversations; we are starting to prepare for our visit to meet with a range of settlers in two weeks. The year is rapidly coming to an end!
When I was in California, I met with our Hillel staff to discuss my project. It looks like we will try piloting the project at UCSD, SDSU and CSU San Marcos next year. I have written an executive summary of the project and am working on expanding the various aspects. During these next two months, I hope to create a staff training manual that we can use during the pilot. I am looking forward to the implementation stage of the project!
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RabbiLisa
Lisa Goldstein
Correction
Apparently, my source for the number of Holocaust survivors in Israel was incorrect and I didn't verify it for myself. There are about 207,000 survivors who currently live in Israel. Thanks for Miriam Iosupovici for pointing out the mistake!