Gazan civilians on the roof of a building that had been used for terror activity. (photo from idfblog.com)
As Palestinians begin to discuss the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip after seven weeks of fighting with Israel, Israeli, Palestinian and international officials warn of the risk of another round of fighting unless there is a diplomatic agreement between the two sides as well as an agreement to rebuild Gaza.
Hamas senior official Musa Abu Marzook said that indirect talks with Israel would resume in Cairo later this month. He hinted that Hamas would be prepared to negotiate directly with Israel, saying that there is no obstacle in Muslim religious law to negotiations with Israel.
Israel, for its part, says that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it will not negotiate either directly with Hamas or with any government that includes Hamas. This could complicate efforts for a new unity government of technocrats from Hamas and Fatah.
European Union Ambassador Lars Faaborg-Andersen warned last week that without a long-term political solution that would see Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in charge of Gaza, violence could start anew. Israel and Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire on Aug. 26, and were expected to restart negotiations on long-term issues within a month. These expected talks come amid growing tensions between Abbas’ Fatah movement and Hamas, which is far more popular in Gaza now than it was before the war.
The issues on the table for the Cairo talks include an airport or sea port for Gaza, which Israel is expected to oppose, rebuilding Gaza, which is estimated to cost $7.8 billion, and demilitarizing the Strip, which Hamas has opposed. Cairo is also expected to host an international donors conference in October.
In the short term, the Palestinian Authority has appealed for more than $550 million in emergency aid for Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are still homeless after the fighting.
Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa said, “Reconstruction is the ultimate goal, but our government won’t accept a return to the status quo. We are getting to a limit that can no more be accepted. Never again, never again.”
Israeli officials said they would support the PA having control over a demilitarized Gaza Strip.
The parking lot at the Rambam Health Care Campus is a dual-purpose facility capable of converting into a fortified 2,000-bed underground hospital in times of conflict. (photo from Rambam Health Care Campus)
Not unexpectedly, southern Israel suffered more than other areas of the Jewish state during this summer’s conflict with Hamas. Yet up in northern Israel, 30 doctors from the Haifa-based Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC) were drafted into the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
“Israel is a small country, so everything affects you whether you are in the conflict or not,” Prof. Rafael (Rafi) Beyar, a renowned cardiologist and the director general of RHCC, told this reporter.
Now, in the aftermath of the 50-day summer war, RHCC is proving that medicine has “no borders,” in Beyar’s words. The week of this interview, doctors at the hospital conducted a successful kidney transplant on a 14-year-old boy from Gaza.
The robotic catheterization system allows the doctor to open heart blockages and implant stents in patients remotely. (photo from Rambam Health Care Campus)
The largest hospital in northern Israel, RHCC serves more than two million residents and functions as the primary medical facility for the Northern Command of the IDF. In addition to treating Gazan patients and training Palestinian physicians, the hospital is receiving wounded Syrian refugees.
Many of RHCC’s Gazan patients are children facing cancer and kidney diseases.
“These kids don’t have any other solutions,” Beyar said.
While suffering from kidney failure, the Gaza boy treated this week also had a blood condition that obstructed some of his blood vessels. Doctors first needed to check for useable blood vessels, and only then could they transplant his sister’s kidney into his body. When it became clear that the boy’s functioning blood vessels could not sustain the new kidney, doctors implanted a synthetic connector that saved his life.
On the Syrian front, RHCC has received nearly 100 wounded refugees over the past few months. IDF soldiers provide the necessary immediate treatment for injured refugees at the Israel-Syria border in the Golan Heights, and then bring them to the hospital. Most of the Syrian patients have sustained injuries from shock, bombs and other blasts. When they are treated and recover, most return to Syria, but some don’t want to go back, said Beyar.
Like the patients from Syria, most of the Gazan patients are thankful for the treatment they receive from RHCC. Although Beyar doesn’t know what happens to the patients once they return to Gaza, he said, “Someone who is treated and whose life is saved knows how to appreciate that.” Beyar added that he believes Israeli medical treatment of Gazans “has a long-term impact” on how Palestinian civilians view Israel.
An illuminated Chumash from the El Escorial Library collection in Madrid. (photo from Courtesy of El Escorial Library)
Everyone has heard: “All good things must come to an end.” This saying certainly holds true when talking about Spanish Jewry’s Golden Age. Back in the Middle Ages, Spain’s church and state used forced conversion, expulsion and the Inquisition to obliterate Jewish life on their peninsula. While we might have some sense of how these methods devastated the lives of this once great Jewish community, we are probably less aware of the toll it took on the products of this culture, namely its books.
Let’s first be clear about what the Spanish Inquisition was. In her article “Medieval and Early Modern Sephardi Women,” published in the volume Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, Prof. Renée Levin Melamed writes that the Inquisition was “a temporary legal institution or court set up by the Roman Catholic Church in order to extirpate suspected heresy. Its jurisdiction was solely over baptized Catholics; thus, it could bring to trial converted Jews or Muslims, suspected witches, sectarians and the like.”
What set the Spanish Inquisition in motion? According to Prof. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (author of Ferdinand and Isabella), in the late 1400s, the Spanish monarchs genuinely dreaded that the souls of their Catholic subjects would be forever lost to Islam and Judaism. Indeed, there was a pervasive fear that those who had already left Judaism (those former Jews known as conversos) had not really put aside their original religion. Hence, Spanish Christians strongly suspected conversos of Judaizing. To deal with this perceived threat to Christianity, the king and queen established the Inquisition.
Once the institution began functioning, religious considerations were perverted into accusations based upon economic rivalry, as well as the settling of assorted personal grudges. Moreover, as the offices of the Inquisition had the power to impound the possessions of the accused, it became advantageous to keep the institution going. Far worse than losing one’s possessions, however, was the sadistic physical torture the indicted commonly suffered, and the death by burning of those convicted. Fernandez-Armesto writes that contemporaries of Ferdinand and Isabella chose conveniently (and paradoxically) to forget – or ignore – the fact that “the Spanish royal house, too, was remotely affected by Jewish blood, through its founder, Henry of Trastámara, and his mother, Leonora de Guzmán, mistress of Alfonso XI.”
While Christian officials busied themselves in setting up the Inquisition, a few undaunted Spanish Jews moved ahead in printing sacred Hebrew texts. Significantly, these came to be highly regarded: “Their biblical texts were regarded as more accurate and authoritative … their codices are … very precise,” writes Teresa Ortega-Monasterio in Spanish Biblical Hebrew Manuscripts.
In Early Hebrew Printing in Sepharad ca. 1475–1497, Prof. Shimon Iakerson points out that “in 1482, Solomó ben Moisé Levi Alkabiz was established in Guadalajara and produced the first printed edition of the Talmud; in 1485, [Eliezer ben Abraham ibn] Alatansi was established in Híjar; and, in 1487, Samuel ben Mousa y Emanuel was working in Zamora (Torre Revello 17).”
While we know that Alkabiz printed a Rashi commentary on the Torah, information about Alatansi’s press is limited, and researchers only know of a fragment from the halachic compendium of Jacob ben Asher, including two copies of the latter prophets and two copies of the Torah. From what we know, ben Mousa, like Alkabiz, printed Rashi’s commentary on the Torah, as well.
It should be noted that during this same period, Hebrew printing was going on elsewhere, but it has been difficult to assign locations. Nevertheless, by comparing the fonts and printing paper to known texts, it is possible to suggest (but not confirm) those who may have worked on the books and the possible location of their workplace.
Intriguingly, for a limited time, there was cooperation between Jewish and non-Jewish printers. For example, it appears that Alfonso Fernandez de Cordoba “rented out” his frames to Jewish printers in Híjar in order that they might decorate the pages of their editions. Elsewhere, the Christian type caster Maestro Pedro of Guadalajar was mentioned in a Hebrew text.
Still, the Spanish monarchy felt threatened by the accessibility to Jewish learning afforded by the printing of Hebrew texts. Copies of the Talmud became a target of the Inquisition. From there, the hunt intensified, turning towards other Jewish texts. Two years before the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Grand Inquisitor Fray Tomás de Torquemada to burn Hebrew books. Later, during an auto-da-fé (act of faith, which really meant the public burning of a heretic) extravaganza in Salamanca, this same church father oversaw the burning of more than 6,000 volumes, which were said to be “infected with Jewish errors.”
Even after the expulsion, this ruthlessness continued, as Inquisition officials confiscated Jewish books and searched for any so-called “Jewish contamination” in the conversos community. Arias Montano (1527-1598), the first director of El Escorial Library, described the situation this way: “Of Hebrew books, of which there was great wealth in Spain, there is now great poverty.” In fact, the Inquisition finished off Hebrew printing in Spain.
Miraculously, some Hebrew books printed in Spain survived this onslaught, often as single copies or as mere fragments, writes Iakerson. Some of these remnants exists in Spain, stored in places like the library of the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, in the library of the Royal Palace of Madrid and in the library of the Complutense University of Madrid. While the originals remain out of the public eye, some facsimiles are on view today. For example, in Cabinet 43 of the Escorial Library’s viewing room, there is a facsimile of a 15th-century Torah, which also contains the Masora, or Masoretic texts (various scholarly notes on the biblical text written into the margins).
In his 1969 book Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts, art scholar Bezalel Narkiss located illustrated medieval Spanish Jewish manuscripts in several European libraries and museums. These beautiful texts are now housed in places such as Sarajevo’s National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, National Library of Portugal in Lisbon, the Oriental Department of the Berlin State Library, British Museum in London, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Oriental Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester. Many of these collections are available for online viewing. For example, in 2012, the National Library of Spain gathered and mounted a large temporary exhibit of Spain’s most important medieval Hebrew texts. The exhibit is now viewable online and includes Hebrew Bibles, liturgical texts, texts dealing with reason and revelation, biblical exegesis, polemics and Spanish reports on the Inquisition trials of various conversos, suspected of Judaizing.
With the ability to digitize ancient documents and with the increasing international connection between libraries, perhaps additional surviving medieval Spanish Hebrew texts will be discovered. At the very least, we hope to learn more about those already discovered fragments of this once-flourishing Jewish culture.
Deborah Rubin Fieldsis an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic (take-a-peek-inside.com).
Prof. Shlomo Hasson of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem speaks with audience member Marvin Weintraub after his presentation on Israel’s geopolitical situation. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)
While Prof. Shlomo Hasson of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offered some hope that Israel will one day live in peace, he did not offer many reasons to be optimistic about the future of the Middle East.
Speaking to more than 150 people at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Sept. 4, Hasson put the current geopolitical situation of Israel into context, and discussed four possible futures for the Middle East in general, and for Israel in particular. These scenarios were derived at HU’s Shasha Centre for Strategic Studies, which Hasson heads.
Hasson, who is also a professor in HU’s department of geography, School of Public Policy, and the Leon Safdie Chair at the Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, began by sharing his belief, as a strategist, that, “In every crisis, there is also embedded an opportunity.”
The main issues, he explained, are Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state and its security within recognized (legitimate) borders, the conflict with Hamas and the regional upheaval. The question is which map(s) and policy(ies) can best deal with all these issues (demography, democracy, legitimacy and geography) and what are the driving forces (internal, regional and global) shaping this map.
The dilemma is not new, said Hasson. “We have always asked ourselves, ‘How can we sustain Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and legitimate borders?’” What is new, however, is the context.
According to Hasson, the new aspects of Israel’s dilemma include that the United States doesn’t have a comprehensive Middle East strategy; the cold war in the region (states fighting each other indirectly using proxies, such as extremist groups); the region’s instability (failed states, non-state actors); the increase in criticism of Israel (even by allies) and antisemitism; and the indeterminate results of Operation Protective Edge.
About the war with Hamas over the summer, Hasson divided the results into achievements and failures. Achievements included the devastation Israel inflicted on Hamas, the tunnels it destroyed and the top commanders it killed, the effectiveness of the Iron Dome, the isolation of Hamas, the resilience within Israel and Israelis’ support of the war. On the negative side, he said, Israel did not manage to defeat Hamas; the Israeli government exhibited reactive policy, a lack of creativity and an absence of strategy during the conflict; there were rifts with the United States; the recognition of Hamas as a political actor; and, within Israel, there was bitterness and political division. Hasson questioned whether the war had achieved greater security or served as deterrence.
Hasson went through four predominant opinions on Israel’s possible future, ranging from the Greater Land of Israel to no Jewish state. One of the reasons that progress in achieving agreement is hard, he said, is because people approach it with their own “inevitability assumptions” about such things as to where Israel’s borders should lie: for example, the 1967 borders are inevitable because they stem from moral/progress imperatives, or the Greater Land of Israel borders are inevitable because of a divine promise.
Israel’s decisions and border preferences are not the only ones that will influence its future. Other forces are at work: the super powers (United States, China, Russia, European Union), regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia/Egypt), developments in the Arab world, relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as developments within the PA.
Hasson highlighted the importance of the Sunni versus Shi’a conflict, explaining some of the possible regional outcomes: national-religious states, democracy, the prevalence of moderate autocrats or the rise of extremists. He said that Israel cannot only focus on its relations with the Palestinians, but must take a broader view, including in its strategizing the Arab world, non-state actors, regional rivalries, and global competition over resources and positions.
He described four scenarios and hypothesized their likelihood.
“Pax Americana,” in which the United States returns to the region as a major actor, the Arab nations engage in democratization and Israel returns to the 1967 borders was one of them. Hasson said, “If you ask me, what are the chances, or the probabilities, of this scenario, I would say … very slim. So, when people talk about the ’67 borders, I share their expectation and I have the highest respect for the people who believe in a two-state solution … unfortunately, the leading driving forces are not taking us in this direction….”
Hasson described both the regional hegemony of Sunnite moderate parties (“a moderate Hamas” may prevail in this scenario) and “clash of civilizations” (between Islamic and non-Islamic forces, but also within Islam, where the extremists will take over) as having a moderate chance of occurring, and the potential for anarchy (with even the superpowers fighting each other) as high.
The Middle East will be unstable for a long time and a two-state solution cannot come to fruition, at least in the short term, he concluded. While a bi-national state might be possible, it is not desirable from Israel’s perspective, he said, and there is a need for another approach.
Hasson recommended that Israel recognize a Palestinian state without recognizing its borders, continue to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians and work toward international legitimacy. If negotiations fail, he said Israel has “to consider the possibility of unilateral withdrawal to defensible borders because we shouldn’t give the Palestinians a veto right over Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state…. So, Israel must ensure its security and international legitimacy but also its demography.”
Hasson, referring to the Shasha Centre scenarios he outlined, predicted that Israel in 2020 will have defensible borders, and that the future will involve unilateral acts by the Palestinians (turning to the United Nations, for example) and Israel (more settlement building, for example) – “there will be mutual adaptation and, from time to time, we will have a cycle of violence in the Middle East. But, currently, we don’t see any prospect of getting to the ’67 borders.”
Dina Wachtel, executive director of the local Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, welcomed the audience, and CFHU board member Dr. Sam Bugis introduced Hasson.
“I am Shirley Sotloff. My son, Steven, is in your hands.” So began Shirley Sotloff’s emotional appeal to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the terror group ISIS (or IS, Islamic State), on Aug. 27. The terror group had just released a video of a British-accented fighter sawing off the head of American journalist James Foley. At the end of the video, Steven Sotloff, a 31-year-old freelance journalist who was kidnapped in Syria last August, was dragged into view and threatened with beheading, too.
Shirley Sotloff continued, explaining that she has been studying Islam since her son’s capture, and tried to reason with the IS terror leader. She even addressed him with the honorific “Caliph,” as if he’d already created the Islamic caliphate across the Middle East that is his goal. “Steven is a journalist who traveled to the Middle East to cover the suffering of Muslims at the hands of tyrants,” she explained.
This assessment was shared by Steven Sotloff’s professional colleagues, too. He “lived in Yemen for years, spoke good Arabic” and “deeply loved” the Arab world, said one colleague. Another recalled how he insisted on going to Syria – where more than 70 journalists have been killed and more than 80 kidnapped in recent years – despite security concerns. Committed to recording the plight of ordinary Syrians, he slipped over the border.
“I’ve been here over a week and no one wants freelance because of the kidnappings. It’s pretty bad here,” he e-mailed to a colleague. “I’ve been sleeping at a front, hiding from tanks the past few nights, drinking rain water.” Soon afterwards, in August 2013, he was kidnapped by IS rebels.
What almost none of his colleagues realized was that Sotloff was a Jew who made aliyah to Israel. He’d grown up in Miami, the grandson of Holocaust survivors; his mother has taught in a Miami synagogue’s preschool for years. In 2005, at age 22, he moved to Israel, becoming a citizen of the Jewish state, and studied at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya.
He worked for Israeli publications, filing articles with Jerusalem Report and the Jerusalem Post, and helping colleagues in Israel with his perspective from Arab capitals. Once, an Israeli colleague asked him what a journalist like him – with an obviously Jewish name and connections to Israel – was doing in volatile countries like Libya, Yemen or Bahrain. “I don’t really share my values and opinions,” Sotloff replied. “I try to stay alive.” When the Israeli colleague pointed out that his Jewish background could be discovered in a simple internet search, he was unfazed: “Yeah, Google definitely isn’t my friend,” he acknowledged.
With the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are asking when and how reconstruction of the battered coastal enclave will begin. United Nations workers in Gaza say that 55,000 refugees are still taking shelter in 41 UN schools, raising questions about how the school year will begin in two weeks, already delayed from its scheduled opening in August.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah told representatives of several international organizations that the PA will repair homes that have been partially destroyed and will rent homes, as well as secure temporary homes and even tents, for displaced people. It was the first sign that the PA will take a more active role in Gaza, which has been controlled by Hamas since 2007. In the spring, Hamas and Fatah announced a unity government, but it has not met or functioned since the fighting began soon after the announcement.
A report by Shelter Cluster, which is co-chaired by the United Nations Relief and Works Authority (UNRWA) and the Red Cross, found that 17,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged in the seven weeks of fighting. An additional 5,000 homes still need repair from previous rounds of fighting while, even before the latest conflict started, there was a deficit of 75,000 homes. According to Shelter Cluster, at the rate of 100 trucks with building materials crossing the border into Gaza, it would take 20 years to rebuild the densely populated strip.
Teens on this year’s March of the Living helped Lillian Boraks-Nemetz face down haunting memories. (photo by Adele Lewin Photography)
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a Vancouver poet and author who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, initially declined the offer of a trip to her Polish homeland. She had been there, and written books and poems about her experiences as a child and as a returning adult. She didn’t know that an invitation to go again would lead to an emotional and psychological closure for which she had waited seven decades.
When first invited to participate in last spring’s Canadian contingent of March of the Living, Boraks-Nemetz demurred. March of the Living is a program that brings Jewish young people from around the world to the sites of Nazi atrocities in Europe and then to the Jewish homeland of Israel, marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust memorial day, and traveling to Israel in time for Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s remembrance day for fallen soldiers, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli independence day. March of the Living’s teenage participants are accompanied by Holocaust survivors.
“I thought, how am I going to keep up with a bunch of 16-, 17-year-olds?” Boraks-Nemetz said in a recent interview. But she was assured that survivors are well taken care of on the trips and she was convinced to go.
“There were difficulties, but I rose to the occasion,” she said, laughing. On the extremely long day traveling from Canada to Poland, which then continued immediately with more travel and programming, Boraks-Nemetz was aided by one of the young participants. “One of the girls had chocolate that had extra caffeine in it, so she gave it to me,” she explained.
Boraks-Nemetz was accompanied by another survivor, chaperones and young people from Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa, as well as eight Jewish teens from Vancouver. In all, there were 78 people on the trip. (Young people from Ontario and Quebec made up their own contingents and traveled on different buses.)
The program was intensive. The week in Poland involved stays in Krakow and Warsaw, where they visited the Museum of Polish Jews, and they went to the extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.
“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything. You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”
“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything,” she said. “You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”
In Warsaw, they also went to the orphanage that had been run by Janusz Korczak. A Polish Jew who was a respected published author, Korczak was offered multiple opportunities to save himself from the advancing Final Solution. When the Warsaw Ghetto was created, Korczak’s orphanage, its staff and nearly 200 young charges were forced to move into the ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, in 1942, Korczak was again offered immunity, but instead stayed with his orphaned children as they were deported to Treblinka.
In Lodz, the group visited the cemetery and the place where the second-largest Nazi-enforced Jewish ghetto had been. (More than 200,000 Jews were held in Lodz Ghetto during its existence. About 10,000 of those were alive in 1945.) There, the Canadians boarded one of the rail cars that had transported Jews to the camps.
“It was dark and there were many of us,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “It was tight. It was scary. We got the feel of it. Of course, the fear wasn’t there, but there was something foreboding about it.”
At the camps, the participants said prayers and sang mournful songs.
“There was a lot of poetry,” she said. “I brought my book Ghost Children, which was written after one of my trips there. And, whenever we went to a certain place, I would read a poem and it really got to them.”
An unexpected insight came during conversations with young Polish Jews during an arranged dinner at the hotel in Warsaw.
“They sat down, one at each table of students, so they were able to talk,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “At the end of the dinner, I saw the five or six of them standing in the lobby of the hotel, the Polish Jews, and so I went to talk to them. We went to the side and it was really interesting what they told me. They’re quite modern. They’re a little bit shy. They’re a big change from the Israeli youth,” she said, laughing.
The young Polish Jews told her that things were pretty good for them. Some go abroad – to France or elsewhere – to study, but jobs are hard to find and the standard of living isn’t great. They had a question about March of the Living.
“They said, ‘Why do you always come here looking for what’s dead?’ And I explained to them that this is an educational trip,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “But they said, ‘You know, there are some of us here, there is beauty here too, we are alive and there is a Jewish community – small, but there is a Jewish community. And I could see that that was maybe something to address.”
From Poland, the group flew El-Al to Israel.
“It’s like walking in from the shadow into light,” she said. “The Jerusalem of Gold! And we went straight to Masada off the plane.”
There, the other survivor on the trip, Max Iland, an octogenarian from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., celebrated his bar mitzvah, a few decades late.
“The students were singing and he and I were dancing, it was really fantastic,” said Boraks-Nemetz.
The entire experience, she said, was life-altering for the participants.
“They felt that their Jewishness was strengthened, that they are a part of history,” she said. “They cherish their homes and their families after finding out what happened to Jews over there. And, above all … they were becoming witnesses to my story. That’s what one of them said. She felt she was a witness to it. I did speak to them about the legacy that we, survivors who were on our way out, are leaving them.”
Boraks-Nemetz found especially notable the connection of young Canadian Jews to those who had given their lives in defence of the Jewish state.
“What I didn’t realize was how strongly they feel about the fallen soldiers who fought for Israel,” she said. “They read poetry again to the fallen soldiers.”
When the national moment of silence came, the experience was transfixing.
“We’re standing on [Tel Aviv’s central street] Ben Yehuda and the sirens sounded and, all of a sudden, it was like everyone was made of wax figures. That was an incredible thing.”
For Boraks-Nemetz, the trip provided an unexpected closure to the darkest chapter of her life.
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz accompanied teens on this year’s March of the Living. (photo by Adele Lewin Photography)
For her, the climactic moments of the March of the Living took place in the small Polish village of Zalesie. It was here that young Lillian survived the Holocaust in hiding. After spending two years in the Warsaw Ghetto, she was smuggled out by her father before the ghetto was liquidated and its residents – more than a quarter million Jews – were sent to Treblinka and other death camps. Outside the ghetto, she was met by a Christian woman who transported her to a little white home in Zalesie, where her grandmother was in hiding, posing as the wife of the Polish man who lived there.
Boraks-Nemetz has written about that time in her poetry and in her book for young adults, The Old Brown Suitcase. As an adult, she has returned to the little house at Spokojna Street, Number 16. But this visit was different.
“These two buses went down this dusty road, and there were all these [people in] houses wondering what was going on,” she said. “Nobody bothered us. We filed out and we went into the garden. We all stood in the garden and I told them the story of hiding.”
There was one part of the story she hadn’t intended to tell, but she had developed closeness and trust with the participants accompanying her. She felt confident and compelled to share more than she ever had before, which led to an unprecedented emotional catharsis after almost seven decades.
“I told them something about the man with whom we were in hiding. He was both good and bad,” Boraks-Nemetz said. “How does a child of eight take that? That, on the one hand, he saved us, our lives, and, on the other hand, he was a drunk who could have given us away and didn’t, and, thirdly, he abused me when my grandmother wasn’t there. This is life and that’s how it was.”
In small groups of six or eight, the young people accompanied Boraks-Nemetz into the home.
“When we went into the house, I explained where I slept and where I stood by the window and watched for my parents to come, the road, the garden, the whole thing,” she said. “They were very moved, and a funny thing happened. Each time a group would come out, I would come out with them onto the little porch and they would all hug me. Every one of them. And I think what happened to me was probably, for the first time in my life, I was able to face what happened there. That was an awesome experience for me. I had been there before many times but I always blocked it out. I never faced it properly. And, this time, because of the kids … I just couldn’t believe how it opened me up, this experience with the kids.”
An Israeli border policeman patrols the area of the Judean desert, near the Jordan border. After swift victories in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) terrorist group is setting its sights on Jordan, threatening to drag Israel into the global jihadist conflict. (photo by Nati Shohat/FLASH90)
Emerging from the chaos of the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group has gained the world’s attention for its brutal medieval-style justice and its swift victories in Iraq, threatening to overrun the weak U.S.-backed government there. But now ISIS is also setting its sights on Jordan, threatening to drag Israel into the global jihadist conflict.
“They are a vicious and brutal group, and have even done some things that al-Qaeda thought were unwise,” Elliot Abrams, who served as deputy national security advisor for former President George W. Bush and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told this reporter. “More people, more money and more guns. They do constitute a real threat.”
The goals of ISIS are clear from its name. Alternatively translated as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the Arabic name for the Levant region) or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the group seeks to control the entire region, which, in addition to Iraq and Syria, includes Jordan, Lebanon, and even Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Shanghai’s famous Bund district, where most of the buildings were built and owned by wealthy Sephardi Jewish families. (photo by Anthony Hartman via Wikimedia Commons)
It was a long trek: 6,000 miles by boat from central Europe to East Asia. But the towns of East Asia opened their gates for the waves of Jewish emigrants who had to find shelter from the tragic problems they faced first in Russia and, later, in Europe.
Though some believe their story still flies under the radar when compared to the prevalence of other Holocaust-related discourse – perhaps because most of Shanghai’s Jewish residents viewed their time in the city as a transient stage – historians now know there once was a large and thriving Jewish community in China. Records of immigrants kept by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which operated in Asia from 1917-1950, paint an inescapable picture of Jewish refugees who survived the war in Shanghai.
“The United States, Canada, Australia closed the doors to Jews and other immigrants in the 1920s.… HIAS had to … find other places that were willing to allow Jewish refugees to live there,” explained Mark Hetfield, HIAS president and chief executive officer. “Desperate measures called for creative thinking.”
A plaque at a house in Shanghai that was formerly the residence of Jewish refugees, including W. Michael Blumenthal, who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter. (photo by H. Barrison via Wikimedia Commons)
The first Jews, Silk Road traders, arrived in China in the eighth century and settled in Kaifeng. The next Jews were those who arrived under British protection following the First Opium War. Many of these Jews were of Indian or Iraqi origin, due to British colonialism in these regions, and they became the largest dealers in opium. These included David Sasson (the “Rothschild of the East”), philanthropic businessman Sir Eli (Eliazer) Khadori and real estate lord Silas Herdoon. According to most accounts, the number of Sephardi Jews in China totaled around 1,000.
Around 4,000 Jews would then arrive as refugees from the Russian Revolution of 1917. Finally, a surge as large as 18,000 Jews arrived as refugees from the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s. According to Peter Nash, a child survivor from Berlin who found refuge in Shanghai from 1939-1949, about 8,000 of these refugees originated from Germany and about 4,000 came from Austria.
Canadian participants in a meeting earlier this month with French President François Hollande came away impressed with the French leader’s sincerity and determination to address the terrorism and antisemitism that has France’s Jews on edge.
Avi Benlolo, president and chief executive officer of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and Member of Parliament and former justice minister Irwin Cotler said Hollande was empathetic to the concerns of the country’s Jews and was forthright in discussing the threat posed by French-born jihadists returning from Syria.
“Hollande spoke about the barbaric attack on the Jewish museum in Belgium” and about the protection of Jewish schools, synagogues and other community buildings, Cotler said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
Cotler and Benlolo were part of a 20-member delegation assembled by the Los Angeles-based
Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which met with Hollande prior to officially inaugurating an historic exhibition at UNESCO’s Paris offices. The exhibit, mounted by historian Robert Wistrich, is titled, People, Book, Land: The 3,500-Year Relationship of the Jewish People to the Holy Land.
The exhibit was sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre along with the governments of Canada, Israel, the United States and Montenegro, and it launched this month after pressure from Arab countries forced its cancellation in January.
Benlolo said the reception by French officials and Hollande at the Élysée Palace was warm and welcoming. The delegates were anxious to express their concerns about the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels by a French gunman, who killed four people.
“Hollande believes there are more than 1,000 French nationals who went to fight in Syria and joined radical groups,” Benlolo said. Three hundred remain. Many came back and he’s concerned about their radicalization and if they will take action against the Jewish community.
Mehdi Nemmouche, the man accused in the Brussels attack, is believed to have spent 2013 fighting with Islamic radicals in Syria.
Hollande assured the delegates that he is working closely with intelligence and security services to track returning jihadists and to ensure the safety of the country’s Jews.
“I believe Hollande was very sincere,” Benlolo said. “The Jewish community received substantial grants to secure their schools and synagogues,” he added.
Cotler, who has visited France three times in the last six months, said, “People spoke well of Hollande and his genuineness, his commitment to combat antisemitism, to bring perpetrators of antisemitism to justice and his appreciation of jihadist acts as threatening to French Jews and France alike. He took the position that it’s a joint struggle, a part of the protection of French democracy and all of France.”
During the meeting, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Wiesenthal Centre, told the president, “We meet at a pivotal time in history, when the Jewish community and France’s democratic values are under unprecedented attack by the forces of extremism both from the far right and from extreme Islamist purveyors of religious intolerance and murder.”
He applauded Hollande and his predecessor, president Nicolas Sarkozy, for denouncing an earlier terrorist attack in Toulouse that claimed the life of a rabbi and four children, but he lamented the failure of Muslim religious leaders to condemn the attacks.
Meanwhile, Cotler was effusive in his description of the Wistrich exhibit, which he called “historic.”
“It is a remarkable dramatization of history and heritage, of people, book, land, memory and state,” said Cotler.
In 24 panels, the exhibit traces Jewish history back to the patriarch Abraham, through Moses, King David and all the way through to the struggle for Soviet Jewry, the birth of Zionism and the reconstitution of the state of Israel.
The nine-day exhibit had been scheduled to open last January. Pressure from 22 Arab countries, who argued it would prejudice the peace process, prompted UNESCO to cancel it.
Responding to that decision, Hier stated, “It is ironic that, while the Arab League was trying to kill this exhibition and all the attention was focused on Paris, the UN headquarters in New York [was] hosting an exhibit entitled, Palestine, based entirely on the Arab narrative, which was not criticized as an interference with Secretary [John] Kerry’s mission.”
Following public criticism from Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird and U.S. envoy Samantha Power, the exhibit was rescheduled to open early this month, but with the name Israel removed from the title and replaced with “Holy Land.” UNESCO also required the removal of an image of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had been part of the initial exhibit prepared by Wistrich, a professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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