WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A rabbi in Israel forwarded me an article this week on a controversy at Yad Vashem. Of importance to us is that in that article is a quote of a Yad Vashem official calling Israeli Holocaust survivors not “olim’ but “migrants.” That’s not what the Aliyah Bet seventy-some years ago was about. Still of importance today is the right of persecuted Jews anywhere in the world not just to go to Israel, but to go there and be home.
This Week: “Migrants” or “Olim”? A BIG Difference To Israel and Us
A rabbi in Israel with whom I’m in regular contact forwarded a disturbing Begin-Sadat Center article to me this week. What disturbs me is not specifically the controversy with which the article, by Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, 1/3/21, Yad Vashem at a Crossroads, deals – which is whether Gen. (res.) Effi Eitan, with a distinguished military record but considered “right-wing,” should become the next director of the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem.
What disturbs me, and should you, is an incident, described in the article, between the author of that article and a Yad Vashem official that occurred during the author’s visit there.
“Every year, in the run-up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, the IDF’s General Staff attends a seminar at Yad Vashem. On one of these visits that I attended, a senior instructor led the generals through a photo exhibition of Holocaust survivors living in Israel, whom she described as ‘migrant Holocaust survivors.’ When I told her that they were not migrants but ‘olim,’ since Jews returning to their ancestral homeland are part of the unique phenomenon of the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ rather than ‘ordinary’ migrants, she insisted that the term ‘migrants’ was the universally accepted one.” [emphasis added, a little]
I’ve read a lot of books about the Briha and Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews’ courageous effort during and after the Holocaust to bring home to the homeland as many European Jews as they could, including by parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe during the war and sailing refugee-filled ships after the War into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British blockade. These Palestinian Jews did not regard the Holocaust’s homeward-bound Jewish survivors as “migrants.”
But for all the homeland Jews’ courage and efforts, it was the Holocaust survivors themselves, virtually unanimously determined to leave accursed Europe for Palestine, who initiated and relentlessly drove their movement across borders under horrendously brutal conditions to the dangerously over-filled rickety ships and in the end to battle the boarding British for hours with cans and bottles in sight of Palestine’s shores. For Yad Vashem, of all places on earth, to call these indomitable home-comers “migrants” insults both them and all who aided and facilitated their homecoming, and indeed all who view ingathering of downtrodden Jewish exiles as part of a Jewish homeland’s definition.
In last week’s #1041, I suggested that as a New Year’s Resolution you read, e.g., one of four books that I mentioned that convey “the atmosphere and flavor” of THE Jewish event of our time, the restoration of Jewish homeland sovereignty and its continuing defense against foes. I said these books are by or about participants in these Jewish history-making events, not impersonal academic treatises.
I want to tell you about an incident in one of these books, Howard Blum’s The Brigade, which follows three Palestinian Jewish Brigade members through their actions in Europe in the War and afterwards in vengeance against Nazis and then in bringing home Jews. This incident is the moment two of these men ceased wreaking vengeance and began helping survivor refugees.
They learn that a particularly vicious Nazi was hiding in a Polish town’s church and enter that country to exact justice. They wear their Brigade uniforms on entering the church, so that their quarry will know who has pursued him. But there’s a service going on with a choir of little girls, so they take seats in the pews waiting for it to end. One of the little girls keeps looking at them and then hesitantly gets up and approaches. They wave her toward them and she presses her finger against one of their shoulder patches and says “Mogen David.” “Are you Jewish?” “Yes, but the nuns want me to be Catholic, and I want to be Jewish.” The Jewish Brigade members take the young girl by the hand and walk out of the church.
I have read instance after instrance of bonds forming between Holocaust survivors seeking only to escape Europe for exclusively Palestine and Palestinian Jews helping them get there. I’ve read of the same between Mizrahi (Mideast and North African) Jews and Israelis bringing them home. Those involved on both sides of this Ingathering of the Exiles did not view these homecoming Jews to be “migrants.”
The controversy over Gen. Eitan’s appointment as Yad Vashem director is part of a larger issue of whether the Holocaust is to be viewed as a genocide directed specifically against Jews or as an instance of a “universal” evil that can be perpetrated by and against any people, conceivably including, for some, Israelis against “Palestinians.” The “universalists” passionately oppose Gen. Eitan’s appointment.
I wrote an email to that BESA article author, Gen. Hacohen. I thanked him for telling that Yad Vashem guide that Israeli Holocaust survivors are olim and not migrants. I said that that is what the Aliyah Bet and Ingathering of the Exiles are about. And I encouraged him to continue advocating that the Holocaust, which I see as a climax of centuries of the despising of Jews in Europe – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom were all aimed at us – was neither a one-time occurrence nor a random instance of genocide happening anywhere.
But I would end this week by saying this about Israel and the Holocaust. The State of Israel did not regain sovereignty in 1948 because of the Holocaust, but because Jews did not abandon the land of Israel, including by physical presence there (see, e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine) and in the Mideast throughout eighteen hundred years of uninterrupted successive foreign empire rule, and because, as Herzl told us, if you will it, it is no dream.
The State of Israel makes a mistake, I think, in taking diplomatic and other visiting VIPs only to Yad Vashem. Israel should build on the ample grounds of Yad Vashem a museum documenting vividly the continuous tenacious presence of Jews in our homeland throughout those long dark foreign rule centuries. The case we must make to the world that would sever – UNSC 2334 – the heart of our homeland from us importantly includes: We Never Left.
And what is the bond between the Jewish homeland and us safe-in-America Diaspora Jews? The right of persecuted Jews anywhere in the world not just to go to the Jewish homeland of Israel, but to go there and be home.