Atonement

“The policeman ordered me to strip and pushed me to a precipice, where another group of people was awaiting their fate. But before the shots resounded, apparently out of fear, I fell into the pit. I fell on the [bodies] of those already murdered…. During the first moments I couldn’t grasp anything – either where I was or how I got there. 

I thought that I had gone mad, but when people started to fall on top of me, I regained consciousness and understood everything. I started to feel my arms, legs, stomach, [and] head to make certain that I had not even been wounded. 

I pretended to be dead. Those who had been killed or wounded were lying under me and on top of me – many were still breathing, others were moaning…. Suddenly I heard a child weeping and the cry: “Mummy!” I imagined my little girl crying and I started to cry myself. 
The shooting was continuing and people kept falling. I threw bodies off of me, afraid of being buried alive. I did so in a way that would not attract the attention of the policemen.”

The above is an excerpt from the testimony of Dina Pronivheva, née Vasserman, a survivor of the 1941 Babi Yar massacre, in which 33,771 Jewish residents of Kiev were murdered in cold blood. Forced to lay down over the bodies of fellow Jews, Nazi gunmen shot them in the back of the neck, in groups of ten people at a time. This horrific atrocity, one of hundreds of other horrific atrocities, happened on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) Eve, eighty years ago. As part of the Ukraine, which was in the Soviet Union, Babi Yar was ignored as a location of a Jewish Holocaust site. It was only when the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his epic poem “Babiyy Yar”, which was also set to music by Dimitri Shostakovich, that a Jewish memorial was created.

I have a very torn and tortured approach to dealing with the Shoah (The Holocaust). My maternal grandparents, who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935, and lost both of their families at Auschwitz, never spoke a word of it as I was growing up and, to the best of my knowledge, commemorated their families’ memory with a single yahrzeit candle, lit on Yom Kippur. Until the 1961 Eichmann trial, many survivors in Israel led similar, emotionally scarred lives: Let’s forget the past, help build and defend our new country, and make sure that it never happens again.  Only with the media exposure of the trial did the individual stories and memories start to emerge from the hidden recesses of the minds of the tormented survivors. As a proud Israeli kid, steeped in the heroism of the Pioneers who built the country, I could not fathom what I perceived as passivity and acquiescence on behalf of the European Jews. How could they not resist the Nazis? To be honest, this sentiment was shared by many of my Sabra (Israeli-born) friends. We’d sing obscene ditties about Hitler, and tell each other Holocaust jokes which, in my mind, is an entirely acceptable form of comedy. In fact, there’s probably no other rational response to it (other than building a new country). I recently came across a great one from British comedian Ricky Gervais: “A holocaust survivor eventually dies of old age and goes to heaven. He meets God, and he tells God a holocaust joke. God goes, ‘That’s not funny.’ So the man says, ‘I guess you had to be there.’”

Practically all members of my family had participated in various “Marches of the Living” and other organized excursions to the death camps of Europe, primarily Auschwitz and Treblinka. These visits typically have three components to them: A religious ritual of remembrance, a historical overview, and a Zionist ceremony designed to present the Jewish people, and particularly the State of Israel, in a quasi-victorious light, sort of “as hard as you tried, we’re still here”. Sometimes these events have a military bent to them, such as Israeli Air-Force flyovers in the skies over the camps, or delegations of IDF soldiers in active service. These missions have become a cottage industry unto themselves, with both Israeli and Polish partners, as high-school trips to Holocaust sites have become quite the “coming of age” ritual for Israeli teens, replete with preparatory classes, well-planned on-site ceremonies, and the obligatory wild party at the Polish hotel afterwards. Israeli author Yishai Sarid, (son of legendary peace activist, member of Knesset, and political-party colleague, the late Yossi Sarid) wrote an excellent novel called “The Memory Monster” about a young historian who works as a tour guide for these groups, only to have his life be subsumed by the Holocaust and its remembrance.

Much like God, in the aforementioned joke, I never felt a need “to be there”. I have no desire to visit any of these sites or participate in a group visit. Make no mistake: I firmly believe that the Shoah was the most horrible and evil event in the history of Humankind. I actually feel that by making these pilgrimages we are diminishing the significance of the calamity and are helping to turn it into a historical event which one may cross of their tourism list, like visiting Gettysburg or the Alamo. I refuse to travel to “those” countries, particularly Germany. I once had a flight connection in Frankfurt which, due to bad weather, I’d missed. The US Airways counter inside the terminal was abandoned, so I had to formally “enter” Germany to get to the ticketing counter. When asked by the Passport Control agent “Vat is zee pourpose of your veezit to Chermany?” I responded with a brusque “To get the hell out of it”.

(When my mother first visited the site of the Treblinka death camp, which has been completely leveled with not a single structure remaining, she had difficulty in locating among the 17,000 stone monuments the one commemorating her father’s hometown of Przemyśl. When she finally did, she realized that the lettering on the stone had faded. Being the resourceful woman that she is, she pulled out her eyeliner pencil and filled-in the wording. Subsequently, each family member, before their own “March of the Living” excursion, was provided with a magic marker to fill-in the letters ensure that the engraving remained legible).

During most of my childhood and youth in Israel, me and my father would spend every Yom Kippur in our ancestral town of Rehovot, which my Great-Great-Grandmother helped found, back in 1890. We’d go to services at the Central Synagogue, where my family had memberships over a time span of multiple generations (and where both me and my father had our bar-mitzvahs), walking back through town to my grandparents (who’d always light a yahrzeit candle in memory of their families murdered in the Holocaust), stopping to visit various relatives and friends on the way. Except for a rare ambulance, you never see a vehicle on Israeli roads during Yom Kippur, and it’s the children’s moment of glory, when hundreds of thousands of bicycles pour into the country’s deserted streets. There were a variety of Yom Kippur rituals and traditions surrounding the services in Rehovot, which remain dear to my heart. In any event, a Yom Kippur there involved several miles of walking, which is harder than you’d think when one is fasting…

I can’t recall exactly why we didn’t go on Yom Kippur 1973; I seem to remember my father having some back problems. I can clearly recall waking up on Yom Kippur morning, looking out the window of our Tel Aviv apartment, and being very surprised to see military cars on the road (even at age ten we knew that no cars should be driven). At quarter to two in the afternoon an air-raid siren came on, and we rushed to our building’s subterranean bomb shelter (all buildings in Israel have one, as required by building codes, to this day). That was the start of the greatest trauma, to this day, in Israel’s history: The Yom Kippur war.

Six short years after suffering the crushing defeat of the 1967 Six-Day War, Egypt and Syria joined forces and attacked Israel simultaneously, both in the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights. The attack caught Israel unprepared, on multiple levels: This being the holiest day of the Jewish year, many soldiers were on leave. Israeli Military Intelligence failed to “deliver the goods” and produce solid, reliable assessments. The IDF’s mobilization emergency stockpiles were neglected, and in pitiful shape (this is vital because Israeli military doctrine only relies on the active-service army to block an enemy attack; it’s up to the million-plus reservists to take the battle to enemy territory, where Israel wages its wars. When the reserves are called-up but don’t have functioning tanks and armored personnel carriers, you have a serious problem). And most significantly: following the Six-Day War, Israel became a euphoric society, with delusions of empire, convinced of its invincibility. This euphoria also led to terrible political decision-making by Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister (and Israeli military legend) Gen. Moshe Dayan, who steadfastly refused to entertain any peace-for-land proposals from Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat. And the war came.

Virtually everyone in the country was immediately impacted: the entire reserve contingent was called-up (pretty much all able-bodied men at that time), many privately-owned vehicles were conscripted (including our family Volvo, which my father drove ferrying military journalists to the front). As there was a mandatory blackout in the urban areas, our dual job as kids was to paint, during the day, the headlights of all cars blue, dimming their beams, and at night we’d patrol the neighborhood, armed with whistles, and call up from the street: “Third floor, on the left, turn off your light!”. With all of this going on, I don’t think that we lost a single day of school. Our teachers hung maps on the classroom walls, and we tracked our forces as they made their way towards Damascus and Cairo, eventually stopping and negotiating cease-fire agreements with the belligerents. The damage to the country was astounding: Over 2,500 IDF soldiers were killed; everyone knew, or “knew of” a casualty, including my second cousin Jonathan Paikess, who was killed in his tank on the Golan Heights on the second day of the war, blocking the Syrians (As if this wasn’t tragic enough, his father Micha, my father’s first cousin, was killed in the Six-Day War during the battle for Jerusalem). I remember going to the post office to pick up a copy of the “List of the Fallen”, a thick booklet listing all those which we’d lost. Many reservists (including my father) had to stay on for several months, and the economy tanked. Israel’s euphoric hubris had ended, but so did the nation’s innocence; Israel came dangerously close to annihilation. The war laid the ground to the 1978 Peace Accords with Egypt, but also to the country’s political shift to the right, enshrining Menachem Begin’s Likud party as the leading political entity, for decades to come.  The Hebrew word for “Omission” (Mekh’dal) to this day is used as the proper noun describing the collective political and military failures that brought about the war. Every year, around Yom Kippur, Israeli media provides both historical and analytical coverage of those days: Government decisions are examined, military maneuvers dissected, strategic errors broken down, archives pored over, all trying to answer the core, existential question: How could we let it happen?

A book was recently published about Leonard Cohen’s time in Israel during the war. Living on a Greek isle at the time, the Canadian Singer/Songwriter/Poet/Prophet came to Israel and, borrowed guitar in hand, travelled to many godforsaken desert outposts in the Sinai, performing his hits of the time (such as “Suzanne”, “Bird on a Wire”, and “Sisters of Mercy”) to very small groups of soldiers, at times during a break in fighting. The following year he released his haunting song “Who by Fire”, which is based on a famous Hebrew Yom Kippur prayer:

“And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?”

It’s a tough day to navigate: one tries to be introspective, and contemplate how to become a better person, amidst all of this emotional baggage, while fasting. But the yahrzeit candle is burning low, and it’s time to lean forward into a new, and hopefully better, year. The Jewish calendar is, much like its observants, comprised of rapid transitions.

Our friend and master Blues/Boogie-Woogie pianist Rev. Billy C. Wirtz was in town, so as soon as our online services ended, and the shofar (ram’s horn) was blown, we nibbled on some honey cake and scrambled over to the Blue Note Grille, where we fully broke the fast with some quality Bar-B-Que (the real deal, not the North Carolina imposter) and enjoyed, as always, the Reverend’s timeless hits, which included “What I Used To Do All Night, Now Takes Me All Night To Do”, “Grandma Behind the Wheel”, “Mennonite Surf Party”, and others of their ilk. However surprisingly, and perhaps most fittingly, Billy graciously closed with Bob Thiele and George Davis Weiss’ timeless classic:

“I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed days, the dark sacred nights
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.”

Certainly not always, but it can be.