Day 10

Waking up in Jerusalem. The is a vertical city. Eyes closed, listening to the birds around us, the traffic, mostly below, the church bells across. So much sound from so many directions. And then to open your eyes and look, in just one slice one can see the grass and flowers around the pool of the hotel, the bottom of the valley of the shadow of death, the traffic moving up the hill, the walls of the old city; just off to the right is Mount Zion and behind that more hills and the barrier fence.
The heat wave has continued on this day, even early in the morning it can be felt.
We begin our programming with a presentation by Colonel Bentzi Gruber, one of the commanders in Gaza. He talks to us about “ethics in the field”. Really he tells us of the challenges of this conflict, of how to protect Israel from the incomprehensible concept of suicide bombers. Eight seconds. In a dramatic sequence of footage we see a smiling young man from Gaza sitting in the front seat of a car. We see his jeep begin to drive across the field that is the barrier, the Israeli guards distracted by gunfire in the other direction. We see him being too late for the bus he was aiming for, heading for the town, the road blocked by a hummer, an explosion, a Palestinian young man in a thousand pieces, a young Israeli soldier from behind the HumVee without a leg. Eight seconds.
To be clear, this talk was not about the “why” of this conflict. This was about the how, how to protect Israel, how to fight this and cause as little damage to Palestinian civilians as possible. It was also about how to get this message out, that Israel and the territories are a tiny spit of land, that Israel needs to defend herself, that rockets and suicide bombers flying into neighborhoods are not the same as carefully, selectively trying to find combatants that hide in the population.
From here a part of the group went to the Hartman Institute to discuss the conflict further. A crew of us went off to the zoo, a diversion to fun and a beautiful spot. It is a wonderful zoo – goats happy to chew on your back pack straps; a poor little mole rat trying for many minutes to unsuccessfully negotiate an uphill glass tube; two amazingly big rhinos in an exhibit with graceful long eyelashed giraffes and zebras; monkey yelling, a cacophony of birds calling, their sounds echoing against the hills of Jerusalem.
After lunch, the group went to Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the museum and memorial to the Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew). The physical structure of the museum is both incredibly beautiful- imaging walking through a triangular tube of Toblerone chocolate to come out the far end to a magnificent view of Jerusalem- and incredibly stark. Just cement walks, not Jerusalem stone.
The Shoah is so many stories, the visit is the same. I want to just relate just two, they will be more important than the whole = terror and hope
Terror - I have been through and read much about the Holocaust. Something always gets me. The whole is too much. But this time it was on a small screen, a speech written by the President of the ghetto in Lotz Poland. This man worked with children, but did not have children of his own. The speech explained that he was commanded to have all the children under age 10 report to the square the following day for deportation. He explains that he pleaded and begged, but the Nazi’s insisted. This order and participating in its execution was incomprehensible to me – to be this man and say these words or to be a parent in this ghetto. I could not have been that man. I do not believe I could have been one of those parents. I do believe that for me, it would have ended here, that night.
Hope - We have been blessed to have Charles Fodor with us. Charles was a young boy when he was in the ghetto in Hungary. He and his father survived. He did not see his mother after she was deported from the ghetto. This is his first visit to Israel, and hence his first visit to Yad Vashem. I will long remember his reaching out to his wife, to holding her hand as they started to visit the museum; to the courage it must have taken to come here. It was an honor to share this visit with Charles; for my kids, for all the kids, to learn about this in his presence. While he might have been held up by Vicky, his wife, we were all held up by being here with him.
A few days earlier, at Havdala, as the kids where all standing against a wall overlooking the Temple mount, I remember Charles looking over the crew of youth and saying “Am Yisrael Chi” “The Jewish People live” Remarkable, to so clearly feel the link from the terrible past to this rich present, to the future. Remarkable.

Jeff Schiff