KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Coming to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. is often a deeply emotional experience for Deborah Strobin and her older brother Ilie Wacs. Here, they relive their own memories of World War Two…memories they were reluctant to share out loud, until recently.

DEBORAH STROBIN, co-author, An Uncommon Journey: I just didn’t really want to talk about it. And neither one of us cared to just be out there.

ILIE WACS, co-author, An Uncommon Journey: No, we never really talked about it, no.

STROBIN: I mean, if someone would have told me this many years ago, I would never have thought that would happen.

LAWTON: But now, they are indeed sharing, in a new book called, “An Uncommon Journey,” which describes their family’s flight from Vienna to Shanghai and ultimately to America. Their experiences, they’ve come to realize, are part of the larger Jewish story.

WACS: It is important to tell that story. It is on the periphery of the Holocaust, actually, what happened in Europe. However, it is still a story.

LAWTON: The story begins in Vienna. Their father, a tailor, had been a deserter from the Romanian army, so the Austrian government considered him “stateless.” In 1938, when Ilie was 11, Hilter’s Nazi army marched in, annexing Austria.

WACS: Hitler was welcomed with open arms. People threw flowers at him. It was called the war of the flowers, the blumenkrieg. And I remember to this day the troops marching for endless hours through Vienna and the tanks, the goosestepping. And the people cheering Hitler. I was very angry. I was very angry at the Austrians. How could they have changed so quickly? Overnight, within 24 hours. It was mostly anger. The fear came later.

LAWTON: Then in November 1938 came a series of attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues known as Kristallnacht or night of the broken glass. A non-Jewish friend convinced the family they needed to leave. But their father’s papers were questionable, and countries like the US had very strict entry requirements.

LAWTON: However, for many years, Shanghai had been designated a “treaty port” where foreign nationals could live and trade on Chinese soil.

WACS: Shanghai was the only place in the entire world that had no visa requirement. Nothing. All you had to do is book passage. So, out of desperation, we had to leave. We chose Shanghai. Nobody really wanted to come to Shanghai, but it was the only place to go.

LAWTON: The Wacs family was able to secure passage on an Italian luxury liner.

WACS: The boat was called the Conte Biancamane.

LAWTON: The family boarded the ship in Genoa, Italy on August 16th, 1939, just two weeks before World War Two started. Ilie was 12 and Deborah, just three years old.

STROBIN: I was told—and I don’t believe I remember that at age three but—I remember getting a sense of going on this happy vacation. But that’s all I remember basically. They were trying to protect me.

WACS: There was a Russian Jewish community who came to Shanghai right after the revolution in 1917 and 18. Then there was a Sephardic Jewish community, they were known as the Baghdadi Jews. So when we got to Shanghai, there was already a Jewish community there who could help us settle up.

LAWTON: The family found a tiny apartment in the poorest section of the city, which was already occupied by the Japanese. Ilie, a budding artist, did sketches of their surroundings. Their father got some work as a tailor, but it was difficult to make a living.

Photo: Tauber Holocaust Library

WACS: It was a hard life in Shanghai. It was a very difficult life. Food was scarce. Our main occupation, thinking, was about food. When are we going to eat again? Nevertheless, there was a vibrant community in Shanghai, 18,000 of us. There was theater, there were newspapers.

LAWTON: Things got much more difficult after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and Asia became a major front in the war.

WACS: The Germans kept pushing the Japanese, ‘what are you doing about solving the Jewish problem?’ All the Japanese did, they put us in a ghetto. So they treated us well during the war. Sort of treated us well. They didn’t kill us, right?

LAWTON: Deborah says she didn’t really understand what was happening, or why. Ilie, on the other hand, saw it as an adventure.

STROBIN: He was always fearless.

WACS: Yeah, well, it didn’t…

STROBIN: I had fear.

WACS: I know.

STROBIN: I was frightened all the time.

WACS: You were frightened all the time.

STROBIN: Completely. I still am.

WACS: You still are. I was not.

STROBIN: But, but he was fearless. I mean, I remember when the bombs came, I mean when the planes came. And we could actually tell the difference between the Japanese planes and the American planes. There was a difference. And I remember the sound of it and I remember my mother yelling we must go down in the basement. He didn’t want to move. He wasn’t finished sketching.

LAWTON: Finally in 1945, after the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese left Shanghai, and the Americans liberated the ghetto. Jubilation however, was short-lived. They had heard rumors that bad things were happening to Jews in Europe, but they had no idea that six million had been killed.

WACS: It was really a very difficult time. On the one hand, we were happy the war was over. And then when we found out what had happened in Europe, that none of our family had survived, most of the families had not survived, and it was quite terrible. It was quite shocking.

LAWTON: The Jewish community in Shanghai survived largely intact. The Wacs family and many others finally started making their way to America, where they began a new life. Both Ilie and Deborah eventually got married and had children. Ilie became a successful fashion designer. Deborah became a fundraiser and served as deputy chief of protocol for the City of San Francisco. They didn’t talk about what had happened in Shanghai.

Then, for his 70th birthday, Ilie wanted to visit the Holocaust Museum. Deborah reluctantly came along. And there, they saw a photo of three small children in the Shanghai ghetto. Deborah was the one on the left.

STROBIN: At first it was hard to look at the picture, to be quite honest. I mean, at first I didn’t know what I was looking at even though I know it was me, but it didn’t quite penetrate. I was concentrating more on the eyes. And I kept thinking, they look so sad. And then I realized, that was me. That sad little girl, she was actually looking back at me.

LAWTON: She remembered the day the photo was taken. The three had been playing in the park when a Japanese soldier told them to sit and smile.

STROBIN: We found out later on, obviously much later on, that there was a propaganda picture taken. They were looking for three children that were clean and didn’t look—and looked somewhat healthy. We weren’t, but we looked it.

LAWTON: Seeing that photo planted the seed to find out more about what had really happened in Shanghai. They went through their parents’ old documents, which Ilie still had stashed away. He donated the papers to the Holocaust Museum, but first, he made copies of the images and incorporated them in a series of paintings.

LAWTON: They decided to write a memoir from each of their perspectives because they felt a responsibility to bear witness to what had happened, especially for future generations.

STROBIN: Since I didn’t know anything, it didn’t seem fair for my children not to know anything either. They needed to know. My grandkids need to know.

LAWTON: Writing the book, they say, helped them to see how fortunate they were to survive. And even more than that, they say it connected them to the greater Jewish experience.

WACS: I’m not a very observant Jew, but I feel connected to the history of Judaism.

STROBIN: Yes.

WACS: It brings you closer, yes it does.

STROBIN: Yes it does.

WACS: Yes it does.

STROBIN: Makes you feel proud.

WACS: Yeah.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

MURRY SIDLIN (speaking to singers): Every note. Get inside of every note. Inside of every note.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In a Washington, DC church an impassioned conductor implores his choir.

SIDLIN: Don’t move, don’t move. Very nice. What you’re doing is very nice, and there’s no room for that. It has to be extraordinary—the sort of thing that you will remember all of your lives.

FAW: Whenever he can Murry Sidlin urges them to do more, because what they are rehearsing, what they are trying to commemorate, is another performance by another choir in horrific circumstances: Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.

SIDLIN (speaking to singers): To us it’s just damn words. They leave the rehearsal and walk over bodies to get back to their barracks. We cannot be indifferent.

FAW: This music, Verdi’s lyrical Mass for the dead, is a full-throated testament to the majesty and judgment of God, profound even in this rehearsal at Washington’s Kennedy Center. But it was perhaps never more powerful or poignant than its performance on June 23, 1944 in the concentration camp, Terezin, just outside Prague. When Jewish prisoners sang the requiem to their Nazi captors, that Catholic Mass, says Terezin survivor Vera Schiff, gave prisoners a way to defy the Nazis.

VERA SCHIFF: The text of the Latin prayers suggests that we all will be judged by the Almighty, and this will include the Germans. That was a promise. That the day will come in which we all will be facing the final judge, and that gave us a great deal of satisfaction and hope.

SIDLIN: It was cathartic, therapeutic, and important for them to remain dignified. They responded to the worst of mankind with the best of mankind. This is our way of fighting back.

FAW: In the cold, filth, and misery of a camp like this, a Romanian-born conductor, Rafael Schaechter, gathered 150 fellow prisoners, and in a dank basement with just one score and a broken piano taught them by rote Verdi’s sublime work. Choir member Edgar Krasa says Schaechter was extraordinary.

EDGAR KRASA: Socially he was a wonderful person, but once he sat behind the piano he was a real tyrant.

SIDLIN: The survivors who sang in this chorus say—said to me that when he started work on the requiem, and this is a quote, “he was like a crazed man on a mission.” He began to say things to them such as, “We can sing to them what we cannot say to them.”

FAW: Through the words in this Catholic liturgy, a Jewish chorus could stand up to the Nazis by letting them know what ultimately matters. Nazi propaganda films were made at Terezin to give the false impression Jews were happy there, well fed and cared for. When officials from the International Red Cross visited, things were spruced up even more. The Nazis asked Rafael Schaechter to perform that requiem for their guests. They probably couldn’t understand the Mass sung in Latin, but Schaechter and his choir understood exactly what they were doing.

SIDLIN: Here I can really make a difference—and not to all mankind. To myself, to my friends, to my colleagues, to my family I can make a difference. I can sing what I can’t say. I can respond in the best possible way to the unspeakable horror in which I find myself.

FAW: Performers could be deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, warned Jewish elders in the camp, if the Nazis understood the lyrics. So Schaechter gave his chorus a choice.

KRASA: He told us about the danger and said if you—whoever is afraid, there is the door, and you can go. Nobody left.

FAW: No one left?

KRASA: No.

FAW: The lyrics of the requiem and their hidden meaning were the source of the prisoners’ defiance. The second and longest movement, for example, tells of the day of wrath—Dies Irae: “The day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world in ashes. How great will be the terror when the judge comes” is how the Latin is translated.

SIDLIN: It’s very simple. God’s in charge of humanity, and if anybody fools around with that they’re going to hear from God.

FAW: Or take the final section—Libera Me.

SIDLIN: “Liberate me eternally from eternal death.” Terazín was eternal death. Through this music they found the mechanism by which they could sing to God with assurance that God’s presence is with them, and so I think they found in this work a spiritual reawakening or a spiritual reassurance.

FAW: The singing of Verdi at Terezin had a profound impact on the prisoners and singers, like survivor Marianka Zadikow-May, speaking recently at a symposium.

MARIANKA ZADIKOW-MAY: We wanted to be liberated and just hope that there is a loving Hashem in heaven who will hear you and liberate you.

FAW: In the wretched camp, says survivor Vera Schiff, Verdi’s requiem was a lifeline.

SCHIFF: It was part of the defiance, to keep up our spirits, to keep us in a frame of mind you want to live, you want to live another day. That was helping over the hunger, over the illnesses and deprivation, and that carries you a long way under the circumstances when we feared for our life day by day.

KRASA: We felt great because otherwise we had no opportunity to show the Nazis that we don’t, we’re not afraid of them.

FAW: Schaechter conducted Verdi’s Requiem 16 times at Terezin. After the final 1944 performance, he and most of the chorus were shipped off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. For the few survivors, remembering brings pain and pride.

SCHIFF: I think it brings back twofold emotions: the emotion of course of sadness, because in my case I’ve lost all my entire family. But simultaneously I think I find that it was a great achievement of what people can do under unimaginable circumstances.

SIDLIN: This was not commemorating death. It was commemorating the beauty and importance of life.

FAW: When the requiem ends in the multimedia concert Murry Sidlin created to commemorate Terezin, the mournful wail of a train whistle sounds, and as the audience watches film of Jewish prisoners being transported to Nazi crematoriums, one solo violin plays an ancient Jewish song which the condemned sang on their way to death—a haunting tribute to Terezin, where in defiance there was affirmation, indeed a kind of triumph.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

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Read an excerpt from THE EICHMANN TRIAL by Deborah Lipstadt

DEBORAH LIPSTADT (Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and Author of The Eichmann Trial): The trials that took place immediately after the war were based primarily on documents. In the Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner, the attorney general, made a decision to call the victims of genocide. He called these witnesses to tell their personal stories, and they told their stories one by one by one. So people began to associate what happened during the Holocaust, the Final Solution, with specific people, and in that way it put a human face on genocide.

The victims had spoken before, but they had never had an audience the way they had it at the Eichmann trial. The world was listening. I think it was the impact of the intensity, the idea of being in a courtroom setting, that the perpetrator was sitting there in that glass booth—I think all those things together gave what the victims were saying, what the stories they were telling, an added authenticity and authority.

People understood that these people weren’t inherently flawed, that they weren’t inherently weak, but that they were in a sea of opposition, a sea of hostility, and there was no one, no one there to help them.

When you begin to hear the story from people, when it becomes personalized, when you hear it in the first person singular, “This is my story and this is what happened to me,” genocide takes on a new meaning. You begin to realize that it didn’t happen to just a group of nameless people, but it happened to individuals, and what happened is their memory, and then the memory gets transmitted to the next generation.

It’s a lesson to the world of what happens when you stand silently by. In fact, it’s more important that the rest of the world, those people who aren’t associated with the victims, know about it. That’s what it means to be persecuted, that’s what it means to be a victim, that’s what it means to call for help and have nobody answer. That’s the importance of memory—that you take this memory, integrate them into ourselves, internalize them, and act on that in our lives.

I was here as a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and then on June 10, [2009] as I was on my way downstairs to give a lecture to a group of people who had come to visit the museum, I passed the guard station. I saw Officer Johns and the other officers greeting people. No sooner had I gotten to the room, a few minutes thereafter shots rang out, and it was an 88-year-old Holocaust denier, racist, anti-Semite who came to the museum, approached the door. Officer Johns reached out to open the door to let the man in, and the man took out a rifle and shot him. It happened because this killer was motivated by hatred, was motivated by anti-Semitism, was motivated by exactly those sentiments which this museum is dedicated to fighting, and it was such a terrible irony.

On this Yom HaShoah I think it’s very important for the world to remember that evil begins with a single individual talking to another individual talking to another individual. Maybe they are motivated, as was the case in the Holocaust, by an age-old hatred, but it takes one person with another person with another person to make it happen, and that each of us as individuals have the power to say, “Stop.” We may not be able to stop the hatred, but we can say, “Stop, I won’t be involved in it.” We also have to remember not to think of the victims only as “the six million,” but they were one by one by one, and in that courtroom in Jerusalem 50 years ago people heard the voices of those victims in a way that they hadn’t heard them before.

Holocaust survivor Rachel Bodner says the Nazis would never have succeeded in killing so many Jews in Belgium during World War II—the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the number at between 24,000 and 30,000—if only Jews and Christians had talked to one another.

“Why don’t people open their mouths? People didn’t and look what happened—the Holocaust,” says the 83-year-old Belgian Jew. Silence, she explains, was caused by ignorance, and silence and ignorance together led to oppression. Fear of confrontation also played a role.

Bodner, who hid from the Nazis in a Catholic convent and immigrated to the United States in 1947, had an older sister who perished at Auschwitz. This month she spoke about her experiences to Jewish and Catholic students in Baltimore as part of an annual interfaith program of study, dialogue, and commemoration called “Lessons of the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust.

Led by Jeanette Parmigiani of the Baltimore Jewish Council and Deborah Cardin of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, which cosponsors the program, the purpose of “Lessons of the Shoah” is to help high school students develop respect for and understanding of each other’s faith.

Participants also focus on contemporary genocide, and a survivor of intergroup violence and ethnic hostility in eastern Congo spoke along with Bodner. In addition, students are required to work as a team on a social justice project they choose.

Some religious leaders have observed that interreligious dialogue is losing momentum among new generations of Christians and Jews and that remembering the Holocaust is not as compelling to young American Jews as it was to their elders. But young people are still willing to engage in interfaith dialogue if only given the opportunity, according to Donny Kirsch, coordinator of educational outreach for the Jewish Community Relations Council in Washington, DC who works with “Lessons of the Shoah.”

Kirsch also contacts Jewish congregations to locate Holocaust survivors still willing and able to talk about their experiences. As their numbers dwindle and advancing age makes it difficult for them to travel, Kirsch says it is increasingly important to create local opportunities like the interfaith program in Baltimore for survivors to share their stories.

Among the scholars and religious leaders who participate in “Lessons of the Shoah” are Rabbi Geoffrey Basik, founding rabbi of Kol HaLev (”Voice of the Heart”), a Reconstructionist synagogue community in Baltimore, and Father Robert Albright, a retired Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and former university chaplain who speaks to students on the history of Judaism and Christianity and who listened to Rachel Bodner’s testimony about silence and speaking out.

“If we as kids had a program like they have now,” he said, “this world would be a different place.”

Matt Boivin is an intern at Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and a student at Spring Arbor University in Michigan.

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Rabbi Avi Weiss

Rabbi Avi Weiss, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York:
America is my home. I’m grateful to the US forever and ever. Israel is my homeland and that’s where my family lives, literally and figuratively. When I think about existentially who I am I think of Israel. My roots, I’m grounded, my ancestry all there.

The biblical narrative, and even if one doesn’t buy into the biblical narrative, the history of the Jewish people is wed to the land of Israel. The Bible talks about a special mission that the Jewish people has, and whenever it talks about the covenant which is our contract with God, it talks about children, people, and land, and from the very beginning that land is defined as the land of Israel. That’s where Abraham and Sarah walked.

As wonderful as I feel in America, in Israel I feel like I’m spiritually flying. I can’t explain it. It’s like asking someone why they are in love.

When you love something there could be different opinions, and I think those different opinions aren’t a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think a consensus is being reached, and we are at a point now where there is an interdependence within the Jewish community. Israel is not going to make it with the political right alone or the political left. It’s not going to make it with the religious alone or those who couldn’t care less about religion. It’s only going to make it with the both, and there has to be a sense of interdependence between the two.

The political right has to understand that it has no monopoly on loving the land of Israel. The left loves the land just as much, but it thinks you’ve got to give away land for the sake of peace. The left has to understand that it has no monopoly on wanting peace. The right wants peace just as much. If both sides would stop impugning each others motives then that unity, interdependence, will be able to allow us to move forward.

Blessed be the nation that has as its army the Israeli defense forces, not only a strong army but, I believe, one of the most moral armies on the face of this earth. I know the families of the soldiers who fought house to house in Jenin at a great price, because when we went into Jenin back a couple of years, Israel could have taken out Jenin from the air but wanted to minimize loss of civilian life. Look, I mourn the loss of innocent Palestinian life. I mourn that. It’s a Jewish concept. But one must talk about intentionality. The intention of the Israeli defense forces to limit civilian losses, it’s only to target military who, unfortunately, they hide themselves amongst the civilian population. The intention of the other side: to murder as many men, women and children as possible. Are there aberrations? Of course, but it’s not part of the mainstream. It’s not part of the very system which Israel is about. Unfortunately, on the other side terrorism is very much a part of their whole motif.

I feel for Palestinians. The fault lies with Palestinian leadership. It lies with Hamas. It lies with Hezbollah. This is not a Ghandi-Martin Luther King movement. If the rockets stop lobbing into Sderot, if they are going to stop the terrorism Israel is the first one to want peace. Unfortunately, the more Israel has given, the weaker Israel is perceived from the other side, and the more the other side wants.

All I can say that whenever we have withdrawn up to this point, it has precipitated the other side wanting more. We withdrew from Lebanon and what happened was suddenly the rockets came in. We withdrew from Gush Kativ, from Gaza, the rockets came into Sderot, and I have great fears if we are going to withdraw from the West Bank, from Samaria and Judea, then Tel Aviv is right there in the line. And I think America has to understand that Israel today is the frontline against the spread of terror. I think this is one of the most important debates. Some people think that Israel’s war on terrorism is kind of isolated to the Middle East. I say no. Israel’s war against terrorism is America’s war against terrorism. I believe with all my heart when an Israeli soldier falls fighting terror, he is not only fallen in the defense of Israel and the Jewish people, he has fallen in the defense of the West, of the free world.

Israel is alone and Israel needs as much support as possible, and so it’s critical that there ought to be support not only from Jews, but from non-Jews as well. But as much as American Jewry helps Israel and as much as America helps Israel, I think it’s reciprocal. I think Israel is America’s greatest friend in the Middle East. I think today Israel really stands strong, being the bulwark against the spread of terror as it was the bulwark against communism during the cold war era.

I see the grassroots as being front and center and being in absolute solidarity with the people of Israel. There are of course those who would criticize, but by and large the support is overwhelming, and what I would do is, I think, it’s important for American Jews to visit Israel. I think it’s important for them to live in Sderot. If you live amongst those wonderful people you will see how peace-loving they are. I take second place to no one when it comes to an understanding the spirituality and potential holiness of all people, including Palestinians. I desperately want to live in peace with Palestinians. Rabin used to say you have to make peace with your enemy. You can only make peace with an enemy who wants to make peace with you. Having Gaza which is controlled by Hamas, by terrorists, or withdrawing from the West Bank, which could then be taken over by Hamas or Hezbollah— that is not good for Israel, and it’s not good for America.

I walk the length and the breadth of Israel. I don’t only see Israel being involved in a political kind of equation. I see Israel as a place of spirituality. I see it as an extraordinary place where people reach out for the vulnerable. I see a medical system; I see a social service system. Yes, I see Jews and Arabs in many, many places doing everything they can to find a language to talk peacefully and embrace each other. I see it as an extraordinary light, as Isaiah would say, to the nations of the world.

I take second place to none of those critics when it comes to concern for the Palestinians. Where we part company is where you place blame. They are placing blame on the state of Israel, on the army. I place the blame squarely on the heads of Hamas, and I will say it clearly. I would say to the Palestinians, if they had a Martin Luther King, nonviolent disobedient movement, they would have had a state many years ago. But when you’ve got a movement where you go bomb buses and you go into restaurants lobbing rockets and you maintain that it can be justified—nothing justifies terror.

We have to find some kind of way of making peace with the Palestinians, which I believe the settlers desperately want, while allowing people who have lived in these places to continue doing so. I can only tell you this: If from the other side there would be a show of trust in real peace rather than terrorism, the history of Israel is that Israel made peace with every Arab country who wanted to make peace with Israel. I believe it’s very fair for there to be natural growth [of the settlements]. Imagine someone turning to an American family saying you can’t have more children, or if you have more children you can’t add a home. What I find very difficult is when America and an American administration starts bullying Israel and starts pushing Israel around. Israel is a sovereign state, and I believe Israel knows best what is in its best security interest. From my perspective Israel knows more about security-wise in the Middle East than America knows. It’s got the experts, it is on the ground, and in that sense it makes an extraordinary contribution to America as well.

I think the mission [of Israel] is to be in a place where one has sovereignty and autonomy and can develop a society that really cares for the oppressed and for the vulnerable. It does so in its own place, in its own land, and does its share to set an example for others. That’s the Israel that I know. That’s the Israel that I love. That mission, I think, is ultimately going to evolve with people of all political persuasions and all religious backgrounds.

In the rabbinic literature Israel is compared to a dove. A dove can’t fly with one wing. You need both wings, and they may have disparate ideas, but there’s got to be a blending together and a consensus and a coming together. I think that’s the most critical challenge Israel faces today.

Rabbi Michael Paley

Rabbi Michael Paley, scholar-in-residence and director of the Jewish Resource Center of the UJA-Federation of New York:

I stand with Israel, and I love Israel. I love the Jewish people, and I love Israel. It’s been one of the most important aspects of my whole life. I came of age at 1967, and it fired my identity. But Israel has to make a choice: a democratic state, a Jewish state…and my particular flavor is a Jewish democratic state with territorial compromise. This does not take away my love for Israel or my hope for its security.

Because I love Israel, because I stand with Israel, I believe and hope and pray in its destiny. I believe its destiny is probably better within or closer to the 1967 borders. I’m not critical of Israel; it’s a democratic state. I don’t want to take away the rights of the voters who live there, like my brother, or my nephew who is in the Army now, are people who live and vote in Israel.

The 20th century for Jews was a difficult century, and we had to, for morality reasons, take power, and power is more difficult. We haven’t been very good at it. We haven’t had to decide the fate, as a Jewish people, of other people who are not Jews. We haven’t been in control of even the Jewish faith. We are in control of other people and sometimes we’ve been too aggressive, sometimes we haven’t listened to their rights, sometimes we’ve blotted out their voices. Sometimes they made us blot out their voices. Sometimes our trauma of the last century comes out and bites us and we say, “oh, what, are you crazy, you are not going to have any compromise at all? You know what happened the last time.” Of course, I’m conflicted. I don’t like to see these things. But still I stand with Israel. That’s the unique contribution of the Jewish people right now, and it’s a place in which our destiny is going to be wrapped up. It comes from our deep history, and it will also be our future. I hope we can do it with vision and understanding, even prophetic wisdom.

Abby Bellows

Abby Bellows, Jewish activist and community organizer:
I grew up in the Havurah movement. It was founded in the early ’70s as a breakaway from the Conservative movement and the Reconstructionist movement. It was people who wanted a more vibrant, more social justice-oriented Judaism. There were rabbis who were part of the movement but weren’t presiding over it. I grew up in one of the original Havurot in DC, Fabrengen. I’m involved in a lot of independent minyanim in New York—independent prayer communities. My Judaism has always been kind of free-form.

I feel complex in my feelings towards Israel. My grandmother escaped from Germany. A lot of our family was killed there. I get the need for a Jewish state from that kind of visceral level, and I recognize that anti-Semitism still exists in the world, but at the same time I feel that there is something fundamentally tense for me about having a state that by definition gives preference to one group over another, because my Jewish values taught me about egalitarianism, and I feel like they are not being represented necessarily in the policies of Israel.

The lack of Palestinians being able to get permits for building homes easily or the challenges with civil rights for a lot of Arab Israelis, Bedouin Israelis. Those things really concern me. The way that the Orthodox community is privileged over other types of Jews in Israel is really concerning to me and in a lot of ways I feel doesn’t reflect the Jewish values that I have been taught.

A lot of my friends are into progressive Israel activism. They are post-Zionist or they are progressive Zionist. They find some way with organizations like the New Israel Fund, J Street—organizations that are trying to better Israel with a progressive bent. But I have a lot of other friends who just feel really alienated from the state. I’m a community organizer, and a lot of left-Jews really don’t connect or are embarrassed by Israel or feel really alienated.

For a lot of people in my generation, we are struggling to understand the connection to Israel, the relevancy of it. For a lot of us anti-Semitism isn’t a daily reality, although the attempted attacks in Riverdale brought it close to home for a lot of us in New York. We still question how our values are reflected in the world, given Israel. For a lot of us what comes up more often than not, people in my circle at least, is friends of our who are on the left saying disparaging things about Israel or saying things that are particularly critical. I think a lot of people my age aren’t equipped to respond in a way that’s not just total right-wing-they-can-do-no-wrong, and I think that the path to fighting anti-Semitism is not only about drawing inward and protecting the Jewish state. It’s about educating and building relationships with people who are different than us. It’s painful for me to see Israel activists who are only in the paradigm that my grandmother told me: “Jews need to care for the Jews.” That’s not the interpretation that I’ve taken from the Holocaust and from the history of persecution of our people. Yes, we need to have a fall-back position of protection. What’s really going to change our future is building relationships that are interfaith, intercultural, and reflect the best of Jewish tradition, which is about being questioning and critical and open-minded.

For me it’s about the treatment of Palestinians. It’s also about the treatment of Bedouins, the Arabs who have become Israeli citizens. It’s also about Jews who aren’t Orthodox in Israel. I have friends who have made aliyah and had to do an Orthodox conversion, when previously they were very strong, practicing Conservative Jews.

I think Israel has to be much more upfront about human rights as a first, bottom-line priority, and that is something we can be proud of because Jews believe in human rights.

The most recent time I went, last summer, I went for my cousin’s wedding, who made aliyah. It was a feeling of home culturally. I love the feeling of walking down a street that’s called Hillel and the feeling of integration, of having the words that I use to pray be the words I hear on the street. The last trip I was on was a narrow trip. My vision was within my family and my friends, and it was pretty easy to not see what was happening in the West Bank, at the checkpoints, at other sites of contestation in Israel.

My Judaism has always been fully expressed in this country. I have never been raised with a Judaism that is referential to Israel necessarily, and when I was the president of Hillel I remembered having a conversation with the other leaders about taking down a sign in the entry way of Hillel that said “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel,” which was Hillel’s motto, because it turned off a lot of my friends who didn’t feel comfortable coming into the space. I always try as a Jewish leader to create a Judaism that doesn’t have to be about Israel for the sake of the continuity of our people, celebration of all the richness of our heritage. I think right now for young Jews, it’s really important to have a Judaism that can be a Jewish home where people can feel comfortable even if they don’t put out their credentials about their support of Israel.

Steven Cohen

Professor Steven Cohen, Hebrew Union College:

In 1948, the State of Israel is born and American Jewish involvement with Zionist and other organizations is at its peak; it will never be as high as it is then. It plummets in 1949 and kind of putters along. There is a blip in 1956 with the Sinai campaign and still Israel is not a major part of the American Jewish consciousness until 1967. In 1967, we have the Six Day War. American Jews are mobilized and because they are coming out and becoming full-fledged Americans and proud Jews and ethnic Jews Israel will play a major role in their consciousness from ’67 probably through the 1980s. And since the 1980s there has been a declining American Jewish interest in Israel, in large part because of changes in the identity of American Jews. They are becoming more personal, less collective, more religious, and less ethnic, and Israel is a very unusual symbol for a religio-ethnic group in America. American Jews regard it as their homeland, but hardly any have ever lived there. Israel is their quasi-national symbol. They love the country. It represents ethnicity, nationality, culture, pride, heart, soul to the vast majority of American Jews.

In part, [American Jews] are reacting to Israel as a response to the Holocaust. For years, Jews have suffered from persecution. That persecution never reached the height that it did in the destruction of 6 million Jews in Europe. A fragment of those Jews joined other Jews who had been in the land of Palestine, then Israel. Before that Israel is born as a result of a Zionist movement and the return of Jews to Israel and American Jews are very aware of that narrative from ashes to the glorious, miraculous state of Israel, and that really cements the American Jewish relationship with Israel starting with 1948.

Both Jews on the left and Jews on the right want to blame Israeli politics for the alienation of some American Jews from Israel. The right says the left is too critical of Israel, the left says Israel deserves to be criticized. If it had better policies, it would hold the attention of American Jews.

The real engine of declining American Jewish interest in Israel is changes in American Jewish identity, the way American Jews think of themselves as Jews, and in particular intermarriage. The more Jews marry non-Jews, the more they adopt a definition of being Jewish which is very much like American Protestant Christianity, and American Protestant Christianity is spiritual. It’s about faith, it’s about religion, and there isn’t an automatic place for a national homeland.

On measure after measure, older people outscore middle-aged people, middle-aged people outscored younger people. Older people are more attached to Israel than younger people. Why is that? In large part, younger people are more likely to marry non-Jews, and it’s the result of that marriage, that their attachment to Israel is lower than older people. Among non-Orthodox Jews, most young Jews marry non-Jews. Were we to only look at the in-married, we would find that in-married Jews today are as if not more attached to Israel than in-married Jews of yesterday.

The Orthodox is a growing segment of American Jews. Eight percent of Jews my age, I’m in my 50s, twenty-three percent of American Jewish children are being raised in Orthodox Jewish homes. They are the China of American Jewish life, the growing force. Orthodox Jews, as opposed to everybody else, have become more attached to Israel. More travel to Israel, more study in Israel, more settlement in Israel. It may be that one-fourth of American Jewish Orthodox people will move to Israel in their lifetime. That is an amazing number, and it reflects the deep commitment of Orthodox Jews to the land, state, and people of Israel.

Orthodox Jews will come to exercise even more influence over the ways of which American Jews relate to Israel politically, culturally, religiously and in other ways. They are more conservative, some say hawkish, about Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors, and their approach to Middle East politics will come to more and more influence the way American Jews relate to that part of the world.

Left of center American Jews—and let’s remember Jews are the most left of center group in America—left of center American Jews are adopting more dovish stances towards the conflict, pretty much in keeping with the current American administration’s approach to the conflict. They want a two-state solution to the conflict, Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. They want peaceful negotiations, and they want the withdrawal of settlements from the West Bank.

We have more left-of-center Jews than Orthodox Jews, but we have more Orthodox Jews who are deeply involved with Israel. Most Jews see themselves as progressive, liberal, left-of-center sorts of people. Israel is very unpopular in the American left, and in fact the world left. The same principles which make the non-Jewish left unhappy with Israel make the Jewish left uncomfortable with Israel. So they are attached to Israel as a family matter, but they are unhappy with this member of the family, and they somehow would like this member of the family to behave a little better.

American Jews who would like Israel not to be there are a very small number. They get a lot of attention from the press, they get a lot of attention from American Jews, but when we go to the surveys we find very few Jews are in opposition to the Jewish state of Israel. The vast majority like the fact there is a Jewish state in Israel. They care about Israel; they care about the Jews who are there.

Israeli officials recognize that America is Israel’s primary strategic ally, and in that equation American Jews play a vital role. If American Jews don’t support Israel, then America won’t support Israel, and Israel will stand alone in the world against all of its enemies. Most Israelis think that way.

One of the problems that highly engaged Jewish young people have is that right now they have a choice either to be advocates for Israel or to be apathetic, and by creating other ways and other spaces in which Jews can be pro-Israel these people can be engaged with Israel and still, like many Israelis, take issue with particular policies of the Israeli government.

I have long been what we call a Labor Zionist. I believe in partition, the 1947 resolution that divided the land of Israel into an Arab state and a Jewish state. I would like to see a return to partition, a Palestinian state and a secure democratic Jewish state of Israel, and I think the way to get there is through serious negotiations with our Palestinian counterparts and a strong American and European presence in those negotiations and guarantees for the state of Israel. Without security, I am not willing to countenance significant withdrawals. But I believe that withdrawals from the West Bank will enhance Israeli security in the long run.

From our surveys we know that American Jews are widely concerned about the Iranian threat to Israel and to world peace as well. They, like our leaders, are unclear about what is the appropriate response, what will work to prevent Iran from becoming a serious nuclear threat to world peace and to the very survival of Israel.

America is an exceptional country. It has made Jews different from Jews everywhere else in the world, including Canada, Argentina, the UK, France. American Jews have adopted a more religious, faith-oriented definition about what it means to be Jewish. Jews in those other countries are still more cultural, more national, more ethnic, and therefore, in certain senses, more patriotic about their connection to Israel.

I’m very concerned about changes in American Jewish identity. The lack of interest in Israel among Jewish young people is important in and of itself, and important for what it says about changing Jewish identity. I’m a Jew who happens to believe that Jews need to be fully Jewish, religiously and ethnically Jewish. I’m very concerned that the ethnic aspect of being Jewish is in decline.

If secular Jews are angry at Israel for the way their way of being Jewish is being treated, by definition they are Israel-engaged. My concern is with secular Jews who don’t even know that secular Jews in Israel from their point of view are getting a raw deal.

No one is more critical of Israel than Israelis. Criticism of Israel indicates engagement with Israel. American Jews should be worried when their children stop criticizing Israel.

Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss, writer and blogger:

I didn’t have much of a relationship with Israel until after the Iraq war. Close friends of my family moved there when I was young, but it didn’t really interest me, and it was only after the Iraq war when I really began to look at my country’s relationship with Israel. My best friend told me, “oh they just destroyed the air force in Egypt and Syria on June 5th, 1967, and I was somewhat indifferent to that, I confess. I was 12 years old; it just did not mean that much to me. My family were secularized, academic Jews and they were tempted—because they thought anti-Semitism was an important factor in American life, a belief I don’t share with them—they certainly thought about moving to Israel. But I think the importance of opportunity for their children in the US came before that.

Israel is pursuing disastrous policies on its own that, as a Jew, I have to stand up and say this goes against all my training as an American, this goes against the civil rights struggle in which I took a part, this goes against the Vietnam War struggle in which I took a part, so I’m going to stand up as a Jew, a proud Jew, and denounce these policies and say you have to find a new path—the Jim Crow policies in the West Bank, the 600-700 checkpoints, the destruction of all hope for Palestinians for one-and-a half million Palestinians under occupation, for the Palestinians who were blockaded in Gaza, this sort of contempt for Palestinian human rights for certainly the last 40 years. It’s not just Jewish in my view. I come to this as a very proudly identified Jew. I grew up, that was my whole identity of being Jewish, and I developed a more diverse, American Jewish identity. As I became an adult I intermarried, I broke Jewish law in that respect. I don’t keep a kosher household, so there are many ways in which I represent sort of a typical kind of integrating Jew. I’m not very religious. I’m certainly not an observant Jew and I’m—no other religion calls to me. I go to synagogue a couple of times a year. I define myself as a Jew because apart from the fact that my mother and father are Jews, that I was raised Jewish and I feel Jewish all the time, I would say the ways in which I’m Jewish are that I’m a very bookish person. Books and reading are very important to me. I think of myself as Jewish because I bring a kind of an intellectual sensitivity to issues that I think is very Jewish. This sort of universal tradition in Jewish life of “rachmanes,” concern for others, is something that is part of me.

There is a little bit of love. I think about that often, because I criticize Israel night and day. I spend a lot of time criticizing Israel, just as I think I would have been criticizing the American South when it was segregated in the 1960s, I would have been criticizing it night and day. I would have been a Freedom Rider. The things that I love about Israel, and I’ve only spent a week there, but the things that I love, and I study the place, I think that journalism is wonderful journalism. Right now, the best journalism in the world is coming out of Israel. You have very brave Jews who are exploring things in a very open way. I think that intellectual tradition that I associate with Jewish life is very alive in Israel. When I’ve walked in Jerusalem, when I walked in small towns on my one visit, it was very pretty and beautiful.

I have been frequently been accused of being disloyal, and I think it is—I don’t care about that. I think that I’m being very loyal. I respect the power of communities to define themselves, and so in the 1600s the Jewish community in Amsterdam defined itself in such a way that Spinoza was outside. He was excommunicated, he was considered disloyal, and I respect that religious communities can do that, and today the religious community and the Jewish leadership of the US is trying to exercise a monolithic orthodoxy. In some ways it is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in terms of its tolerance of heretical ideas. What are my heretical ideas? They are that one man-one vote, all men are created equal. These are values I was given by Abraham Lincoln, by the civil rights struggle, by my American experience. So I think they have Jewish roots, too. I actually feel very strongly that I am trying to help my people. I feel a real, as assimilated as I am in many ways, I feel a great loyalty to the Jewish people, and I think the leadership, especially when it exercises these loyalty oaths or any prohibition on open discussion on this is making a very bad call. And so I assert myself as a Jew, and I say Jews have to talk about these things.

What I think is intolerable is a state that is oppressing a minority to the degree the Jewish state is doing so now. So I think Israel is facing a choice right now, that the two-state solution which Obama is pushing is truly its last opportunity to save the Jewish state, and if it fails, if it fails to take the two-state solution, it’s going to be involved in governing a majority population of Arabs in a Jewish state.

A million Jews have left Israel. They are living in Europe, they are living in the US. They don’t want to live there, and these are largely secular Jews, and they are Jews like me, who seek opportunity in a diverse society that respects minority rights. So I think Israel, which has taken a very sharp turn to the right under Netanyahu and Avigdor “Loyalty Oath” Lieberman, Israel faces a choice what kind of society it wants to be. I think it should grab the two-state solution.

Israel should learn from its Jewish cousins in the US that minority rights are essential, and diversity is essential, and these things make Jews safe.

You will notice Netanyahu has not said one word against the settlements. There is now a move to close down outposts. He can’t say he’s going to close down settlements because his coalition falls apart, and those settlements include these people of a fanatical religious character.

Take down the checkpoints in the West Bank is the first thing they should do. I think they should start taking down the wall, I think they should lift the blockade on needles and cloth and everything else that can’t get into Gaza.

I am obviously a minority and a very distinct minority. I represent a fringe of American Jewish life and yet the concern of the American Jewish leadership in the US is the concern that my fringe is getting bigger by the moment, and it is getting bigger because of the Gaza slaughter which woke up a lot of American Jews, thinking what kind of society is this? By the election of Avigdor Lieberman, of Netanyahu. There are many demographic changes that are going on in American Jewish life that is giving me more and more company by the day.

The tradition that I cherish in Judaism is respect for man in God’s image, the words “bitzalem,” which the human rights organization in Israel has, that God created man in his own image. That means all men, and so that kind of respect for all human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, I see as Jewish and is it true that many Jews do not accept my definition? Absolutely, but do we also understand in America that identity is fluid? Yes. I think that I represent a strain in Judaism. If Judaism is going to survive as a sort of a meaningful, moral presence, which I want it to be, then it’s going to have to embrace my views, and it’s why I have so much company now.

Under 35, 60 percent of American Jews are doing what I’m doing. They are intermarrying. They are fully enjoying their minority freedoms in the US, and I think many of them do not see Israel as sort of necessary. Israel came out of a movement that responded to horrific conditions for Jews in Europe. This is something that I think everyone has to remember, that I have to bear in mind whenever I’m criticizing Israel. If it were 100 years ago, I think I would have been a Zionist. If I were living in Vienna or Berlin, which is what I would have been doing, trying to be a journalist in the early 20th century, I would have been a Zionist, because there was a glass ceiling for Jews and worse, there were programs that my ancestors fled in Russia. Those are all real conditions that Zionism came out of. It’s why it captured the Jewish people, and those conditions don’t exist anymore and that is why summoning the Holocaust, which is what the Jewish leadership is reduced to again and again in order to maintain support for Israel in the American Jewish population—that has run its course. And for Jews under 35, I think their attitudes are going to be much more detached about Israel, and that’s the big threat the special relationship faces.

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

by Juliana Ochs Dweck

“Hey! There was a big world out there before the Holocaust,” Mayer Kirshenblatt calls out in his recent book about Jewish life in Poland before World War II.

Passover Seder at My Paternal Grandfather’s, 1992

In 1990, when Kirshenblatt was 73, he began to draw to ensure that people would remember how Eastern European Jews once flourished before so many perished. At the urging of his family, he sketched his memories of life in Apt (Optów in Polish), the small town he grew up in before World War II and eventually left. He painted his mother and the town’s wigmaker, men praying in the besmedresh (study house), and prostitutes in the marketplace. As a child, Kirshenblatt spent his mornings in kheder (Hebrew school) and his afternoons in the town’s Polish public school, but he devoted almost as much time to playing hooky and exploring everyday activity in Apt. In an exceptional exhibition and ambitious companion book of the same title, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust (University of California Press), we join Kirshenblatt as a young boy. We go on meandering walks with him, taking in the spectacle of the livestock market, eavesdropping on gossiping women, inspecting the components of a shoe and the workings of a whistle.

In the 1930s, Apt was largely a Jewish town, with 6,500 Jews and 3,500 Christians, so much of daily life was Jewish life. Kirshenblatt illustrates the minutiae of formal and informal Jewish ritual in multicolored detail. Mikve: Thursday, Women’s Day depicts a women’s weekly ritual bath. The mikve was a square pool, four feet deep and heated by a wood-burning oven. Women would bring their own soap and towel and, with the bucket provided, rinse themselves with hot soapy water and then step into the water. Shlugn Kapures: Yom Kippur Eve shows Kirshenblatt’s family as they swing a chicken above their heads, a Yom Kippur ritual that symbolically transfers one’s sins to the fowl.

The Black Wedding in the Cemetery c. 1892, 1996

In Apt, Jewish life was intertwined with Christian life. Images such as Funeral of the Father of My Christian Friend, depicting the interment of the father of Kirshenblatt’s childhood fiddle partner, demonstrate the pre-war intimacy between Jews and Christians. Daily interaction in the Polish village was often cluttered and eccentric. There were the tomatoes Kirshenblatt’s mother forbade her sons from eating, deeming them trayf (not kosher) because she saw them growing in the church organist’s garden. There was the town’s main synagogue, which had a sunken floor: one had to descend four steps to enter. This made the inside of the sanctuary feel imposing without dominating the town church’s exterior, which was prohibited.

Mayer July’s folksy memory paintings and the lyrical narratives that accompany them have a frequently idealized sweetness and beauty. Their timeless quality is reinforced by an unvarying date, 1934, inscribed on nearly all of the paintings, as if Kirshenblatt’s entire childhood happened the year he left Apt and emigrated to Cananda. But Kirshenblatt does not sanitize pre-war life. He reveals and revels in “the carnivalesque side of life,” as Jewish studies professor Jeffrey Shandler calls it on the exhibition’s audio guide. We see this in the kleptomaniac who slips a herring down her bosom and in the depiction of Baynish the Drummer catching Yankele Zishes in bed with his wife. Kirshenblatt’s accompanying narratives are assiduous but also relaxed and episodic, expressed, as his daughter, New York University professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, writes in her afterword to the book, in the “realm of living speech.”

Purim Play: “The Krakow Wedding,” c. 1994

Kirshenblatt’s animated paintings are so bulging with vivid detail that, like stories themselves, they invite careful perusal (something the exhibition’s large paintings encourage). Their intricacy betrays a life and a memory that is about learning and exploration, not knowledge and erudition. They are about feeling more than fact.

Just as Kirshenblatt’s illustrations intimate the practice and process of life in Apt, his art is itself the result of a long, collaborative process. In 1967, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett began “listening with love” to her father’s stories of life in Apt. In the ensuing decades, Mayer Kirshenblatt’s entire family became involved, hoping that painting would alleviate his bouts of depression. His wife sent him to painting lessons, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s husband provided him with art supplies, and another son-in-law built racks for his canvases.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett helped her father build the scaffolding for his memory by eliciting stories through word associations, encouraging tales to become sketches and sketches to inspire paintings. This would provide a foundation for Mayer Kirshenblatt’s own recollections and also for stories he elicited from childhood friends and from the town’s memory book. The result is a collective autobiography, a story told in the “third voice” with multiple points of view intertwined to tell one story.

Kirshenblatt’s own memory of Apt ended in 1934, when he, his three brothers, and his mother traveled to Toronto to join his father, who had fled in 1928 to escape the wrath of a loan shark. It was only through letters that arrived after the war that Kirshenblatt learned the fate of his family members who remained in Poland. In Slaughter of the Innocents II: Execution at Szydlowiec 1942, he depicts the bloody execution of his family by the Nazis: “The Germans took the whole family out to a nearby field. They lashed my grandmother to a tree and, before her very eyes, they shot her entire family. Then they shot her.”

Slaughter of the Innocents: Execution at Szydlowiec 1942

But Kirshenblatt himself is not a Holocaust survivor, and the execution scene is a memory he borrowed from survivors and reports. Despite this, in Kirshenblatt’s painting borrowed memories and collective memories become as emotional and painstaking as his own.

In Jewish tradition, memory has long been preserved and transmitted through ritual and liturgy, passed on not only through texts but also through religious practice. Jewish rituals, such as the Passover meal, are an active way Jews share the past with future generations. It is how Jews heed the injunction zakhor, “remember,” which appears in the Hebrew Bible and has been echoed as Jews vow not to forget the Holocaust.

But in Mayer Kirshenblatt’s collective autobiography and in the exhibition of his work, we see that Jewish memory is also stored and transmitted through art, through the creative expression of painting. When Kirshenblatt paints Jewish rituals and Jewish life, whether in their joy or their sadness, he preserves both his own memories and also the collective memories of the Polish Jewish community. In Mayer July, painting becomes Kirshenblatt’s own religious practice of remembrance.

“They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust” was organized by the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. It runs through October 1, 2009 at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

Juliana Ochs Dweck has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Hebraica in Philadelphia and the Rose Haggadah at the New York Public Library.