21-Aug-18: A global day of tribute to terror victims? Yes, we were a bit surprised too.

Image Source: The UN

A media release from the United Nations explains that it has decided that today, August 21, 2018, should be known as the International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism.

Unless you're a diplomat accredited to the UN in New York City or one of the speakers in the multimedia presentation that is at the heart of the commemoration, you might not know.

We're not in those categories. So we knew nothing about the whole thing till we stumbled across a link this morning.

The goal, as explained by the UN Secretary General, is uplifting:

For the first time, we have gathered in one place the testimonials of individuals whose lives have been affected by terrorism, to hear first‑hand how this has impacted their lives, and what they have achieved.  I applaud the courage and resilience of everyone represented here.  I thank those who are with us here today and who are willing to speak out against terrorism, and I thank the thousands of others who stand up and speak out every day, everywhere. We are here for you and we are listening to you. Your voices matter.  Your courage in the face of adversity is a lesson inspiring us all. Commemorating the forthcoming International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August is an opportunity to recognize, honour and support victims and survivors, and to lift up the voices of those left behind. The United Nations stands in solidarity with you.

How to say this politely? As terror victims, the parents of a child murdered by an Islamist terrorist in the service of Hamas, our experience hasn't brought us to feel that the UN - or really anyone else in the world of major organizations - stands in solidarity with us.

Actually, quite the opposite. We're working hard to get the mastermind of the terror attack that took our Malki's life to be extradited from her cosy, well-funded comfortable life as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's leading celebrity jihadist and brought to a federal court-house in the United States. So far, that process has been moving slowly as readers of our blog probably know.

We have not viewed it and don't know yet whether it's accessible online. But the multimedia presentation described in the UN's promotional materials reminds us of an opportunity we were given a few years ago to testify about what being victims of terror does to a person.

Arnold Roth was a guest of a European association of terror victims which undertook a project to record the experiences and thoughts of a couple of dozen assorted terror victims with very different outlooks. The film-making took place in Madrid, Spain, in March 2014. The timing coincided with major Spanish events commemorating what they call 11-M, referring to the events of March 11, 2004 when the catastrophic Islamist terror attack on Madrid's trains took place [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"].

It wasn't, and still isn't, entirely clear what the eventual goal of the project was. It does appear that demonstrating 'resilience' against 'radicalisation' was involved. In some respects, it might still be a work in progress.

The 2014 project's English language portal is here, under the title "The Voices of the Survivors Against Radicalisation". (There's a fine summary video here.) As far as we know, not much marketing effort (and we're trying not to sound unkind to the good people involved in its making) was ever devoted to creating serious awareness. Or else we just missed it.

Since video presentations about being victims of terror are getting attention in New York City today, here in the clip below is what that project of four years ago did with Arnold Roth's testimony. It seems it was posted to YouTube about a year ago.



All the videos in that 2014 set were translated into a variety of languages. Not all the speakers spoke in English (most probably did not) and the intended audiences can choose from among Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, German and Italian sub-titled versions. Not a small undertaking.

While Arnold is comfortable speaking in public, and had a good idea of the points he wanted to convey - especially about how poorly terrorism is understand by commentators and politicians, and the sometimes disastrous ways terrorists are treated - the video doesn't quite deliver what he had in mind.

Once we saw the final product, we realized his aims were probably not a terrific match for what the sponsors of the project sought to achieve. For instance, he explicitly mentioned Hamas and Ahlam Tamimi - who plotted the assault on the Sbarro pizzeria - at several junctures for the obvious reason that they are central to the difficult times we have endured and they continue to play an embittering role in our lives today.

Those parts of the interview, however, did not survive the editing suite. This probably explains the slightly choppy nature of the final product and its abrupt changes of tone and subject matter.

If this momentous day, and the things it seeks to remember and to pay tribute to, got some attention where you live via the media or in other ways, we would be glad to hear about it.

10-May-16: Stopping to remember

A country stops to remember [Image Source]

Tonight (Tuesday) here in Israel, sunset marks the start of an extraordinary period of 48 hours.

An entire country first stops, remembers and mourns collectively and individually the thousands of lives taken from us in the several wars and many terror attacks that have for generations – starting long before Israel came into existence as a separate country - characterized the extreme animosity expressed towards us by the surrounding Arab states.

That’s Yom Hazikaron, Israel's national Memorial Day.

Then, barely pausing for breath, the mood changes dramatically as the sun sets Wednesday evening and we go straight into a day of national joy” Israel's 68th Independence Day, starting Wednesday night.

Last year at exactly this time, Arnold Roth was an invited keynote speaker at Toronto's community-wide commemoration of Israel’s national days. After participating, we can say that Toronto does a really fine job: a formal occasion, very well attended, and marked by full-hearted solemnity and celebration. It felt a tremendous privilege to take a role.

In his speech, Arnold reflected on what some consider the strangeness of a day of deep sadness being bracketed closely with national jubilation. His speech, under the title Remembrance and Redemption, is the subject of the video embedded below. In it, he touches on the song that Malki, our murdered daughter, composed in the last year of her life: several versions of it, all freely downloadable, are here, along with some of the background to its creation and aftermath.

He also shared aspects of a not-so-pleasant experience - as Israel's representative - addressing an international conference on terror and its victims, convened in New York City by the Secretary General of the United Nations in 2008. (A Haaretz report of that conference and of Arnold Roth's speech is here.) That speech is the source of the audio track accompanying a short introductory film clip that was shown to the audience in Toronto and which takes up the first 4m 20s of the YouTube video below.

This video was first published a year ago on the blog of the Malki Foundation, a really fine charity worthy of your attention and support. (Full disclosure: we are among its founders. Our roles - Frimet's and Arnold's - are honorary. From its inception, the foundation has always had a top-notch, but tiny, professional management team which does a great job.)

To put some concrete data around the pain that Israelis will be remembering tonight and tomorrow, the official military data (via Ministry of Defense) refer to 16,307 bereaved families: 9,442 bereaved parents, 4,917 widows and 1,948 orphans (below the age of 30). Soldiers who fell from 1860 to May 6, 2016 number 23,447. More than one-and-a-half million people will be visiting some 52 military cemeteries across Israel tomorrow.

The first official memorial events will begin shortly after the first siren blast this evening (Tuesday, May 10 at 8:00 pm. There will be a two-minute-long siren tomorrow (Wednesday, May 11) at 11:00 am, when anyone who cares to look will be able to observe that remarkable sight of highways throughout the entire country stopping to flow, pedestrians standing with heads bowed, a nationwide hush in the midst of a bright, sunny, warm and busy day in a Middle Eastern country that has not forgotten to honor those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.

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.

11-Sep-13: Remembering, failing to remember, denying the obligation to remember

Jerusalem's 9/11 memorial site. We plan to attend the ceremony there
later today. [Image Source]

As people who have felt, and continue to feel, the pain of losing a loved one to the cynical hatred of the terrorists and those who sustain them, we feel a permanent connection to the memorial events marking 9/11.

September 11, 2001 also happens to be the day on which the Malki Foundation was formally established. The registration papers were issued that morning by the Israeli government office that takes care of registering not-for-profits. Later that day, we learned to our horror how widely the experience we had undergone a month before had spread. It has continued to spread much more widely since those fateful 2001 days.

For the past decade, we have mounted a struggle here in Jerusalem for what we see as the failures of a headless bureacuracy (in truth, it may be even worse than that) to remember, to honour, to respect the lives of victims of the terrorists.

We did it first in relation to the location right in the heart of Jerusalem where Malki and so many others were murdered that awful day. [For example, this article published by Frimet Roth in 2003.] And we did it later in relation to the hundreds of people murdered by terrorists in Jerusalem since the September 2000 outbreak of the Arafat War (some call it Second Intifada).

We eventually succeeded in getting a plaque affixed to the wall of what had been the Sbarro restaurant building at the intersection of King George Avenue and Jaffa Road in central Jerusalem. To see how we described this mostly-unpleasant struggle at the time, click on "A plaque at Sbarro". We posted some related photographic images and other items there too.

As to the larger challenge of having the leadership of the great city of Jerusalem, currently roiling its way through an election, recognize the obligation to memorialize those murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in its streets and restaurant and on its buses, Frimet Roth's article below, from 2006, provides some insight into another frustrating and ultimately dis-spiriting struggle.

Bottom line: today there is a respectful and distinguished memorial in Jerusalem, located on municipal land in the Arazim Valley on the city's north side (see the photo above). It honors those killed in New York and Washington in September 2001, and incorporates a 30-foot bronze sculpture of a waving American flag that morphs into a memorial flame. As for Jerusalem's own victims, nothing.

(As it happens, we had the opportunity to raise this with city's current mayor just a few weeks ago in his office. Readers interested in knowing how that went are welcome to contact us.)

Partners in 'Project Amnesia'
With Memorial Day over, the Jerusalem Municipality must have breathed a sigh of relief.
FRIMET ROTH
Published in Haaretz on May 16, 2008

With Memorial Day over, the Jerusalem Municipality must have breathed a sigh of relief. We, the victims of terror attacks on the home front - attacks our leaders failed to thwart - have Memorial Day throughout the year. But City Hall, it seems, would prefer for the memories of our loved ones to fade.

Reminders of the hundreds who have been murdered by terrorists in this city poison the ambience. Negative ambience equals unhappy tourists, and unhappy tourists deplete the city's coffers - so goes the logic. This, at least, was the off-the-record explanation given to me last month by the unnamed staffer who answers the phone in the office of Jerusalem's spokesman, Gidi Schmerling. She was responding to my inquiry as to why, seven years after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, there is still no central memorial to this city's terror victims.

The municipality was actually the first to raise the idea. In 2002 it made a promise to victims' families that a memorial park would be erected in Jerusalem. The city's official policy for years has been to place a plaque wherever a terrorist murder happened. The reality is that only a few such memorial plaques have gone up. There is one on the outside wall of the building that was formerly the Sbarro restaurant. The plaque, 50 cm x 80 cm, lists the names of the 15 men, women and children massacred there. One is my daughter, Malki.

The plaque is up only because of many months of unrelenting pressure by my husband and me. My questions to Jerusalem's official representatives this year about what happened to the plan for a central memorial have been met with a resounding silence. Despite several months of calls and e-mails to the spokesman's office and other officials, some of them elected, no formal response has ever been forthcoming. My approaches were ignored or referred elsewhere, or I was given empty assurances that they would be dealt with in the near future. They never were.

Nobody deserves such disgraceful treatment from a municipality, least of all those of us who have paid the supreme price for this city to keep flourishing. The municipality has a partner in its de facto "Project Amnesia": The government of Israel has seemed no less keen to banish reminders of our terror victims. Shortly after the election of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), our prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, laying the groundwork for the disengagement, told Israelis that we "must forget our pain."

Evidently our current prime minister shares that view. In his public addresses, Ehud Olmert routinely avoids mentioning the more than 1,100 Israeli civilians murdered in the Al-Aqsa Intifada - and with good reason. Dredging up those casualties would hamper his efforts to pass Fatah off as a moderate "partner for peace." Concessions to Abbas - prisoner releases, new weapons, closing roadblocks - would go down much less smoothly with the Israeli public if the enormity of our recent losses were highlighted.

There is a third partner eager to distract the public from the wounds inflicted by terrorism: our own news media. In a recent television discussion, two veteran Israeli newscasters, Ben Caspit and Yigal Ravid, bemoaned the inordinate amount of time and ink that Israel's media have devoted to covering terror attacks during the last intifada.

According to this view, now that the tsunami of tragedy has passed, memorials are unwelcome. But apparently that rule carries a proviso: If the victims are non-Israelis and if the attacks took place outside Israel, then commemorating them is fine.

How else can one explain the decision of the Interior Ministry's Urban Planning and Construction Committee in February to approve the construction of a monument to the memory of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks? That memorial will be erected by none other than the Jerusalem Municipality - in a city park in the Arazim Valley, on Jerusalem's northern side. The choice of site will ensure its exposure to the traveling public; a bridge for the new light-rail train is slated to pass right alongside it. Somehow, concerns about depressing our tourists with such a monument were not an issue here.

This will not be the first 9/11 memorial in Israel. Nine have already been erected. As a bereaved mother, I feel a bond with victims everywhere, including non-Israelis, over the loss of loved ones murdered by terrorists. And as someone who grew up in New York, that bond is particularly strong toward my compatriots. Nevertheless, it is unconscionable for Israel to accord foreign victims, even those of our most loyal ally, the United States, preferential treatment over our own victims.

Six years ago, in a private meeting requested by my husband and me, Oved Yehezkel, the personal assistant to then-mayor Ehud Olmert, confirmed for us that Jerusalem had allocated an existing but rarely-frequented park as the location of a memorial to Jerusalem's victims of terror. That site, at the Allenby Compound, is a safe 15-minute drive from the city's center. It was thus unlikely to feature on many tourists' routes. The idea of such a park was initiated by the municipality, not by the victims; we were simply urging its planners to respect our sentiments in its execution. Yehezkel, now cabinet secretary, assured my husband and me that we would be consulted frequently during the process of its erection.

The bone that was tossed to us (a park that is not close to the city center, in a place rarely visited) remains an unfulfilled promise. Not even the tiniest steps have been taken at the site and we've received no requests for our input. Municipal officials know they need not lose sleep worrying about a backlash from the victims' families. We are a sector that can be counted on to swallow its anger and suffer humiliation in silence. Grief tends to have that effect on us.

But it is not only the offense toward the hundreds of victims that is disturbing. As Israel conducts serious cease-fire negotiations with Hamas, recalling that group's commitment to bloodshed is crucial. It would inject the caution and wariness that often seem absent from our leaders' mindset. And as for the city's precious ambience and the feared drop in tourism? Somehow we can find a way to survive the diversion of a few prospective tourists to Greece or Turkey. But we cannot survive the consequences of forgetting our terror victims.