After Thirty Years

Last Thursday and Friday were two very special and significant days. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of two major wars in Israel's history, the Six Day War and the first Lebanon war. The latter is of particular poignancy because Pat's son Greg (Gidon), an Israeli soldier, fell in battle on the third day of that conflict.

Thursday afternoon and evening there was a special ceremony marking that anniversary at Latrun, at Israel's Armored Corps Museum. It is there that ceremonies are held when Israeli young men and women complete basic military training. This time however, the ceremony was different. It was a time for reunion and remembering. Members of the Division in which Greg served, gathered, first in small groups to greet each other, recall events, and remember fallen comrades. Families of fallen soldiers, held in particular high regard, were also invited. For some of the men, it was the first time in thirty years that they had seen each other.

Pat and I and Amos, a very close friend from Kibbutz Gazit, where Greg had found a place for himself here in Israel attended the ceremony. Several men came and connected with Pat after all these years. We heard stories and details that led up to the tragic events in which Greg was killed. She met the jeep driver who had taken her to Lebanon, in the midst of war to see where Greg had fallen. There was a bulletin board which displayed the pictures of the men in Greg's unit who had fallen. Then we all gathered as the company commander told something personal about each one of the men, and presented a memorial plaque to each family. The evening concluded with a larger gathering at which the Chief of Staff of the Army spoke and where, once again, the fallen soldiers were remembered. After thirty years it was time to recall the efforts of these men with pride and dignity.

Friday Pat and I drove to Kibbutz Gazit, where Greg is buried, to mark the anniversary of his death. We have done this each year, when in Israel. This was the 30th anniversary. This year three of the men, including the company commander, who had been at the ceremony the previous evening, joined friends from the kibbutz to reflect and remember Greg. He has now been dead longer than he was alive!

Israel was a very special place for Greg. He came here for a year after high school on a program called Etgar. Kibbutz Gazit, at the foot of Mt. Tabor, became his new home. He fell in love with the country and with his group leader on the program; came back, ultimately, to the kibbutz, and ended up giving his life for this country. He left his love for Israel to his mother. Pat came here on sabbatical, came here to spend the year of mourning in a country that knows so much about death and grief, and we have come each year to be part of this vibrant, challenging, sometimes rough at the edges society. It has a way of growing on one!

This is our last post for this trip. We have not written all that often, but hopefully you have gained something from our postings. Shalom,

Frank

Images from Jewish Berlin

Frank has written below about our trip to Germany. For both of us is was a profound experience to be in Berlin. We had an excellent tour guide.

The German government has financed many memorials around the city. They periodically have sent out requests for proposals to artists to design these memorials, and then they have chosen one of the proposals to fund. The memorials are exceptionally moving artistic expressions and in their own way, beautiful.

Here are three. I never know exactly where the pictures will appear on the blog, or in what order. But one of the pictures shows a large room in the city hall of a district in Berlin where many Jews once lived. Someone found a letter in one of the houses and realized that Jews had lived there, and he took it upon himself to investigate more about the lives of the Jews who had been neighbors. This room contains hundreds of descriptions of families who once lived in the neighborhood.

Another picture is of "stumbling stones" -- brass plaques embedded in the cobblestones with the names of Jewish individuals who lived there and what happened to them. There are hundreds of these little plaques.

The third picture is from inside the Holocaust Memorial that Frank described. This memorial is quite overwhelming -- it takes up an entire square block in the middle of the city.

We both are so pleased that we made the trip and the impact will be with us for a long time to come.

Return to Germany

After more than 70 years, I returned to Germany. It took many counseling sessions for me to be able to make the decision to go. All of this was prompted by Pat’s decision to go to Germany for several days to visit a young couple who were living in Germany while the husband had a post doc position at the university in Braunschweig, a city about an hour and a half north of Berlin. For me it was both a wonderful opportunity and a challenge.

I left Germany as an 8 ½ year old in 1939. Up to now I had always felt that I would never return. I had no desire to go. The circumstances under which I left certainly did not provide any encouragement for me to consider returning. Yet here it is 2012, no longer 1939. I kept that in my mind as the time for going back neared, and all the time I was there.

We flew from Israel to Berlin on El Al Israel Airlines. The plane was filled with Israelis going to Germany on business or for pleasure. A contradiction by itself. We arrived in Berlin and took a taxi to our hotel. My German, long dormant, started coming back to me. I was able to read and understand the signs along the way. I had last been exposed to German as an undergraduate in college. We had not spoken German in our home once we arrived in America.

After checking in to our hotel we took a city circle tour. It was quite a powerful experience seeing the famous sites of Berlin which I remembered from my youth. Berlin had been 80% destroyed by the allied bombings in World War II. Now we were in a clean city with modern glass and steel architecture interspersed with older, traditional structures. We saw remnants of the Berlin Wall which had divided the city between east and west for so many years. Reunification was a major event in the life of the city. Berlin today is modern, active, cosmopolitan, with many hotels, and a thriving tourist industry. It was hard for me to grasp that I could walk freely into a major department store and choose from the many items for sale or stop for coffee and cake at the lavish food court. That was now and real.

The next day we took a tour of Jewish Berlin. This turned out to be a tour of what had been; a tour of a piece of history that the German government and the city did not want to be forgotten. All the memorials we saw that morning, were funded either by the federal or city governments. The memorials were powerful, often overwhelming in their starkness, simplicity, directness. The Jewish community of pre-war Berlin had been decimated and its institutions destroyed. What remains are signs on street lights, the railroad track on which trains carried Jews to concentration camps with dates along the trackside, a room in the city hall filled with pictures along the walls and biographies on shelves of people who had once been “neighbors” but had been taken to be “resettled”, a monument dedicated to the many synagogues that once served the Jews of the city. Now they are but names on metal plaques in rows on a lawn at the site of one of the destroyed synagogues. The most striking monument is a block long installation of grey stone blocks in the shape of coffins, forming columns of varying sizes, standing on uneven ground. The further you walk in, the taller the columns, the smaller you feel. It took my breath away. The whole experience of that tour left me without words. Perhaps silence and/or tears are the only possible response. We were not able to see any of Berlin’s reconstructed synagogues. They are closed; open only for services. I was disappointed.

The next day we spent significant time on Museum Island in the midst of the city where we walked amid displays of ancient archaeological finds, moving in their beauty and size. We ended the day with a visit to Berlin’s Jewish Museum and its striking architecture. Inside is a history of the Jews of Germany and Berlin brought to life through photographs, ritual objects and texts; designed for groups of students of all ages.

Then we traveled by train to Braunschweig where we had three days with a family including a young, three year old Israeli boy who was learning German at day care, whose father speaks to him in Hebrew and whose mother speaks to him in English; he manages to keep them all straight. It was truly a delight to be with them while dad is off in Spain working on his research project. We took trips to a park by a lake; to the foothills of the Harz Mountains; and to an “auto city”, devoted to a history of the automobile, sponsored, of course, by Volkswagen.

Before leaving Germany and returning to Israel, we had one last night in Berlin. Our hotel was a short distance from Berlin’s most fashionable street. We walked for several blocks and found a small, sidewalk restaurant featuring Italian food. We encountered a young waiter who spoke English like an American. It turns out he spent a year in Norfolk, Virginia as an exchange student. It’s a small world.

I was really glad to return to Israel after a moving, sometimes overwhelming, eye-opening experience. I felt as if a curtain has been lifted, a closet door opened. I surprised myself many times how at ease I felt in those surroundings; how available my German was and how comfortable I felt engaging in simple conversations. Yet I did not feel comfortable enough to wear my kippah in public. Somehow, I did not want to call attention to myself. Surprisingly, I am open to the possibility of returning to Germany to see more and perhaps to make some contact with Jews living in today’s Germany.

Frank

Park Shikmona

There is a new park in Haifa, Park Shikmona, which is down by the sea. There are three new "tyellet" -- paths -- there, one close to the sea, another for bicycles, roller blades, etc., and a third one, parallel, but higher up. They are all fabulous, planted with native plants that grow close to the sea. I love to walk there and there are lots of good picture-taking opportunities. I'll post four pictures taken recently.

Tomorrow we are flying to Berlin where we'll be for three days before going by train to Braunschweig, where we will spend another three days. Naomi Hill, the youngest daughter of my friend Judy (z"l) is living there now with her husband Ori and their son Boaz. Judy died in 2004. We are close with her children and so we are visiting Naomi, and that's the primary purpose of the trip. We are both looking forward to it.

So more later!
Pat

Politics Make Strang Bedfellows

Events in the last few days just prove the point that rabbis do not make good political analysts, especially here in Israel. What I wrote in my previous postings could have come to pass.

Shaul Mofaz and Bibi Netanyahu were fierce political adversaries. Now they have formed a strong coalition, bringing the center party, Kadimah, closer to the more right wing Likud. The Knesset did not dissolve and September elections are history. It remains to be seen what, if anything, this strong coalition can accomplish in the year and a half before the next scheduled elections.

Israel faces a number of challenges in the coming weeks and months. We hope for some positive results!

Frank

Politics Are Never Simple

The current coalition, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, had requested the Israeli Supreme Court to review the court's decision requiring the demolition of illegally built houses in the West Bank settlement of Beit El.

The coalition had such hopes pinned on the Chief Justice of the court. However he and other justices ruled that their decision was final. The neighborhood in question is comprised of five multi-family buildings on the edge of Beit El, and it has turned into Mr. Netanyahu's hill of horrors. Sending bulldozers there and forcibly evacuating some 200 men, women, and children in the midst of an election campaign would be the equivalent, in electoral terms, of the series of terrorist bombings in early 1996 that ended up toppling the government of Shimon Peres. The sight of demolished buildings and evacuated settlers only weks before the election may drive may drive masses of Likud voters, members of the party that Mr Netanyahu leads into the hands of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party.

Never a dull moment on the local political scene. Stay tuned.

Frank

Elections Yet Again

In Israel we have become accustomed to having elections very often. This option often prevents progress on significant economic, social and political issues that face the country.
There have been 32 governments in the 64 year history of the state. I cannot recall when there has been a government in which one party was able to gain a majority of seats in parliament in order to govern.

There are 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament; 61 seats are needed to basically govern effectively. Here votes are cast for parties, not individual candidates. There can be as many as a dozen parties in any given election. This means that most governments are coalition governments. The Prime Minister is usually the leader of the party gaining the most seats. The number of seats each party receives is determined by how many votes a particular party receives in proportion to the total number of people voting.

This year elections will take place on September 4th, just before the Jewish holidays and before American elections in November. It is fairly certain that Mr. Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, will head the next government. He will probably have a majority of right wing parties, including the religious parties. Those parties with left of center leanings will not be able to muster enough votes to form a successful coalition. A recent poll showed that the there would be 65 seats for the right, 55 for the center-left.

Mr. Netanyahu decided that elections would be good now for a number of reasons. He has no competitors, Israel's economy is creaking, and there are problems passing the budget which would destabilize the government.

The next four months in Israeli politics will be very interesting. There will be party primaries and over the summer the election campaign will take place. Election ads on TV and radio will be limited to specific time slots. The campaign will surely not be as drawn out as the campaign in the US has been this year. As Israeli citizens, Pat and I will unfortunately not be in Israel to vote and there are no provisions for absentee voting. We did vote in one election a number of years ago.

The voting process itself is very interesting. No voting machines. When you step behind the curtain in the voting booth you are greeted by an array of cards with symbols, one for each party. You select a card with the symbol of the party for which you wish to vote,k place it ion the envelope provided, seal the envelope an place it in the voting box. An interesting fact with which to conclude: Here in Israel usually over 80% of the population that is eligible to vote, turns out to vote!