Yom HaShoah

Israelis never stop for anything.  They are constantly moving, yelling, pushing you out of the way so they can get to where they are going.  At 10:00am on Yom HaShoah(Holocaust Remembrance Day), a siren wails for one minute, and Israelis stop what they are doing, standing still for the entire time, in remembrance of the victims and in honor of the survivors of the Holocaust. 

At 9:55am on Yom Hashoah, I positioned myself on a balcony that overlooks a busy intersection of Jerusalem in order to witness the memorial for myself.  Many others had the same idea—from parents with little children, to teenage girls at seminary, to older adults for whom the ceremony might have a more personal meaning than it does for me. 

At 9:58am, cars were still honking at each other as they drove through the intersection.

At 9:59am, drivers began opening their car doors, standing beside their cars, in the middle of the road, in anticipation of the siren. 

At 10:00am, the siren sounded.  Traffic stopped.  Any remaining driver or passenger opened his/her door and stood solemnly next to his/her car, in a minute of quite reflection, thought, and prayer.  No one moved.  It was beautiful. 

I cried.

At 10:01am, the siren stopped, and the drivers got back into their cars and continued on their way.  When I finally gathered myself together and began to walk home, I noticed that my fellow observers had already left.  I crossed the street into my neighborhood, and life had resumed as usual, as if nothing had ever happened.  I was a bawling, snotty mess as I walked home, but no one stopped me to see if I was okay.  On any other day, I would not have expected anyone to, but I thought, maybe today… People just looked at me as I walked by, maybe in pity, maybe in empathy, or maybe just because I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt in what is quickly becoming a religious neighborhood.

I have never cried at a Holocaust memorial service before.  Growing up, I read a lot of books written about the Holocaust—memoirs as well as fiction.  When I was 15, I traveled with USY Pilgrimage to Poland, for a grueling and emotional 10 day tour of the ghettos, camps, and mass graves that litter the horizon.  After that, Holocaust museums and services never really affected me in the same way—how could they even compare to what I had seen?  (Which can barely represent the entirety of what actually happened). 

I had entered (and exited) the gas chambers, I had walked along the train tracks, feeling stuck as I tried to leave the Birkenau concentration camp, I had seen the pile of ashes of people who should have been, and I mourned their losses everywhere I went.  Worse than Majdanek, a camp which, it is well known, could be fully functional within 24 hours, were the camps of which nothing more remained than a large field with some bicycle tracks running through them.  For these camps, there is no marker of what once stood there, no proof besides memories and recollection of the atrocities that took place.  Camps like these fuel the fire of Holocaust deniers.  What will the future generations know of what took place here?  How can they possibly begin to understand, when no survivors are left to tell their stories, and all we have are fields of grass?

And how could I, after having seen all of these things at 15, possibly be moved by a museum or a memorial service?   But today I was.  There is something so powerful in the entire sensory experience of what took place today—hearing the siren, seeing life stop for a minute, feeling the way we do when we allow ourselves to really think about what happened.  It’s powerful and overwhelming.

Until today, the Yom Hashoah memorial services I had attended in the United States had always taken place in Hebrew school.  We lit candles, said the Kaddish (the one with the names of the camps inserted in between each word), and sometimes we wore gold stars in solidarity or watched the movie Paperclips.  I had never experienced a memorial on a national level, and if one even exists other than the museums and monuments littered throughout the country, I am unaware of it.  But today I witnessed an entire nation stop for one minute to remember—a memory that lives in the collective conscience of Jews and other persecuted groups not just in Israel, but throughout the world.

This is what it means to be a Jewish State.

This, the act of remembering—as an entire unit, an entire nation—the narrative which tugs at the heart strings of everyone who lives here, the events which directly or indirectly resulted in the formation of this very nation; this is what it means to be a Jewish State.

At 10:36am I finished writing this blog post.