27-Jul-12: Reflecting on the power of memory

The park; the youth club building; the banner across the street. The
entrance to our Jerusalem neighbourhood today

In the world of Jewish memories and experience, this time of year has an especially stressful character. 

It’s a very hot Friday here in Jerusalem at this moment. The Sabbath will settle in as the sun sets, and the following 25 or so hours of disconnect from the surrounding world, always welcome, will be especially so because of what follows it on Saturday night: the observance of the ninth day of Av.

Av is a difficult month for people who live by the traditional Jewish calendar. The ninth day of Av is when the Babylonians destroyed the one-and-only Jewish temple in Jerusalem, bringing an end to independent Jewish life in what we call Israel today and killing some 100,000 Jews while exiling almost all the others. 

Some 640 years later, in the year 70, it was the turn of the Roman empire to conquer Israel and for the second time the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This time, some two million Jews were killed; a million more went into an exile that lasted many centuries. An independent Jewish nation in its own land did not arise again until the establishment of modern Israel 64 years ago.

Av the ninth is marked by a sunset-to-sunset absolute fast that begins this coming Saturday night. There are mournful prayers, deliberate physical discomfort and a great deal of personal and community introspection. Beyond the ancient history aspects, the same date has been associated with some of the Jewish people’s blackest moments: on this day, the entire Jewish community of Spain was expelled in the fateful year 1492. On this day in 1942 in the city of Warsaw - one-third of whose entire population was Jewish at the time - the Nazi Germans began to liquidate the ghetto and send its inhabitants to their deaths in the Treblinka factory of death.

Once the ninth of Av is safely behind us, the rest of the summer for most religiously observant Jews gets easier and more enjoyable. The relaxation doesn’t quite reach our family, unfortunately. In 2001, our eldest daughter Malki, 15, was killed in a Hamas terrorist outrage in the center of Jerusalem. Even as most Jews breathe a sigh of relief with the end of the fast (this year, that means this coming Sunday night) we prepare ourselves for the annual pilgrimage to her grave and the public commemoration of the anniversary (called the azkara in Hebrew) of her murder.

We feel indescribable pain, but we are not morose or neutralized. We’re terribly sad, even overwhelmed by the feeling of loss. But we have full and constructive lives to live.

It’s not self-evident. With so much death and anger around, and a full-time industry of propagandists declaiming about the unbearable insults suffered by their pride, a person might be forgiven for thinking that in a community like ours here in Jerusalem, where hundreds of young people were killed in terrorist attacks, the mood would be characterized by vengeance and confrontation. It simply isn’t so.

Malki died alongside her best friend. They were two beautiful young girls, busy with a day full of good deeds, standing at the counter of a bustling pizza shop at lunchtime. For the past eleven years, they lie side by side in Jerusalem’s soil. Their friends from the neighbourhood and from their youth organization – many of whom were as close as teenage friends get to both girls – suffered an incomprehensible double blow.

I have heard people say over the years that they could easily imagine passionate young people reacting to the vicious and deliberate killing of their closest friends by resorting to their own acts of hate-based violence. The reality, as anyone who knows anything about Israeli society, is far from that. Here is what the friends actually do.

Every August for the past ten years, the graduating group at Malki's youth organization (it’s called EZRA) sits down and organizes a public fun fair and bazaar. It runs from mid afternoon until late at night, and it takes place in a small and pleasant public park just near where we live on Jerusalem’s north side.

The park happens to abut the building that serves as the clubhouse for EZRA in our part of town. 

When the building was still just a few weeks old back in 1997, we rented it for an evening and held Malki’s bat mitzvah party there. On the awful night of August 9 eleven years ago, the same building was filled with hundreds of youngsters conducting a prayer vigil while the search went on for the two girls in other parts of our city. We knew by then that Malki and her friend Michal had both been inside Sbarro that afternoon. But it took some hours (12 in the case of our daughter) for the friends and the families to learn the bitter outcome.

And it was in that same park, on a hot September night some thirty days after the Sbarro massacre, that we held a public memorial event there, an azkara, to allow our friends, our neighbours and us to express our grief, collectively and privately, at the loss of two such beautiful, innocent, good lives. The agony of that evening was greatly sharpened by the events that had kept most of us glued to our televisions throughout the afternoon and evening leading up to it: this happens to have been the night of September 11, 2001.

The EZRA fun day is held annually in memory of Malki and Michal, and with the stated intention of giving all the proceeds to charity. This year’s will be the tenth such fair. It is set for Monday afternoon, July 30, and will run from 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night. The banner announcing it is already stretched across the road leading into our community to create awareness (photo above). The Hebrew words state the message of the fair: “To give when you love”.

It’s a message which puzzles me, year after year. Why do the children in our community here in Jerusalem who have lost parents, siblings, friends to acts of overt hatred, respond by doing acts of charity, declarations of love? It’s not so obvious. They’re busy kids. The boys are weeks or months away from starting their army service, so they probably are grappling with complicated thoughts. Most of the girls will be starting their national service (most girls of religious orientation do this in place of army service, but some do go into the military) and are aware of the challenges ahead. Still, when they take time out to do something as a cohort of friends, a collective action, it’s about charity and remembering and – their choice of word – love.

It’s hard not to make invidious comparisons with what we see in the news from other parts of our region: grief stricken young men and women, strapping bombs to their chests and expounding on how anger and pride demand that they kill people and perhaps themselves as well. We’re all too familiar with the horrifying dynamic.

But over here, the dynamic is about recruiting vendors who will set up tables to sell school books, pens, small household appliances, decorative objects and works of art, clothing and gifts. They find jugglers, food-stall operators, people who will install inflatable bouncies in the shape of castles or large animals which delight the toddlers who are brought by their mothers. The volunteer team, all of them barely out of high school, advertise the event by flyers distributed throughout Jerusalem; by ads in bus stations, synagogues, message boards and other key locations.

It’s not just in our neighbourhood either. People of all ages have addressed the painful memories of their own lost loved ones by creating worthy undertakings, concerts, park benches, small libraries, and on and on throughout Israel. Our Malki, all of fifteen years old when she did it, served as youth leader for a group of nine year old girls in a city that is an hour’s bus ride from here. This coming Monday, the youngsters of that city too are holding their own memorial fair (proceeds to charity) in Malki’s memory as they do year after year. The cohort of friends now taking charge were only seven or eight when Malki was alive, so they cannot really have known her. Yet they understand the symbolism and it clearly resonates with them.

There is an apocryphal tale told about Napoleon who was walking in the streets of Paris on the 9th day of Av. His entourage passed a synagogue and the sounds of wailing from within caused him to send an aide to ask what terrible thing had happened. The aide enquired, and reported to Napoleon that the Jews were in mourning over the loss of their temple. Napoleon asked with indignation: “How could this happen without me being informed? When did this occur? Which temple?” The answer given by the aide was that the loss occurred on this date 1,700 years ago and in Jerusalem. Napoleon was silent for a moment, and then is famously reported to have said: "A people that mourns its loss through countless generations will surely survive to see the rebuilding of its temple.”

A society that chooses to honour the lives of its murdered children through constructive acts of remembrance, joy and charity has a special resilience. Their pain is not removed or even lightened; their hopes and dreams are not necessarily granted to them; and the men (and women… and children) with the bombs strapped to their chests are not thwarted. But the strength of a society that knows how to remember is something to behold. It is a privilege to be living in its midst.

Click here for pictures of last year’s EZRA charity fair in memory of Malka Chana Roth and Michal Raziel, of blessed memory, which was attended by nearly a thousand people. For information on times and locations for Monday’s two charity fairs (one in Jerusalem, one in Maale Adumim), please email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com

The Hebrew banner adjacent to the local EZRA youth organization branch reads "Latet K'sh'ata Ohev", "To Give When You Love". That has been the slogan of the annual bazaars in memory of Malki and Michal for ten consecutive years.

2-Aug-06: Remembering Past Losses

We're a people with a memory, we Jews. Tonight is the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. We call it Tisha B'Av, and it's been a day of fasting for us these past, oh, two thousand years. Not just fasting, but a day of remembering how the heavy burden of Jewish history has impacted generation after generation of Jews down through the ages.

As a child, I recall hearing from a teacher how Napoleon Bonaparte walked past a synagogue and heard the sounds of weeping. He looked inside and saw Jews of all ages sitting on the floor, reading and sobbing. When he asked why, someone told him it was what the Jews do when they call to mind their losses of 2,000 years earlier. His response, as my teacher conveyed it to me, was "A community that can mourn for 2,000 years will surely see the renewal of what was lost."

We spent this evening, as we have in past years, in a public reading of the Biblical book of Lamentations - Eicha, in Hebrew. Not in synagogue, but on a ridge on Mt Scopus about ten minutes drive from our home, looking out over Jerusalem, the city whose name every observant Jew pronounces dozens of times a day in prayer, as our grandparents did in Jerusalem, in Krakow, in Casablanca, in London, in Berlin. And as their grandparents did, and their grandparents' grandparents' grandparents did.

Sitting on a low stool as a sign of mourning (or on concrete steps, as we did) and looking out over Jerusalem as the words of Jeremiah the prophet are intoned mournfully, you would have to be made of rock yourself not to be aware of the history, and of what that history is telling us.

It's not a history that's confined to books, and not even to prayer books, but a history unfolding around us, enfolding us, embracing us.

The particular ridge where our community - with friends, guests, children, we are about 250 people - chooses to meet each year on this night used to be somewhat isolated. Then they built a road right beside it as part of the new rapid access routes that connect Jerusalem's eastern suburbs - places like Maale Adumim - to the center. The new road also serves part of the population that does not see the same significance in Tisha B'Av as we do: the Arab residents of this city. So this year, the quiet of our outdoor prayer gathering blended with the shouts and whistles of Arab Jerusalemites as they pulled up alongside. Not enough to bother anyone. Just enough to remind us of where we are, who else is here and what's on the agenda.

Today was a violent day in a violent period. Hezbollah's 'freedom fighters' have managed to fire more than 1,700 missiles into Israel since the start of the latest phase of this ongoing six-year, one-hundred-year war. Just today, Wednesday, they created a new record: 210 missiles, according to Haaretz; 182 according to Reuters. And the day is not over.

So far today, the Magen David Adom civil ambulance service has had to treat 159 people from injuries caused by Hezbollah missile attacks. 5 are described as moderately wounded; 47 as 'lightly' hurt; 107 needed treatment for shock. You can play with those definitions, because moderate, severe, light are words that make sense when we speak about other people. But when it happens to you and me, we're in much less doubt about what to call it. The family of David Lalchuk understand that. He became a kibbutznik after moving to Israel from Boston about the time we did, two decades ago. 52 years old, he had arranged for his wife and two daughters to take refuge down south while the missiles fell in the Nahariya/Kibbutz Saar neighbourhood. He heard the incoming-missile siren today and got on his bike to pedal to safety, but was hit and died.

In the 22 days since Hezbullah's six-year plan to wage war on the Zionists burst into activity, 2,208 Israelis have had to be treated in hospital for injuries from the missile attacks. 77 are still hospitalized, 3 in serious condition, 34 moderately injured and 40 in what Israelis like to call light condition. And 19 are dead, not including soldiers killed in action.

For the apostles of proportionate response, these are bad numbers. There need to be far more injured and killed Israelis. Perhaps there will be, and those critics will be happier. Meanwhile, almost every last one of us Israelis - stubborn, opinionated folk that we are - would like to have those casualty numbers stay exactly where they are and not grow.

Sitting on that dark hillside tonight, reading from the light of a small lantern, we could hear the cacophany of Moslem muezzins from various corners of East Jerusalem, calling their faithful to prayer. It's a fairly raucus sound if you are not familiar with it. Not melodious in a conventional sense, not meant to be easy-on-the-ears, but rather to burst right through whatever other activity might be underway. Which is just how it was for us tonight; disturbing, intrusive, a reminder of their very different outlook on life. They do it five times each day, and each time it seems, for those of us who hear it in this renewed, flowering, thriving Jerusalem a reminder of profound differences.

That's not to say that we Jewish Jerusalemites are provoked or angered or even, in most cases, bothered. Tonight at least, sitting on the hillside, looking down at the Temple Mount, visualizing the many tragedies we associate with the 9th day of Av, the person chanting the mournful verses did not even raise his voice. It's something we Jews do well: remember, quietly mourn our losses, recall our pain, honour those who came before us and who did not forget.

When you internalize the lessons that history has handed our people, you understand why there are some thousands of young Israelis on Lebanese soil and guarding northern Israel and southern Israel tonight. And also why the sputtering moral outrage and crocodile tears that accompanied yesterday's photographs of dead Lebanese children have so little impact on mainstream thinking in this country.

We have internalized our lessons from history, and other people have internalized theirs. On the whole, our version works for us, and has allowed us to establish a mainly tolerant, robustly democratic, forward-looking and justice-cherishing society. And for those still wondering: there is very, very little we need to learn regarding respect for human lives and for children from the Nasrallahs, the Assads, the Ahmadinejads and the Chiracs.

May the occasions of mournful remembering be turned to days of joy and celebration quickly in our time.