In his speech at Yad Vashem yesterday, the eve of Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Benyamin Netanyahu recalled his visit to the infamous villa in Berlin's lakeside suburb of Wansee. During his tour, he came across the original invitation to the event that was to decide the fate of the world's Jews. It read: "You are invited to a conference to determine the final solution to the Jewish problem. Breakfast will be served at nine o'clock." The seemingly equivalent banality of these two statements was almost too much to bear. When asked to sign the museum guestbook, only three words came to Netanyahu's mind. He wrote the following: "Am Israel Hai" (the nation of Israel lives).
A truck rolled down my street and a familiar voice yelled out "Alte zakhen!" For many Israelis, these are the only two Yiddish words they will ever know. In the past Eastern European Jews would travel up and down the streets in their wagons buying and selling "old things." Today, they've been replaced by Arab merchants. But the Yiddish remains. How oddly and wonderfully life goes on.... The truck reached the end of the street and the hammering on the corner of Frishman and Dizengoff resumed. Keep building, I thought. I love construction.
And how it lives! In contrast to my experiences of this holiday in North America, being in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds me less of the death and destruction wrought in the past than of the life that remains today. I woke up this morning, as I do every morning, to the sound of hammers pounding away at the high-rise condominium project gradually ascending on the corner of Frishman and Dizengoff. I woke up grumpy. I hate construction, I grumbled. I put the kettle on, grasped for my headphones to block out the noise, and set to work.
At ten o'clock, as I cleared the dishes from my modest breakfast of coffee and toast with cottage cheese, the hammering was interrupted by a different noise. A siren. A cry of remembrance. It blared loudly for two full minutes as everything around it fell silent. When it finished, everything came back to life.
A truck rolled down my street and a familiar voice yelled out "Alte zakhen!" For many Israelis, these are the only two Yiddish words they will ever know. In the past Eastern European Jews would travel up and down the streets in their wagons buying and selling "old things." Today, they've been replaced by Arab merchants. But the Yiddish remains. How oddly and wonderfully life goes on.... The truck reached the end of the street and the hammering on the corner of Frishman and Dizengoff resumed. Keep building, I thought. I love construction. 