Thursday, August 14
More Pictures Below
In a way, you can know what it's like to visit the Holocaust Memorial as Yad Vashem, a Jerusalem mountaintop also containing the cemetery for beloved lost Israeli leaders like Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
It will have photographs and text describing what we all know is one of the worst, if not the worst, example in history of calculated human cruelty.
But what you cannot know is how it feels to walk in the bright sunshine of a summer day here in the Jewish homeland and then dive into the subject matter of how six million Jews--about as many as live here now-- were exterminated.
The United States National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is very elaborate, more than Yad Vashem in fact. But it is not in Israel. It is not among the people whose parents and grandparents actually tasted the gas of Auschwitz, where an iron sign promised "Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Make You Free").
Some of the simplest exhibits are the most moving: the Garden of the Righteous, in which a tree is planted for those non-Jews whose aid reduced the death toll; the eternal flame in the Memorial Hall; and the Children's Memorial, where you walk into total darkness. Five candles are reflected by so many mirrors against mirrors against more mirrors that the effect surrounds you with little twinkles of light, emblematic of the million and a half children killed during the Holocaust.
You hear names and ages over the sound system as you walk amid the image of countless candles, representing the lives snuffed out by Nazi hate.
After immersing ourselves in the way so many Jewish lives were snuffed out, we saw other lives begin. At the Ethiopian Absorption Center, about 1,200 recently arrived Ethiopian Jews are on their way to learning Hebrew and becoming functional in this country.
This is doubly hard for them because many are learning how to drive for the first time, even how to use a telephone.
One couple invited our little entourage in. Delicious curry smells wafted out of the tiny kitchen. Tadeg and Alemanesh Fetigu have been here for a year, their six-month-old son obviously less.
In speaking to Ethiopian kids (some of the most beautiful in the world), they wanted to know if I had met George Bush.
"Easily five or six times," I told them, referring back to the many fundraisers I MC'd for the former governor. "He's a very nice man."
They were mildly impressed and ran off to play. They have very little, but it is more than they had in Ethiopia.
Photos
The striking view from the mountaintop at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial.
The Garden of the Righteous. A rabbi in the 2nd century took his flock north to Galilee and fed them from carob trees while on the run from Romans. That's why carob trees are planted with plaques commemorating non-Jews who saved Jews from the Final Solution.
The people named on the plaques may have saved one Jew, maybe a thousand or more. A Hebrew saying states that "if you save one person it is as if you have saved the world."
Mural depicting "The Last March," the herding of Jews into Warsaw ghettos. Notice all the faces are downcast in despair except for the child and the Rabbi who carries the Torah. Behind the marchers you can see the helmets and bayonets of Nazis, whose faces are not seen. The artist said that to give them faces would make them human.
Sorry about the blur, but in the soft lighting of the museum, a member of a youth group is packing a big rifle.
Remember the rift over the "Whites Only" water fountains? "Jews are not Wanted Here" was posted all over Germany in the mid-to-late 1930s.
Actual bricks from the Warsaw Ghetto wall.
Model of the Auschwitz death camp. Every one of those little blocks is a large barracks building that could have housed 200.
Zyklon-B gas canisters.
An Auschwitz prisoner uniform.
Photo of Auschwitz prisoners. Author Elie Wiesel has his head raised at lower right.
Memorial Hall at Yad Vashem with eternal flame.
Children's memorial exterior. Note the intentionally unfinished construction, a theme for interrupted lives.
As you exit Yad Vashem, this memorial beckons you to a spectacular view. If you rest your hand on it, it will also burn the living daylights out of you in the 100-degree sun.
Our chariot for this adventure, the spacious VW van of Amos Baron, best driver and guide in Mideast history. If you ever plan to come here, call him at Amos Tours: 011-972-25632711 or e-mail amostours@hotmail.com. How funny is it that Amos has the same area code as Farmer's Branch?
The "train to nowhere," with a real German Cattle car perched at the end of an unfinished iron bridge.
You can't help but imagine being trapped in one of these airless tombs. Yad Vashem is at once depressing and uplifting. Look what these people have done with the hand history has dealt them.
From Wednesday
We meet the olim, or 'new arrivals' who have made the aliyah, the commitment to move to Israel. L to R: Mark Davis, Absorption Center Director David Elad, Marlene Gorin of the JCRC, Philippe, Laurent and Rivka from France, Nava from Atlanta holding her son (yes, that's a boy) Ariel. That's Producer Jeff Williams and his goatee in the front.
In a Hebrew class with kids from France and Spain.
The kids have a rabbit named Bob Marley.
Daoud Kuttab, Palestinian journalist, telling me how Monday's Hezbollah rocket attacks that killed a teenage boy were "defensive." Daoud's business card lists his address as "Ramallah, Palestine." Funny. I was in Ramallah Tuesday, and I was in Israel.
Palestinian Gazi Berjit and Israeli Yitzhak Frankenthal agree on almost nothing, but they both lost loved ones in Mideast violence.
From this high-tech surveillance center, Old City police watch 272 video cameras. They have seen terrorist stabbings, bombs, shootings and street crime. But overall, crime is down.
Maybe peace can come through programs that allow Jewish and Palestinian kids to learn about each other. Nouar Qutab, 18, is a Palestinian in Jerusalem. Liav Harel, 17, is an Israeli from Haifa.
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