Remembrance Day

In the summer of 1973, while I was still living in England, before making Aliyah, I came to visit my relatives in Israel. I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Tel Aviv, and one honeysuckle-scented evening, I accompanied my cousin Ronit and her friend, Levana, to an army camp in the vicinity of the Yarkon Park, to visit Levana’s brother, Na’aman, who was stationed there.  I wasn’t used to being around so many young men, especially not soldiers and I remember feeling very shy. I also remember that this was my introduction to Israeli Army coffee – thick and bitter-sweet. Bitter because of the coffee grounds and sweet because of the amount of sugar used to allay the bitterness. Another thing I remember was the way the soldiers stirred and stirred and stirred a very small amount of coffee with a few drops of water to make it froth, before adding the rest of the water. Curious, the things that stick in one’s memory.

Shortly after that, I returned to England, where the academic year was about to start. My cousin and her brother Rami joined me. It was Ronit’s first trip abroad, a last fling, as it were, before beginning her military service. For Rami too, who had recently finished his own army service, this was his first journey beyond the confines of Israel. But their visit was cut short, cruelly and unexpectedly, by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. All the other airlines had cancelled flights to what had become a war zone and only El Al was flying to Tel Aviv. I remember how, despite the danger,  my cousins, together with hundreds of other Israelis, insisted on returning home, where Rami immediately joined his artillery unit. He fought in the Golan Heights and, thankfully, returned to his family, safe and sound, at the end of the war. But I heard afterwards that Na’aman, Levana’s brother, had not been so lucky. He was killed at the very start of the war.

Why am I writing about this now? This evening marks the start of Remembrance Day for the fallen in all of Israel’s wars and for the victims of terrorist activities against Israel.  I’ve just been watching the central memorial ceremony, the lighting of the memorial torch at the Western Wall, by Preident Shimon Peres. I don’t know why that evening by the Yarkon River suddenly came into my head. I’m listening to the radio, which is broadcasting – as they do every year at this time – mournful songs, songs from Israel’s wars, from the War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War,  the First Lebanon War, the Second Lebanon War …
Sixty four years of war, forced on us by the surrounding Arab countries who tried to extinguish the State of Israel at birth (nay, even before her birth), most of whom still refuse to recognise Israel’s  right to exist as a Jewish homeland.

And yet, the most beautiful songs to come out of those years of war are not the kind of martial sounds that you hear on Arab radio stations, but songs of peace, many of which were originally performed by Israeli army entertainment troupes, such as this one, from the Northern Command Troupe: “We shall yet see other days, beyond the smoking, burning hills...Laughing about the spring, about love, about youth, and things the sight of which we’ve already forgotten…”

Or this one, by Naomi Shemer: “Tomorrow, maybe we’ll sail on boats, from Eilat to the Ivory Coast, And on the old destroyers, they’ll be loading oranges. All this is no dream, It’s as true as the light at noon. All this will come to pass tomorrow, if not today – and if not tomorrow, then the day after…”

And perhaps the most famous of all, originally performed by the Nachal Troupe:
“Raise your eyes in hope, not through gunsights, Sing a song to Love, and not to war… Sing, sing to Peace. Don’t whisper a prayer. Sing, sing to Peace, With a great shout.”

Less than a year after the Yom Kippur War, my family and I made Aliyah. For thirty-eight years, we have been living in Jerusalem, and Peace seems further away than ever. I can only echo the words of yet another song by Naomi Shemer, written at the time of that war: “In a small, shady neighbourhood, Is a little house with a red roof. All we ask for, let it be. It’s the end of summer, the end of the road. Let them return hither. All we ask for, let it be. Let it Be, let it be, Please let it be. All we ask for – Let it be.

Günther Grass: Conscience, Senility – or Just Plain Antisemitism?

The defenders of Günther Grass claim that his “poem” – “What Must Be Said” – was not an expression of antisemitism, but merely a legitimate criticism of Israeli policy vis-a-vis Iran.
They further claim that what he wrote must be understood within the context of his over-riding fear of nuclear war.
To call him an antisemite is ridiculous, they say,  and to declare him persona non grata and ban him from entering Israel is to stifle free speech.

I agree on one point and one point only. Banning him from entering Israel  was unnecessary and heavy-handed.  One does not ban a celebrated author from visiting Israel merely because he happens to be an antisemite.
And he is an antisemite, make no mistake.

Grass claims his conscience has forced him to speak out now so that Germany should not become complicit in Israel’s future crimes.
“Crimes“? What crimes? To imply, as he does, that Israel is planning on fitting nuclear warheads on submarines purchased from Germany, in order to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran, thus wiping out the Iranian people, is monstrous!

To claim that Israel is threatening Iran, when precisely the opposite is true, to whitewash Iranian President Ahmedinajad’s naked threat to wipe “the Zionist entity” off the face of the map as mere braggadocio, to call tiny Israel a threat to world peace whilst ignoring the far greater threat to world peace posed by nuclear powers such as North Korea, Pakistan, and certain former Soviet states – not to mention Iran herself -  is indicative, not of a general fear of nuclear war but of an obsession with the Jewish State to the exclusion of all else which can only be explained by antisemitism. Of course, it may be that the distinguished author is suffering from incipient senility. But I doubt it. The man volunteered for the Waffen SS in the closing stages of World War II -  a fact he saw fit to conceal for 60 years. You can say he was then only a boy of 17. But, as I wrote in my previous blog, the antisemitic brainwashing received in one’s youth poisons the blood, seeps into the subconsciousness and then surfaces, often disguised as  the more Politically Correct “anti-Zionism”.

It is perfectly true that not every criticism of Israel is indicative of antisemitism.  But to single out Israel as the greatest danger to world peace, as Grass did, can be explained in no other way.

Yad Vashem

In a way, there’s a curious kind of appropriateness that this post should come right after the one on the Zamirchor visit, since our partnership with the choir from Bayreuth actually came about as a result of  the vision of the German choir’s founders, a vision of reconciliation between the Jewish and German peoples.

The day before yesterday, I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, as part of an organised visit from my place of work.  I have, of course, been there before, but the place never fails to move me. This was, however, the first time I had visited the Children’s Memorial. You walk down a slope into a darkened hall, with no windows, pitch black except for hundreds of twinkling lights all around you. I believe they are supposed to represent the souls of the more than one and a half million Jewish children murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. As you walk through the cavern, a voice recites the names, ages and places of origins of some of the victims. I know that some of our guests from Zamirchor also visited there last week and I was suddenly reminded that on one of our previous projects with them, in New York two years ago, after a meeting with a Holocaust survivor, one of the young Germans asked her why she thought that this had happened in Germany, specifically. At the time, I interpreted his question as meaning, did she think there was something intrinsically evil about the German people. She did not think so and neither do I – nor, apparently, did Shira, our guide from Yad Vashem. And yet it did happen there and we have to ask ourselves why. How did a civilised and cultured society somehow turn into Amalek? In New York, my gut reaction was that this was a question Germans must ask themselves. It would be easy to say, yes, Germans are (or were) inherently evil. Easy and comforting – because then, there is no need to confront the possibility that such a thing could happen elsewhere. But supposing the seeds of such satanic evil lie dormant in all of us? That’s a very frightening thought.

I, personally, do not believe that Germans are inherently the most evil of nations. It is, after all, a fact that in many countries that fell under the Nazi yoke, the general population collaborated with enthusiasm in the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews.  One has only to think of the Nazi-style parties that existed in countries such as Hungary, Romania and Croatia. I doubt that the Holocaust could have taken place without the widespread, centuries-old antisemitism that was (and still is) endemic in European society.  For this, the Church cannot escape responsibility. For almost two millenia, Christian children were taught that the Jews were Christ-killers, that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood in the preparation of matza (unleavened bread), that the Talmud permits Jews – encourages them even – to swindle Gentiles, and so on and so on. By the time Hitler came along, antisemitic perceptions such as these were so engrained in the mindset of the general population (not only in Germany), that the Nazis found fertile ground for their doctrine of hate.

And yet many of the circumstances in which Nazism arose and flourished, and which we are told contributed to the rise of Hitler to power, existed in other countries also. The economic crisis triggered by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 affected the whole of Europe, including the United Kingdom – not to mention the United States. Unemployment was rampant in the UK and in the USA also. Why, then, did Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts fail in the United Kingdom, while Hitler flourished in Germany? Why, despite the existence of blatantly racist movements in the United States (you have only to think of the Ku Klux Klan) did Nazism never gain a stronghold there? I have no answers.

In modern, liberal, democratic thought, we are taught that it is intolerance that is the enemy, that antisemitism is just one aspect of the universal dislike and distrust of whoever or whatever is different. We are told that the Holocaust is not unique, that other peoples have also been the victims of genocide. The Turkish massacre of between one million and one and a half million Armenians during World War I immediately comes to mind – as do the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the ongoing, systematic massacre of African civilians by Arab militias in Darfur. However, it is also true that the definition of genocide has been altered and broadened in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the present century. It is my contention, however,  that attempts to universalise the Holocaust in fact are aimed at minimizing its enormity.  The indisputable fact is, that it is only the Jews who have been subject to repeated, premeditated attempts to utterly exterminate them. For the Nazis were not the first.  The very first recorded attempt at genocide in history was directed at the Israelites, when the Pharaoh of Egypt ordered the drowning of all male Israelite babies in the Nile. In his mind, the females would become the wives and concubines of Egyptians, their children would be Egyptians and thus, the Israelites would cease to exist as a people.

Hundreds of years later, in faraway Persia, the King’s Grand Vizier, Haman, also plotted the extermination of the entire Jewish race.

Pharaoh failed. Haman also failed. Hitler almost succeeded.

Could it happen again? I look at the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in Europe, at the widespread antisemitic prejudice only thinly disguised as anti-Zionism – and I can only wonder.

A Harmonious Visit

I’ve had a wonderful time this past week, both musically and otherwise, thanks to the visit of the Zamirchor from Bayreuth, who visited Israel for the first time between March 21st and March 27th. The Zamirchor hosted us in the past, in Bayreuth  – I have written about this in a previous post – and we also took part in two joint projects with them, in New York and in Geneva and Annecy. This time, it was our turn to host our friends from Germany, who were here to participate in another musical project with us – two performances of Mozart’s Requiem, in Jerusalem and in Herzliya, and a (mostly) a cappella concert in one of the churches in Jerusalem’s Old City. The latter was good and the two Mozart concerts were excellent – opinions being divided as to which of the two was the better. My personal opinion – shared, I believe, by the majority – was that the Saturday night concert in Jerusalem’s Henry Crown Auditorium, was something really special, thanks, in no small measure, to the magnificent conducting of Ronen Borshevsky who was not only inspired, but who inspired all of us. There was an indefinable kind of energy in the air. When orchestra and choir fell silent after the last, mighty, reverberating “Quia pius es“, someone in the audience shouted “Bravo” and a storm of applause followed. It was one of those occasions when you know you have given your best and that it was really, really good.

In addition to the musical side, this reciprocal visit by Zamirchor was also a great social success. On the first evening, we hosted them to a buffet supper in the YMCA, before our first rehearsal together. All the food was prepared by JOCC members, thus demonstrating our culinary skills. Most of the Germans were hosted by JOCC members in their own homes, so I guess our visitors had plenty of opportunities to sample Israeli home cuisine. Then there was the hike and picnic at Sataf, in the hills around Jerusalem – more food. I had volunteered an “Israeli salad” – but when I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients, I found that not only were there no tomatoes – there were no fresh vegetables at all! Since it was a Friday morning and we were due at the Henry Crown Auditorium for a rehearsal at 11 o’clock, there was no time to go to the supermarket and I was forced to be very creative  – by which I mean I just threw in whatever was available .

Amazingly, considering its popularity and its close proximity to Jerusalem,  I had never been to Sataf before. Everything was in our favour. The weather was glorious – a beautiful spring day, with the wild flowers in bloom and the birds singing in a cloudless blue sky.

Then there was the varied fauna we met on the way…..

We passed flowering almond trees, and an ancient olive press and eventually found ourselves in a wooded copse where, finding the acoustics amenable, we did what we always do best. We sang. Since the Zamirchor also knew David de Sola’s arrangement of “Adon Olam” (“Lord of the Universe”) – indeed, we had sung it together at the concert the previous evening, with Yours Truly as one of the two soloists – that’s what we sang. I have it on video, but have so far been unable to upload it to YouTube  (I’ve been having problems with uploading videos of late), so you’ll just have to take my word for it .

The hike ended with a picnic by the spring, where we spread table cloths on a low stone wall and set out the many and varied offerings prepared by the members of JOCC, buffet style.

I don’t know, maybe it was the combination of fresh air, good food and exercise, that made us sing so well that evening .

The Zamirchor visit ended Tuesday night with a farewell party at the Jerusalem Khan, an old Turkish caravanserai now converted into a theatre and restaurant complex.

The music and dancing was still going strong when I left at about 11:40 pm.

For myself,  I felt much more “connected” to the Germans than during our previous encounters.  Maybe it’s because this was already our fourth project together and it takes time for me really to get to know people. Then again, maybe it’s simply that I feel more relaxed and able to open up to others when I’m on my home turf.  One thing I can say for sure – I can’t wait for our next project together .

Toulouse: All Over Bar the Shouting?

So it was Islamist terrorism after all! I should have known. There’s a direct line between Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese terrorist who smashed the skull of four-year-old Einat Haran in Nahariya in April 1979,  through Amjad and Hakim Awad, who butchered five members of the Fogel family in the village of Itamar in March 2011, including eleven-year-old Yoav and four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas, whose throat they slit,  almost decapitating her in the process, to Mohammed Merah, the French Muslim jihadist who gunned down Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two sons, Arieh and Gabriel, aged six and three and then seized eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego by the hair, put a gun to her head and shot her at point-blank range.

I can’t imagine why the French authorities wasted so much time and effort trying to capture the vermin alive. France has abolished the death penalty and, had he been captured and brought to trial, even a life sentence in gaol would, no doubt, have seen this piece of human excrement back on the streets within ten or fifteen years – and that’s assuming the French authorities would not have been forced, at some time in the future, to exchange him even sooner for a kidnapped French citizen.

No. With the guillotine no longer an alternative, shooting him down like the rabid dog he was, seems the best possible solution.

Toulouse – The Horror Continues

Further details emerging from yesterday’s murderous terrorist attack are even more horrifying than one could have imagined. The security camera footage shows that the murderer seized eight year old Miriam Monsonego by the hair and shot her in the head at point-blank range. What kind of animal would do such a thing to a child?

And what kind of warped, sick mind could desecrate the memory of the victims of the Toulouse attack by drawing a comparison between the deliberate murder, in cold blood of French Jewish children in France, with the unfortunate deaths of children killed in Gaza - not because they are deliberately targeted but because when Israel targets missile launchers that have launched rockets at Israeli civilians, sometimes civilian children in Gaza are in the line of fire? And they are in the line of fire because Hamas and the Islamic Jihad deliberately uses them as a shield behind which they can hide.

What, in any case, have Israel  and Gaza got to do with the murder of French Jewish schoolchildren by (apparently) neo-Nazis?

The warped, sick mind in question belongs to  Catherine Ashton, the EU Foreign Affairs Minister (a post to which she was appointed, not elected).

A Monstrous Hatred

My heart is full of grief and rage tonight;  grief for the deaths of three children, aged eight, six and three and of the 29-year-old father of two of them, in Toulouse today, victims of some evil spawn of Satan;  and rage that their murderer – this piece of human excrement, this coward who targets children -  is still alive and walking free on this earth. A gunwielding motorcyclist opened fire on a Jewish school, mowing down anyone in his path. When he ran out of bullets in one gun, he produced another and continued his orgy of murder.

Anti-semitic outrages of this sort have been on the rise in France over the past decade. Frequently, the perpetrators have come from the country’s growing Muslim community. This time, however, the fact that at least one of the firearms used in carrying out this act of barbarism, was used last week in two similar ride-by motorcycle shootings, in which French soldiers of North African (Muslim) origin were the victims, seems to indicate that the killer or killers belong to the extreme neo-Nazi Right and that they are motivated by hatred of all racial minorities.

It also appears that the Jewish school,  Lycée Ozar Hatorah, which was targeted today, had little or no security and from what I’m reading on Facebook, this seems to be true of most Jewish schools in France.

Evidently, relying on the local police is not enough. The Jewish community must take steps to protect itself. And, in view of the targeting last week of members of the Muslim North African community in France,  I wonder if it would be asking too much to hope that all of the Children of Abraham might band together,  Children of Israel and Children of Ishmael, to combat our mutual enemy.