05-Mar-23: Intertwined lives: A Purim reflection

From a 1997 family snapshot:

Malki dressed up for Purim as a farmer

In a few days from now, we will be marking the sixth anniversary of the day in 2017 when senior US Department of Justice officials announced the unsealing of terror charges against our child's killer, the Jordanian fugitive terrorist Ahlam Tamimi ["14-Mar-17: Sbarro massacre mastermind is now formally charged and her extradition is requested"].

But before then, the Jewish world will mark one of its happiest annual events: the festival of Purim. An emotional roller-coaster? Certainly. Jewish life is replete with such moments.

About once every five years (and most recently in 2018), we repost here on our blog a reflection written by Arnold Roth touching on the festival through the lens of three intersecting lives. In posting it below, we have adjusted the dates of Purim so that they are correct for 2023. 

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Purim, for those not so familiar with the intricacies of the age-old Jewish calendar, works in a slightly unexpected way.

Throughout the world, Jewish communities will begin marking it this coming Monday night, March 6, 2023. That evening and then again the following morning, Tuesday, observant Jews will gather in whichever part of the world they are to hear the reading of the Book of Esther.

In Jerusalem where we live, we do the same - but exactly 24 hours later. The day is called Shushan Purim. (Shushan in the Purim narrative is where the Persian royal palace was located.) The first of the two readings of Esther in Israel's capital takes place Tuesday night (March 7, 2023). The second will be the following morning, Wednesday (March 8, 2023) as part of the Shacharit daily morning prayers.

Later in the day on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, Jerusalem's Jews - but not the Jews of almost every other community around the world - will celebrate what Purim stands for by means of a festive meal and appropriate beverages. 

(Note that along the way there is a traditional fast day, the Fast of Esther, actually a dawn-to-sunset fast and not a full 25 hour fast, which this year starts before dawn on Monday morning, March 6, 2023.) 

At exactly this time of year, but eighteen years ago in 2005, Arnold Roth was given an opportunity to publish a reflection about how Purim, with its family-focused joy and celebration of good triumphing over evil, feels to a family like ours that has lost a loved child to an act of hatred-based terrorist murder.

The result was a short essay published on the aish.com website. The themes which the article touches remain on our minds, so here is a replay.

Fifteen
The number that conceals G-d's name also represents the mysterious turning point for three generations of my family | Arnold Roth 

Most Jewish teenagers growing up in Australia during the 1960s were, like me, children of concentration camp survivors. Our parents were involved in owning small businesses or were employed. There was hardly a professional among them. At birth, most of us lacked even a single grandparent; almost all of us were named after family members who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

It was clear that we were everything to our parents, and no one needed to tell us why. Top of their priorities list was ensuring that we gained the best possible education. Little wonder that several of the largest and most successful Jewish schools in the world were started in Melbourne in the years right after World War II. And the community's interest in things Israeli was unlimited; the occasional Israeli film and Israeli visitor to Australia's distant shores were memorable events.

The Six Day War happened when I was 15. The weeks of rising tension leading up to it left an indelible mark on me: the grainy television images of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the march; Nasser's strident speeches and unilateral blockade of the sea lanes to Eilat; the massing of Egyptian forces on Israel's Sinai border and of the Syrians on the Golan frontier; U Thant's disgraceful capitulation in removing UN peace-keeping forces from Sinai precisely when they were most needed.

Our daughter Malki Z"L with her
beloved grandmother Genia Roth Z"L

who visited us in Jerusalem, April 2000

And the blood-curdling threats of one after another of the Arab dictators and monarchs: "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... This is our opportunity to erase the ignominy which has been with us since 1948... Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map."

Holocaust Horrors

Fifteen marked a turning point in my life. 

A few months after Israel's stunning defeat of the forces bent (once again) on the liquidation of the Jews, I enrolled for the first time in a Jewish day-school. My ideas about being a Jew in the world, about history and how it affects our lives, about the Holocaust and the chain of Jewish life, began taking grown-up shape.

My mother grew up near Łódź in a town located close enough to the Polish/German frontier to have been overrun by Nazi forces on the first day of the war. 

Among the men rounded up by the invaders on that September day was her father, the grandfather whose name I was given. As a father myself, I have to breathe deeply in calling to mind the image of my mother throwing herself at the feet of a German soldier, begging, screaming for her father's life to be spared.

On the day the Nazis marched into Poland and began the process of destroying a world, trampling a unique culture into the mud, murdering Jews by the millions, my mother had just turned 15.

My awareness of my parents' lives begins, in a certain sense, with the end of the war: their four or five years as displaced persons in post-war Germany, their long journey to Australia as a young couple with no English, no marketable skills and no roots beyond their few personal ties and their very Jewish sense of community.

An unexpected photograph changed this for me a few years ago.

I have a cousin, Chana, a kibbutznikit, the daughter of my father's oldest brother. She was brought to Tel Aviv in the 1930s as a baby by her parents who fled pre-war Galicia, and has lived her life in Israel. Returning as a tourist to her roots, she traveled to Krakow in 2000, and via a chain of circumstances ended up in possession of four photocopied pages which she shared with me. These were Nazi documents - census forms which the Germans required the Jews in the Krakow ghetto to complete prior to dispatching them to the death camps.

The first page had been completed in the distinctive handwriting of my father, of blessed memory. A small snapshot attached to the form showed him as I had never seen before: virile, handsome, young. Two other pages were the census forms of two of my father's sisters. Their names were known to me from a family tree I had put together years earlier with my father's help. But until that moment, they were nothing more than names. Now I gazed at the portraits of two vibrant young women.

My oldest daughter, Malki, had just completed a family-roots project at school and I knew she would be interested. A glance at the pages and she said exactly what I had been thinking: Malki bore a striking resemblance to my father's beautiful sister Feige.

Feige, at left, who did not survive the Holocaust. 

And the great-niece she never knew, Malki, at right.

For us, and for Malki, the resemblance between them was striking.

Unlike my parents, Feige did not survive the Nazi murder machine. Whatever promise her life contained, whatever talents she was developing, whatever gifts she was planning to give the world - all these were overturned by a massive act of violent, barbaric hatred.

Some months after we gazed on those extraordinary pictures for the first time, Malki sat down and quietly (without telling us) composed the words and music of an infectiously upbeat song: "You live, breathe and move - that's a great start!... You'd better start dancing now!"

Living in the land promised to the Jewish people was a source of deep contentment to this granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. The discovery of Feige's picture enabled Malki, I think, to gain a strengthened sense of her personal role as a link in an ancient chain.

Unbearable Questions

Arafat's intifada war against Israel's civilian population broke out around the time we received those precious pages. 

From the diary she kept, it's evident that the near-daily toll of injuries and deaths weighed heavily on Malki's mind. She writes of having to leave her classroom to weep in privacy upon learning of another terror attack… and another and another. 

We, her parents and siblings, were unaware of the depth of her empathy for the victims of the war raging in her precious land. The turmoil and pain, to Malki, were deeply personal. Though born in Australia, she had lived in Jerusalem since age two. She felt deeply connected to Jewish history.

In August 2001, my daughter and her friend Michal interrupted the activities of a busy summer vacation day to grab lunch in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant, Sbarro. 

If she had noticed the man with a guitar case on his back striding through the unguarded door and positioning himself next to the counter where she was engrossed in tapping out a text message on her cell phone, would Malki have recognized the hatred, the barbaric ecstasy, on his face before he exploded?

Malki and Michal were buried the next day. The closest of friends since early childhood, they lie side by side, forever, on a hill near the entrance to Jerusalem. Malki was 15.

Her diary is full of questions: How can such terrible things happen to our people? Why is our love for the Land of Israel not better understood by outsiders? What kind of Divine plan calls for teenagers to be injured and killed by people for whom we hold no hatred at all? How can such intense hatred even exist?

The unbearable question marks left behind by my daughter scream at me every day.

The Hidden Name

Jewish life, viewed from a distance, is an astonishing saga of tragedy, achievement, grandeur, destruction and greatness, played out over millennia. There is a risk we lose this perspective when we are the individuals living it.

Malki and her close friend Michal Raziel.The girls were
standing side by side at the Sbarro pizzeria's
counter when the human bomb walked in and exploded

At Purim, we feast, we drink, we ceremoniously deliver gifts, we celebrate with those we love and like. But the narrative at the heart of this festival is of a close brush with tragedy: the Jewish victory over a genocidal conspiracy by murderous Jew-haters.

Here in Jerusalem, a day later than almost everywhere else in the world, Purim is marked on the 15th day of Adar. Jewish calendar dates are written using a simple alphanumeric code: alef is one, bet is two and so on. But longstanding tradition is to avoid the straightforward way of writing the number 15. 

You would expect it to be yud-heh (lit: ten-five); however these two letters happen to form the first half of G-d's name and are accorded special treatment and respect. Accordingly, 15 is written as tet-vav: nine-six. G-d's Name, as it were, is hidden within the number 15.

Purim is odd in another way: the name of G-d is completely absent from Megillat Esther.

Does this mean the victory of the Jews over their oppressor happened without His involvement? Jewish tradition answers with a firm 'no'. G-d's role was crucial, but our ability to make sense of how and why He acts is limited, inadequate.

Those of us raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and who have experienced the tragedy of a child's death by hatred, struggle to understand the nature of the Divine role in our lives as individuals and as a people. There are times, according to Jewish wisdom, when you need to know that G-d's hand is at work even when the evidence is difficult to see, even when there are more questions than answers.

Malka Chana Roth's memory is honored by the Malki Foundation. It supports families wanting to provide their severely disabled child with quality home care. More information at the Malki Foundation website

[A Dutch version of the article above is online here.]

30-Apr-20 The Holocaust and our family

Arnold Roth tweeted this yesterday as we marked 72 years of Israel's proudly-restored independence.

Text:

From Jerusalem on #IsraelIndependenceDay, my family gives thanks for the WW2 Alled victory and the liberation by US forces of Dachau-Kaufering, a Nazi German death camp from where my father Abraham Rottenberg, a slave laborer, emerged among the few survivors 75 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/gbB3bHx6Ie— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

And then this:

As with many Holocaust survivors, the joy concealed the background darkness. Dad died in 1982. In 2000, I learned for the first time of his first wife, murdered by the Nazi Germans. And in 2016, I learned about their daughter, murdered at age 3. Of these losses, he never spoke.

— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

Arnold's father of blessed memory, Avraham Zvi-Hersh (Romek to his friends) Rottenberg, was liberated exactly 75 years ago - on April 29, 1945. On the advice of friends in Australia, where by then they had made their home, who said a shorter, more ordinary name would help in the process of settling into a new country, he and his wife changed the family name to Roth in the 1950s.

Back to the war. In the summer of 1944, after five years of already living through horrors that in every sense of the word are unimaginable, he was shipped (we now know on the basis of post-war German documentation) to one of the sub-camp complexes of Dachau called Kaufering [background]. There he became, not for the first time in the war, a slave-labor prisoner. From an online record [here], we think he may have been working for the Messerschmidt aviation company. But we can''t be sure.

Life in Dachau-Kaufering was, in key respects, hellish even by comparison with the rest of the Nazi German genocide industry:

The prisoners were used without consideration for life and limbs. The allocation of food was inadequate. According to the report of the war crimes investigation commission... the 11 concentration camps of Landsberg/Kaufering were the worst in Bavaria in terms of inhumane housing, food and the high death rate. The prisoners called these camps "cold crematorias"... By the end of April 1945, a total of about 30,000 prisoners had passed through the camps, including 4,200 women and 850 children. In just ten months, according to estimates from early post-war times, at least 14,500 prisoners died from hunger, epidemics, executions, transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on a march death. [Source]

As Arnold wrote to our family yesterday:

What happened there is nightmarish even by comparison with... Dad's own experiences in the Krakow Ghetto (with his wife Anda and daughter Sara - both soon murdered by the Germans), in the Plaszow labor camp, in the Auschwitz extermination camp and in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in all of those. US forces took control of what was left of it on April 29, 1945 and Dad then moved to nearby Munich where he soon met Mum.

With the war over and the mad scramble to find family and learn what had happened to them, he became aware (he was one of 17 children) that both his parents and all but two of his siblings along with most of his pre-war fellow-yeshiva-students and friends had been murdered in the Nazi German death machine.

In post-war Germany, starting, as so many European Jews did in those immediate post-liberation months, as a penniless, stateless, lone survivor Displaced Person bereft of family, Romek leveraged his skills as a photographer to quickly get back to making a living. It was a line of work from which he supported his wife and children for the next twenty-five years.

In the family lore, based on snatches of recollections he shared with us, he set himself up in one of Munich's public parks, snapping photographs of people out for a stroll or just enjoying life after a devastating war. He then somehow managed to track down the people he photographed (printing photographs in those days involved chemicals, equipment and considerable time) and sold them, or some of them at least, the photos.

This is how he met and then married Gucia.

Gucia had survived with all three of her sisters by staying tightly together - as they survived the nightmarish experiences of incarceration in the Lodz Ghetto, and then Auschwitz and forced labor camp - from the first day of the war until the day they were liberated. In the course of those years, the four sisters lost (to acts of murder) their parents and all three of their brothers. Also: their health, their education, their youth.

Arnold shared several photos yesterday - among them those below - with our family in Melbourne as well as with our childen and grandchildren. He did it to honour, as he wrote, how they rebuilt their lives, soon married (there was a rush of Jewish weddings in post-war Germany), started a family (they unfortunately lost a first child), sailed off to distant Australia, and over the following years raised their two sons in what he describes as comfort and an atmosphere of love and mutual caring.

Romek in Munich - some time between 1946 and 1949. A colorized version of
a black-and-white photo.

Romek and his wife Gucia probably photographed just before they married
in Munich in November 1947

Munich, probably 1948: Gucia and Romek. The monochrome photo
was recently colorized.

Like many other survivors of the Holocaust, Romek spoke little about his experiences with his own children. That's not to say he didn't talk. He did but usually in the relaxed company of other Yiddish-speaking survivors who needed little background and no explanation from one another in order to put things into context. It was, after all, the context of their own lives too.

Arnold reflected on that when writing his mother's obituary for the Australian Jewish News a few years back:

I know terribly little about the details and cannot understand now what stopped me from pushing harder when I could to know the contours of that part of [Gucia's] life, those six years of incomprehensible nightmare. What I do know comes mostly from overhearing both my parents chatting amiably with their dinner-party guests and card-playing friends, recounting stories – sometimes hair-raising – about ghetto, forced labor camps, Auschwitz, transports. Somehow the self-restraint got relaxed when they were in the company of other survivors, and the presence of inquisitive children with big ears didn’t get in the way.

In particular, to us children, Romek never once mentioned that he had had, and had lost (to murder at the hands of the Nazi Germans), a young wife and a daughter. The child cannot have been more than three or four when she too was shot or gassed or starved. About these lives and losses we learned only many years later after Romek himself had passed away.

In the past four years we also discovered a whole hitherto-missing branch of his family, the children of an older brother who himself lived through the Holocaust (a story with much drama) but who died young in the early 1950's. That family not only survived the war in Europe (as Rottenbergs) but remained there, living until today in Belgium. It's quite a narrative, one we're still exploring.

Melbourne's Jewish community was shaped and profoundly influenced by the influx of survivors, mostly with Polish backgrounds like Gucia and Romek, after its immigration policy was belatedly liberalized starting in 1947.

The Roths arrived in Melbourne as refugees in September 1949. Australia granted them a two-year permit but in time they became devoted and happy citizens and remained there for the rest of their lives. Romek passed away in Melbourne in 1982, Gucia in 2016.

May their memories continue, as they have been until now, to be a blessing for their entire growing family.

02-May-19: Multiple events coming up so the Gazans crank up their rockets

10 am The silence of siren time - Yom Hashoah [Image Source]

The Hamas-run Gaza Strip, known for possessing one of the world's largest rocket arsenals, has been making its lethal presence felt again today as the general climate in our neighourhood for trouble and violence edges upwards.

It's Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) but the pragmatic concerns of most Israelis aren't limited (if they ever were) to looking back at the blood-soaked recent history of our people. There are daily murderous attacks on Jews by powerful, absurdly-well-armed enemies right here and now and even if most of the media attention fails to deal with the threats on our borders, Israelis and the security establishment must.

Haaretz says two rockets were fired by Gaza-based terrorist forces into the southern region of Israel early this morning (Thursday). A barrage of explosive-laden balloons was launched in the same general direction during Wednesday:

Alarms sounded in Israeli communities along the Gaza border, including Sha'ar Hanegev and Sdot Negev Regional Councils, before the rocket fire, but there were no reports of damage and no one was hurt. Palestinian media reported that a Hamas training facility in Gaza was target by the Israeli air force. It was heavily damaged, reports say, but no casualties were reported.

According to Aljazeera, those Israel-bound rockets have a known origin:

Hamas, the group that governs the Gaza Strip, reportedly launched two rockets towards Israel on Thursday morning in response to Israeli rocket fire.

Threats were issued ahead of the rockets:

Palestinian groups in Gaza have threatened over the past week to resume certain activities at the border that were recently frozen, including the use of incendiary balloons. Sources in the committee that organizes weekly protests at the border said this week that Israeli failure to implement recently agreed-upon understandings is leading to anger in Gaza and could lead to violent escalation [Haaretz]

The balloons caused serious damage and loss:

Fire and rescue services were called [Wednesday] to put out two fires near Israeli border communities, which authorities say were caused by firebombs from Gaza [Haaretz]

And on Monday, as we tweeted, another Gazan rocket landed in Israeli waters. Haaretz says

The Israeli army said the rocket launched by Islamic Jihad on Monday was aimed at hitting one of Israeli communities along the border. It named Islamic Jihad officials directly, publishing their photos, and laid responsibility for the attack on the organization, an unusual move as it normally holds Hamas accountable for aggression coming out of the Strip.

Aljazeera adds that on Tuesday

Israel reduced Gaza's fishing limit from 15 nautical miles (27.8km) to six nautical miles (11.1km) after it alleged a rocket was fired from the territory by Islamic Jihad - an allegation the Palestinian group denied. Rights group call Israel's ever-changing limit of Gaza's fishing zone as "illegal collective punishment".

PIJ forces on Israel's Gaza border [Image Source]
@MargieinTelAviv points out that you only see them in uniforms on
videos and handouts. When it comes to actual fighting they
wear civilian clothes and refuse to admit that they are Hamas/PIJ
terrorists so that Hamas can claim civilian deaths.
But their FBook pomp betrays them

About that rocket, Anna Aronheim, writing in the Jerusalem Post, quotes the IDF Spokesperson Brig-Gen Ronen Manelis, saying Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched it from the al-Attra neighborhood of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza Strip. And naming names:

“It was intentionally fired by the group,” Manelis said, adding that the PIJ operative who gave the order for the launch is Baha’a Abu al-Ata, the PIJ commander of the northern Strip. According to Manelis, al-Ata received his orders directly from the group’s leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah in Damascus. PIJ, the military said, is trying to carry out low-level attacks and maintain a low profile so that Hamas doesn’t figure out that they are trying to undermine ceasefire efforts between the ruling group in the coastal enclave and Israel.
“There are dozens of countries around the world which are trying to improve the humanitarian situation in the Strip but and at the same time there is one man inside Gaza and one man outside the Strip which is trying to torpedo that,” he said... On a call with reporters, Manelis noted that the rocket launch came shortly before a potentially tense month, with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Nakba Day, Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day, and the one year anniversary of the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem... Manelis also noted that the IDF is also preparing for violence ahead of Eurovision, which will take place in Tel Aviv in May with thousands of tourists expected to visit. Due to a fear of escalation in the south over the coming weeks, Israel’s military deployed several Iron Dome missile defense batteries across the country. ["IDF reduces Gaza fishing zone after rocket fromm PIJ", Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2019]

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, substantially backed by Iran and considered its proxy force in the area, is the second-largest of the terrorist groups active in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip but takes care to act independently of it. Ynet says today that its leadership was "summoned" by Egyptian intelligence officials to Cairo today

in an effort to prevent a further escalation of violence between Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces in Gaza.

While they were doing that this morning, Israelis were standing still for two minutes of silence, remembering lives lost to a fathomless hatred that the PIJ and Hamas people can easily identify with.

05-Nov-17: "Watching the Moon at Night", the documentary film Swedish TV has suppressed, is being screened in Israel

Video grab from "Watching the Moon at Night"

We have written about “Watching the Moon at Night” several times (the links are listed at the foot of this post) in the last two years.

It's a fine, made-for-TV documentary film the leading US Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum described as “an intellectually informative, visually compelling, emotionally moving and highly disturbing exploration of the phenomena of terrorism in our time”. 

The film's co-director, the acclaimed Swedish film-maker Bo Persson, will be the special guest at two Israeli screenings during November. 

Tel Aviv Cinematheque: Wednesday November 8, 2017 - screening at 9:00 pm in Cinema 4 | The Tel Aviv Cinematheque is at Shprinzak 2, Tel Aviv | Purchasing tickets online via the Tel Aviv Cinematheque online booking screen is not the simplest process (and seems not to be working at all right now). Call the box office on 03-606-0800 or email them at service@cinema.co.il

Jerusalem Cinematheque: Monday November 13, 2017 - screening at 7:00 pm | The Jerusalem Cinematheque is at Derech Hevron 11, Jerusalem | To purchase tickets online, click here | Tickets can also be bought by phone on 02-565-4333, or dial *9377 | They offer this email address: contact@jer-cin.org.il

The film was shown last year in the European Parliament and the Swedish parliament, at many international film festivals and in front of audiences in the United States and Europe. But it won't be shown to Swedish television viewers because of some outrageous politically-motivated manipulation.

Marianne Ahrne, a prominent writer, film director and observer of Sweden´s cultural life, wrote last month ["Television, terror and Swedish funding"] about the deeply disturbing fate of Persson’s film:

“I approved the funding of their film while working as a commissioner at the Swedish Film Institute. Since then, I have followed its destiny, seeing it praised at festivals and by several of the foremost global experts in the fields that it tackles - terrorism and anti-Semitism. But Sveriges Television (SVT), our country’s national public TV broadcaster, has, for some obscure reason and despite the fact it originally signed on to co-produce it, refused to screen it. And continues to refuse.”

It doesn't take much effort (we wrote a while back) for people with a deep respect for the open sharing and discussion of important ideas to share her fury.

“What's at work here is a brazen betrayal of principles. Sveriges Television, Sweden's dominant television network, is thwarting - silencing is a better word - the screening of an important, thoughtful film that happens to have been created by some of the most admirable minds at work in that country. The scandal is hardly a secret but it has gotten scant media attention.”

The film-makers [Image Source]

Filmed in six countries, "Watching the Moon at Night" juxtaposes contemporary terrorism, anti-Semitism and the experiences of their victims with the articulate – and often very moving – views of noted experts in these fields. Its exam­in­at­ion of these powerful themes goes far beyond the stereotypes. 

Persson and his creative partner Joanna Helander co-directed the film which was produced by Kino Koszyk HB with support from Sweden’s Film i Väst and the Swedish Film Institute.

The late French writer and philosopher André Glucksmann, the late historian of anti-Semitism, Robert S. Wistrich, and the eminent historian Walter Laqueur, who left his native Breslau for Palestine on the day before Kristallnacht 1938 and is one of the inspirations behind the production, are among the film’s pre-eminent on-screen commentators. Arnold Roth, whose daughter was murdered in the Hamas attack on the Jerusalem Sbarro in 2001, and Dan Alon, one of the surviving Israeli athletes from the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, are important voices in the film.

It also incorporates personal experiences of terror victims from Algeria, Spain, France, Moscow, Israel, New York, Colombia, Munich, Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

Creative camerawork, inspiring music and Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, who reads her own poetry in the film all add to the “personal and emotional” perspective, as Agnieszka Holland, chair of the European Film Academy, described it. She called it a production that “shows the common ground shared by victims the world over and the similarities between the perpetrators. In the film, there is no simplifying thesis, no ‘political correctness’… The film truly makes you think.”

Following the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem film screenings, Bo Persson will lead a discussion (in English) on the issues raised by the production and its audience.

You can see the film's trailer here. There is additional info and several reviews at the film's official website. For past posts of ours, see

• 07-Sep-17: A deplorable Swedish reaction when terror intersects with antisemitism
• 22-Jul-16: Heavy-handed Swedish efforts to silence an important documentary on terrorism and antisemitism
• 21-Jun-16: An important documentary film on terrorism and antisemitism and the Swedish effort to silence it
• 28-Mar-16: Upcoming premiere screenings (NYC, Washington) of an important documentary on terrorism and antisemitism
• 13-Jan-15: Terrorism: watching its victims, trying to understand their experiences

03-May-16: Impossibly painful loss and those who survived: Remembering the Holocaust

Melbourne, Australia, where we lived from soon after we married until August 1988 when we moved in Israel, is frequently said to have one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors per capita of any community outside of Israel.

Jewish Care, the Victorian Jewish community's welfare arm, has created and now begun showing this short film, focusing on the recollections of about a dozen quite elderly Melbourne Jews who survived and rebuilt their lives Down Under, as a tribute to the imperative that we never forget.

Video clip from Jewish Care, Melbourne, Australia - 16 minutes

For viewers who are not made of rock, it may be moving in the extreme to see how, confronted with recollections of the terrible losses they suffered almost eighty years ago, the men and women speaking into the camera relive the reality and the extreme trauma in ways that remind us how such tragic events are never forgotten by those who suffered them.

These people were once young, once had bright futures, once had loving relationships with parents, lovers, siblings, spouses, friends. We don't possess lexicons rich enough to capture what it must have felt like to be part of the uniquely cruel process that forever and in unimaginably cruel ways took all these relationships and experiences away from them forever.

We are left to recite the dry facts: that between 1933 and 1945, the German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party carried out the systematic persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. All we, the survivors and children and grandchildren of the survivors, can and must do, is remember.

The internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, a date selected because it marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom HaShoah. This year it starts tomorrow evening, Wednesday, May 4 and ends the following evening.

27-Jan-16: Reality, invention, memory and media

Image Source

We're fans of the columns penned by the journalist and commentator Evelyn Gordon. This paragraph comes from one of her latest:

...[F]or anyone who’s still confused about the difference between a real siege and a fictitious one, here are two simple tests: First, in real sieges, people die of starvation, because the besieger stops food from entering; in fake ones, the “besieger” sends in 2,500 tons of food and medicine per day even during the worst of the fighting. Second, real sieges get swept under the carpet by the UN; only the fake ones merit massive UN publicity. And if you think I’m joking, just compare the actual cases of Madaya and Gaza... So next time you hear people talking about the “siege of Gaza,” remember Madaya. And then tell them to stop wasting their breath on fake sieges when people are dying in real ones. ["How to Spot a Fake Siege", January 25, 2016]

Being reminded of the difference between reality and ideologically-driven spin is especially relevant today, January 27. That's the date on which, annually, Holocaust Memorial Day is observed - at least in those places where it's remembered at all.

What's remembered, what's forgotten and what's willfully twisted and distorted is, of course, part of the reason the commemoration exists. How effectively is a matter worth thinking about.

Why was January 27 set aside? On that date Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi network of industrialized death camps, was freed in 1945 [source]. In our own family, that's more than a historical footnote since two of our children's grandparents were among the relative handful of Jews who were sent there and, despite the unspeakable horrors, survived to build families and productive lives.

During its five years of operation, Auschwitz became

"the site of the largest mass murder in history. An estimated 1.1 million people were killed there between 1940 and 1945, 90% of whom were Jews. The camp survived World War Two largely intact, and today it forms one of the most significant and disturbing locations on earth.at the concentration camp..."

Is Gaza equivalent to what Auschwitz was? (There's no shred of doubt in our mind, and there shouldn't be in yours, that the answer is: absolutely not - not even in the very smallest, most trivial sense.) Many will say it depends whom you ask. The very idea, ironically, stems from propaganda first pushed into the public sphere by the defunct Soviet regime

and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media... In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left... [Martin Kramer writing in Mosaic Magazine, August 2014]

Anyone wanting to see for themselves how closely Gaza matches up to the libelous claims alleging it's a latter-day concentration camp can find no shortage of web-based reports depicting Gaza's luxe hotels, well-stocked supermarkets and glitzy shopping malls. Ditto a host of serious news analysis pieces (Washington Post, The Guardian, Honest Reporting, UK Media Watch and many others). It's there for anyone who wants to see.

The trouble is, reality is usually nuanced, often complex. It's clear that neither facts nor photos are enough to displace some people's prejudices and simplifications. Time has an effect too. The generation of Auschwitz survivors is, in the nature of things, approaching its natural end, making it that much easier for the deniers of the Holocaust's reality to attract audiences. And as the evidence sadly shows, there's a growing slice of humanity - among them a disturbingly large number of college students - who have been persuaded that not only did the Holocaust never happen, but it was the Israelis that did it with its principal victims being Palestinians.

"My visit to the Gaza concentration camp" [Source]

Don't be so quick to scoff. Fundamental mistakes of fact and of history are all around us; they are grist for the echo chamber that some parts of the mass media have become.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist whose work we have quoted admiringly here several times refers to some vignettes (in an article he wrote for Gatestone Institute) that are so shocking that a person could easily think they were invented. They illustrate what he terms a "degree of incomprehension -- and professional laziness -- [that] is difficult to imagine in the Internet age". Some instances (all direct quotes):

• When Israel assassinated Hamas's founder and spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, a British newspaper dispatched its crime reporter to Jerusalem to cover the event... Well, our hero reported on the assassination of Ahmed Yassin from the bar of the American Colony Hotel. His byline claimed that he was in the Gaza Strip and had interviewed relatives of the slain leader of Hamas...
• [A] Ramallah-based colleague... received a request from a cub correspondent to help arrange an interview with Yasser Arafat. Except at that point, Arafat had been dead for several years. Fresh out of journalism school and unknowledgeable about the Middle East, the journalist was apparently considered by his editors a fine candidate for covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Two Western journalists recently asked to be accompanied to the Gaza Strip to interview Jewish settlers living there. No, this is not the opening line of a joke. These journalists were in Israel at the end of 2015, and they were deadly serious. Imagine their embarrassment when it was pointed out to them that Israel had completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip ten years ago.

We could add several more from our personal experiences of meeting and being interviewed by literally hundreds of members of the brigade of what Khaled Abu Toameh calls "parachute journalists":

catapulted into the region without being briefed on the basic facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sadly, correspondents such as these are more the rule than the exception... Of course, the above tales hardly apply to all foreign journalists. Some correspondents from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe are both very knowledgeable and very fair. Unfortunately, however, these represent but a small group among mainstream media in the West... [But not] all foreign journalists. Some correspondents from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe are both very knowledgeable and very fair. Unfortunately, however, these represent but a small group among mainstream media in the West...

Those of us who care about truth, and its close companion, justice, understand that these are realities that must never be ignored. Khaled Abu Toameh expresses it sharply in the context of the journalism that we see practiced in this part of the world, which he correctly says

is not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, it is about being "pro" the truth, even when the truth runs straight up against what they would prefer to believe.

All the worthy memorials and monuments and anniversary events are helpless in the face of reportorial incompetence, massive ignorance, malevolence and fabrication. The deliberate rewriting of history absolutely matters.

So does forgetting the victims and their suffering and the lives they built afterwards.

28-Apr-15: In Malaysia, years of antisemitic exhortations along the path to anti-Israel terror

"Glad to be labeled anti-semitic": Malaysia's longest-serving 

political leader Mahathir Mohamad demonstrating characteristic

chumminess in Kuala Lumpur two years ago with Hamas 

arch-terrorist Khaled Meshaal [Image Source]

Israel's Shin Bet internal security service is said - according to an expose published today on the Haaretz English-language news site - to have publicly revealed detailed evidence of terrorism-centred activities by the loathsome Hamas jihadists in far-off Malaysia. [Source: "Shin Bet: Hamas training Palestinian students in Malaysia" | Haaretz | April 28, 2015]

Among the allegations:

• Hamas is taking Palestinian Arabs to Malaysia for training as 'operatives' (meaning terrorists). On their return, these people are to carry out undercover operations in the West Bank.
• A Palestinian Arab from Hebron, Waseem Qawasmeh, 24, is on trial in an IDF military court, charged with membership of a banned organization, with having contact with the enemy and receiving money from the enemy. He was arrested on February 13 at the Allenby Bridge which crosses the Jordan River, providing a road connection between the Hashemite Kingdom and the areas controlled by the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled PA. He had just returned from Malaysia, as well as having spent part of his training period in Hamas-friendly Turkey. The indictment papers were filed with the court on March 18, according to the Haaretz article and form the basis of its expose.
• Senior Hamas officials including Ma'an Hatib and Radwan al-Atrash, live in Malaysia and took part in the events giving rise to the indictment. The Shin Bet says Hatib is "responsible in Malaysia for the Hamas foreign desk", while the well-named Atrash is "a senior figure" in its Shura Council, a religion-connected body that includes Islamist figures tied to Hamas.
• Part of the terrorism prep training involves pushing the Pal Arab jihadism cadets into joining the Malaysian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and getting involved with pro-Palestinian charities active in that country.
• Among their missions, these recruits then serve as courier/messengers between the PA-controlled areas and third countries, as well as being involved with clandestine transfers of funds to serve the Hamas terror organization's requirements.

Malaysia has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Support for Hamas and its overt embrace of terror has been part of its political figures' public declarations for years. The current prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, visited the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in January 2013.

Malaysia's Jewish population, always a tiny number, has shrunk further in the wake of years of vile, fully-open Jew-hatred spouted from the country's highest political echelons. A 2012 article in Canada's National Post ["Anti-Semitism without Jews in Malaysia"] notes that Malaysia's

politicians and civil servants devote a surprising amount of time to thinking about Israel, 7,612 km away. Sometimes they appear to be obsessed by it. Malaysia has never had a dispute with Israel, but the government encourages the citizens to hate Israel and also to hate Jews whether they are Israelis or not. Few Malaysians have laid eyes on a Jew; the tiny Jewish community emigrated decades ago. Nevertheless, Malaysia has become an example of a phenomenon called “Anti-Semitism without Jews.” Last March, for instance, the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department sent out an official sermon to be read in all mosques, stating that “Muslims must understand Jews are the main enemy to Muslims as proven by their egotistical behaviour and murders performed by them.” About 60% of Malaysians are Muslim. In Kuala Lumpur, it’s routine to blame the Jews for everything from economic failures to the bad press Malaysia gets in foreign (“Jewish-owned”) newspapers...

If that's an exaggeration, it's not much of one.

A Malaysian newspaper, showcasing the career of the most prominent of Malaysia's leaders, former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad who served as the country's prime minister for 22 years between 1981 and 2002. provides some illustrative quotes:

"I am glad to be labelled antisemitic... How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies..."

That article, published in The Malaysian Insider, refers to Mahathir's speech to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference summit in 2003:

"[T]he Nazis killed six million Jews out of 12 million (during the Holocaust). But today, the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them"... adding this time that any sympathy accorded to the victims of the Holocaust was "wasted and misplaced".

Keep in mind Malaysia currently sits on the UN Security Council, where one of its most senior diplomats sees it having a role he bizarrely calls "constructive" in resolving a certain generations-long confrontation. See "Malaysia wants role in finding UN solution to Palestine-Israel conflict", a Malaysian news report from less than a week ago.

This might be a very good moment to review some of the thousands of Google links that pop up when you search on the term "Moderate Malaysia". Here's a fine example from 2009 among many others: "The Myth Of A Moderate Malaysia", from Forbes Magazine, in which the author addresses himself to

those scanning the globe for a Muslim-majority country that inspires neither dread nor despair [and] often alight upon Malaysia.

He explains why this optimism could be a teeny bit misplaced.

We are currently scanning the on-line Malaysian media to see how those years of foaming-at-the-mouth racist Mahathir-isms, are impacting on this latest round of made-in-Malaysia terrorism-friendly developments. Stay tuned.

16-Apr-15: At a bus stop stop in Jerusalem's French Hill on Holocaust Memorial Day, two lives upended

Around 11 on Wednesday night, we posted this to our Twitter account:

French Hill quarter, Jerusalem - sounds of police, ambulance activity; initial reports of suspected terror attack: Holocaust Memorial Day
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) April 15, 2015

Those first reports were unclear, though the sounds of emergency vehicles - clearly heard in our part of Israel's capital at a late hour - conveyed urgency and danger. There is still no confirmation from the authorities that what happened was a calculated act of terror via lethal vehicle. But the indications that it was are significant.

From Haaretz this morning ["Israeli man dies after possible Jerusalem car ramming attack"]:

Palestinian driver has been detained as part of the investigation; Police probing terror motives | Nir Hasson | April 16, 2015 | An Israeli man died Thursday morning of injuries sustained after being struck by a car in Jerusalem the previous night. The victim has been identified as Shalom Yohai Sherki, 25. He was the son of Rabbi Uri Sherki and [brother of] Channel 2 correspondent, Yair Sherki. The driver, a Palestinian, has been detained by police. Police and the Shin Bet security service were investigationg the incident and trying to determine whether the attack was intentional.They have not ruled out the possibility that it was an accident... Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat arrived at the scene Wednesday night along with heavy police forces and emergency crew. The incident occurred on Route 1, not far from some of the car ramming attacks in Jerusalem in recent months.

Those attacks were acts of terror beyond any doubt. We reported on two here just last month ["07-Mar-15: For some, but only some, Friday's Jerusalem ramming/slashing was yet another terror attack" and "06-Mar-15: Jerusalem, Purim and terror... once again"]

Shalom Yochai Sherki Z"L

Israel National News tells us more about one of the victims:

Son of Prominent Rabbi Victim in Possible 'Car Terror' Incident | The Israeli killed when he and a companion were hit by an Arab driver is Shalom Yohai Sherki, the son of the well-known Rabbi Uri Sherki | Moshe Cohen | First Publish: 4/16/2015, 9:00 AM
The Israeli killed Wednesday night when he and a companion were hit by an Arab driver is Shalom Yohai Sherki, the son of the popular Rabbi Uri Sherki, and brother of Channel Two journalist Yair Sherki. Shalom studied at the Bnei Tzvi Torani yeshiva high school in Beit El and was employed there as a youth counselor after his IDF service. The 25 year old victim's funeral will be held Thursday, the family said.
Still in critical condition is a second victim, a female around 20 years of age. Doctors are fighting to save her life. The two were hit late Wednesday by an Arab driver from Jerusalem, who slammed into the two at a bus stop in the French Hill area of Jerusalem. Police questioned the suspect overnight, and suspect that terror might have been the motive of the driver, who sought to kill Jews on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, police sources said. The suspect is to be transferred to the Shabak for questioning Thursday. The suspect was slightly injured in the incident, and was treated at the site by Magen David Adom volunteers.
Rabbi Uri Sherki is well-known in Religious Zionist circles. A close student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, he is head of the Israeli student department in Machon Meir and rabbi of the Beit Yehuda synagogue. Born in Algeria, Rabbi Sherki, was raised in France, and is a popular figure among French Jews. His Torah lectures often focus on Philosophy and Religion. Yair Sherki is the religious affairs correspondent for Channel Two... 

Today, Holocaust Memorial Day (the 27th day of the month of Nissan) is when Jews reflect on the hatred that costs lives and futures.

25-Apr-14: More and more, Holocaust Remembrance Day is a reminder of how much is not being remembered

Our daughter Malki Z"L with her Australian
grandmother (may she be well), Genia Roth.
Malki's paternal grandparents survived
the Holocaust, losing almost everything.
Malki herself was murdered in Jerusalem
by Hamas terrorists, among this generation's
heirs to the Nazi heritage, when she was 15.

Whatever small hesitations we may have had about a new initiative taken by the IDF's Social Media Unit, in the end we are deeply disturbed by the many ways in which the experience of the Jewish people just a handful of decades ago - within the lifetimes of the parents of us bloggers here at ThisOngoingWar - is increasingly diminished, degraded and denied.

Measures that restore dignity and respect to the victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi Germans and their many willing helpers are in our view measures worth taking.

This coming Sunday is marked here in Israel as Holocaust Remembrance Day. In its honour, the IDF has undertaken a campaign:

In a few days, we will commemorate the memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the bravery of all those who stood up against Nazi barbarism. This year, the IDF is putting together a special social media project. With your help, we will pay tribute to Holocaust survivors across various social networks.
With three simple steps, you will be able to contribute to Holocaust remembrance. Post a photo of yourself together with a Holocaust survivor on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag #WeAreHere. Also be sure to include his or her name, age, and place of residence.
We will then create an index of all of the photos you tagged, and build an interactive map according to location. This will contribute to commemorating those who were lost, and produce a dynamic memorial to those who remain across the globe.
Start publishing your images now and on April 27 the IDF will publish the interactive map to show the world that #WeAreHere.

We're fully supportive. We posted this Tweet yesterday - and we're grateful to the many who have retweeted it:

Malki Roth, murdered by Hamas 2001, with beloved grandmother Genia Roth, Auschwitz survivor #WeAreHere and remember 

We recently published on this blog a short article ["16-Mar-14: Fifteen: A festival time reflection"] about our family's history and the burden and privilege of memory. 

Genia Szmulewicz Roth was just fifteen when her family became captives of the Nazi German forces that rolled into Poland in September 1939. She was sent from her home town to the Lodz Ghetto, then to Auschwitz  and then to several forced-labour camps from where eventually she was liberated along with her three sisters. All her brothers, with their parents and virtually everyone else in the extended family, did not survive. We will pause to remember them this coming Sunday.

Living initially in a Displaced Persons' Camp, she and her sisters began rebuilding their lives following the trauma of six years under the Nazis. She married another survivor, Abraham Roth, in Munich in 1947, and on being granted immigration papers to Australia, settled in Melbourne in 1950. She lives there today, and is blessed with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who cherish and love her.

Her grandaughter, Malki - the eldest of our daughters - was murdered in a terrorist massacre carried out in central Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. For those unfamiliar with what we have written here in past posts, almost all the planners and executors of that attack on a pizza shop in the heart of Israel's capital city, unrepentant and unbowed, are free today.

We have much to remember.