Remember It Happened to Us

For me the strangest season of the State of Israel is the one that begins with Yom HaZikaron LaShoah ve LaGivurah -- Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day. In a week's time, the state-steered, country-wide sentiment will continue its somber tone when, once again, the shops will close early and the hustle and bustle of the country will diminish into a hushed whisper as families and friends remember their fallen and beloved soldiers. After 24 hours of national mourning, the Jewish majority of the country will quickly turn its mood around in unabashed celebration of the 63rd anniversary of Israel's existence and independence. The streets will be full of sprayed silly string, the bands will be playing, and the bbqs will be grilling.

But tonight, the season has only begun and with it some new thoughts and insights.

Walking to synagogue for a screening of a documentary film called "Hugo 2," made by Israeli filmmaker Yair Lev, I noticed that the tea shop on the corner of Dizengoff and Gordon Streets was closed for business. My first thought was, "finally, the tea shop that opened in the hottest days of Summer 2010 is scaling back its hours and closing earlier than the sign on the door claims. Just as I suspected, it's doomed to fail."

So deep in conversation with Eitan, only a few stores later I suddenly realized that everything was closed. Restaurants usually overflowing with diners all nights of the week were cleaned up, chairs stacked and tables pushed together to make room for the person who recently mopped up the dirty floors.

Then I realized, I was walking to synagogue to see a Holocaust movie and the reason for its showing was Holocaust Remembrance Day. And then I remembered that in Israel, even if the Holocaust and the memory thereof weren't such integral parts of identity and my growing up, the state would remind me to remember anyhow.

I think it's the first year that I didn't feel the cynicism creeping up and over my brain -- the feeling of being forcibly controlled by state memorializing of Jewish national tragedy. It struck me for the first time in my living here that, since my Grandpa Bill passed away, I really hadn't visited the dark and depressing places that stories of the Holocaust lead me into.

Then I started thinking how little every day life in Israel has to do with that memorializing. The country, healthily I believe, is quite wrapped up in its current dilemmas of the pending unilateral declaration of the Palestinian state, scheduled for September 2011. It is quite engulfed in the low grade religio-ideological war transpiring between secular and religious Jews. It is preoccupied with the challenges that tens of thousands of African refugees pose to the state, its infrastructure, and its non-existent, non-Jewish refugee policy.

Very little of any of this has to do with the Holocaust.

Certainly, the Holocaust factored into the creation of the State of Israel, of its declaration of independence by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948, and the international sentiment that gave it sanction to exist during the previous fall in November 1947.

But today, as Holocaust survivors become fewer and fewer and the state becomes stronger and stronger, I understand that the Holocaust will become less manipulable for emphasizing the importance of fighting for the state of the Jews, and more about the ongoing process for the descendants of survivors to tend to unhealed wounds.

In fact, on this very night I found myself asking the following questions: Why is it important to remember the Holocaust? Why is it important to watch documentaries and be reduced to a puddle of tears and streaming snot? Especially if I am as familiar with these stories as I am with the face that I see each day in the mirror, for example.

These questions became even more poignant, when, after watching a 70 minute documentary in which the filmmaker recorded a series of conversations and interactions with his father (who survived Buchenwald), while I was trying to keep my sobs silent, others were mumbling about how they weren't impressed by the work projected on the east-facing wall of the sanctuary.

A number of revelations/thoughts arose from this experience as part of the audience, as well as an observer of the audience, of this particular documentary. A documentary that did not appeal to the horror, generally, universally elicited from seeing images of emaciated bodies and mass graves, men and women shot in cold blood and children being carted off to their untimely deaths.

The focus of Hugo 2, rather, was the scarring experience of being part of the Second Generation and understanding the responsibility of bringing forth the Third Generation, and trying not to pass on a quality of estrangement. And the meaning of the Holocaust as a family legacy, not a people's legacy. A heritage that affects the way a Second Generation member's mother or father related to him or her, which wouldn't particularly attract praise in circles of early childhood development experts or psychoanalysts that seek to study and inform how to foster emotionally healthier children, i.e. societies.

For the first time it struck me that the Holocaust is not a collective Jewish experience. It is the experience of those Jewish people and their descendants who were victims of the Shoah. And while the State of Israel has nurtured a national pause for respect of that evil time in history, remembering becomes important to a particular demographic of the society. And, for me, as a part of the Third Generation, it is necessary to take a moment and understand why it is important for me to remember, and to reexamine the role it plays in two aspects of my identity -- the human one and the Jewish one, and then my relationship to the country in which I live.

I was ten years old the first time I heard my Grandpa Bill talk to my sixth grade class about his stories of the Holocaust. I remember feeling pride, I remember feeling shock, I remember not understanding everything that I heard. But I do remember the last anecdote he told about God speaking to a little girl and a little boy and asking them to take care of one another. That, in fact, "you arrrre yourrr braather's keeperrr," he said in his Transylvanian accent.

I don't think Grandpa Bill believed in a specifically Jewish god, per se. But I do believe he was humble before some great unknown. I do know that he was terribly haunted by the ghosts of his family, the pain and illness of his long-deceased wife, and the terrible burden of guilt for having survived. I also know that he did not turn into a hateful man and he ultimately believed in humankind, while fully knowing the consequences of the seemingly unstoppable monster composed of the human capacity for hatred, unchecked. I sometimes believe that I acquired my obstinate optimism that people's better side is bound to prevail from being his granddaughter. For that ability to cling to hope, I remember him and the Shoah as a human being striving to make the world a better place, as simplistic and exhausted from overuse as that phrase may be.

As far as my Jewish identity goes, remembering the Holocaust engraves the burden and blessing of being a minority in a very diverse and conflicted world. Knowing that difference, perceived as a threat, reduces human beings to irrational, violent behavior, instills in me the responsibility to continue to question my prejudice and to defy the bias I see around me. In more tangible terms, as a Jewish-American and Israeli (by choice) woman living in Israel, it means I hope for peace and that I refuse to dehumanize the "enemy" whether it is a Palestinian, a religious Jew trying to tell me who and how I can marry, or any other "opponent" that appears on my path.

Perhaps, for the past few years it has been difficult for me to accept a state-sponsored time to remember and to reflect on the Holocaust, not because it is so "1984" (although I can make some good arguments that it is). Instead, it may be that in order to become resigned to going through the motions and ceremonies for remembering the Holocaust, and to understand how time and again the tears become unstoppable, the Holocaust needed to have ended. And for so many, generation after generation, it never has.