Midstream- A Monthly Jewish Review

May/June 2008 Feature

Israel at Sixty: Reminiscences and Reflections Part two

  • Reflections on a Historic Landmark Event by Kalman Sultanik
  • Am Yisrael Chai by Menachem Z. Rosensaft
  • Dance in the Street by Seymour Mayne
  • Re-defined by Rochelle Mass

    Reflections on a Historic Landmark Event

    Kalman Sultanik
    On the eve of the 60th Anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, I reflect on what had preceded this historic landmark event.

    After the Liberation in 1945, the entire world, Europe and the Jewish refugees in particular, were undergoing dramatic upheaval and changes unprecedented in modern history. The 180,000 Jewish survivors of the concentration camps were on the march from all corners of Europe and relocated in DP camps in Germany. They were driven by a strong force, a force that was pulling them in one direction only, in the direction of their old homeland, then called Palestine and today’s the State of Israel. They rejected any suggestion to return to their countries of origin and their homes from where they were expelled by the Germans.

    The tragic uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust survivors manifested itself in the measure of autonomy granted to them in the DP camps. President Truman instructed General Eisenhower to recognize the Jewish refugees as a separate ethnic group and to place them in separate DP camps in Germany. In 1946, this decision was officially announced over the Armed Forces Network in Frankfurt. The broadcaster was overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment and uttered the following:

    A Central Committee of Liberated Jews, representing the she’erit ha-pleitah (the saved remnant of Jewry), was elected by the refugees in the DP camps and charged with the administration and representation of the survivors. This committee was accepted and recognized by the United States authorities in Germany, by the Zionist leaders, and the Jewish Agency.

    At that time a delegation of three elected representatives from the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, representing the she’erit ha-pleitah, was invited to meet in Zurich with David Ben-Gurion. Our delegation included Trager, Chairman of the Central Committee, Blumowich and myself. The meeting was impressive and Ben-Gurion’s words dramatic. He said:

    He went on to say:

    In the meantime, Zionist and Jewish leaders in Palestine and throughout the world, and especially those in the United States, focused their efforts on easing the plight of the 180,000 Holocaust survivors in the DP Camps in Germany, to shorten their stay in Germany, and to expedite their departure for Palestine. Prominent Zionist leaders such as Nachum Goldman, Rose Halperin, Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen S. Wise spoke up on behalf of the survivors to the White House and the State Department, with the aim of protecting the survivors from German interference in administering the DP camps. This was achieved by placing the DP camps under the jurisdiction of the American military leadership of General Eisenhower and General Clay.

    The finest hour of the Jewish Central Committee was when the United Nations delegation visited the DP camps, and an overwhelming majority of the survivors declared their strong rejection of being returned to their countries of origin, especially to their homes in Poland from where they had been driven out.

    I was astounded when the United Nations delegate from India asked: Why not send the survivors back to Poland? I reminded him of the Kielce pogrom, when Jews were killed while attempting to return to their homes in search of their families. He was silent. What is more, the UN Delegation also heard directly from the survivors the fervent undiminished desire of the survivors to go to Palestine (Israel) only. As they were returning to their limousines, a woman survivor confronted them, pointing to an Auschwitz tattoo on her arm, and sobbed: “Why do you keep me here? See how I have suffered? And now you won’t let me go home to Palestine.” I also recall having to explain to the Belgian delegate why there is no other place in the world for Jews but their old original homeland—Palestine. The Uruguayan delegate expressed the urgency of relocating immediately all the children to Palestine without any further delay.

    The day the UN Delegation returned from their DP camps, the newspaper Neue Zeitung in Munich reported that the UN Special Committee on Palestine was impressed by the intense unanimous desire of the Jewish refugees to go to Palestine. It gave them an in-depth understanding of the need for an independent Jewish state for the survivors of the Holocaust, a need that had no precedent in the history of humankind.

    Simultaneously with the activities of the Zionist and Jewish leaders throughout the world, the United Nations began deliberations on the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state, a homeland for the Jewish people and the ingathering of the survivors of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. That deliberation came to a climax on November 29, 1947 when the UN passed the partition resolution and on May 14, 1948 (the fifth day of the Jewish month of Iyar) when David Ben-Gurion publicly read the Israeli Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv and proclaimed the existence of the modern democratic Jewish State of Israel after almost two thousand years of exile, inquisition, pogrom, and Holocaust. •

    About the author
    Kalman Sultanik,a Holocaust survivor, represented the D.P. camps at the World Zionist Congress in 1946. He is currently a member of the Board of Govenors and Zionist Executive of the Jewish Agency and serves as Chairman of the WZO, American Section. He also sponsors Midstream.

    Am Yisrael Chai

    Menachem Z. Rosensaft
    Shlomo Carlebach’s rousing “Am Yisrael Chai, Od Avinu Chai,” “the people of Israel lives, our father still lives,” has become one of the most popular, identity-affirming contemporary Jewish songs. But the second phrase, in its original form, was not an exclamation but a question. When he finally revealed himself to his brothers in Egypt, Joseph asked, “Od Avinu Chai?” Does our father still live? Why did Carlebach combine these two verses? Perhaps because Joseph needed to know whether he could be reunited with his father, Israel, before he could affirm that the people of Israel lived on.

    When the remnant of European Jewry emerged from the death camps, forests and hiding places throughout Europe in the winter and spring of 1945, they looked for their families and, overwhelmingly, discovered that their fathers and mothers, their husbands, wives and children, their brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, had all been murdered by the Germans and their accomplices. And yet, even though their question to the world, “Od Avinu Chai?” had a devastatingly negative answer, they declared that “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel not only had not been destroyed but defiantly remained alive.

    From almost the moment of their liberation, the Holocaust survivors’ affirmation of their national identity in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy took the form of a political and spiritually redemptive Zionism. The creation of a Jewish state in what was then Palestine was far more than a practical goal. It was the one ideal that had not been destroyed, and that allowed them to retain the hope that an affirmative future, beyond gas chambers, mass-graves, and ashes was still possible for them.

    Bergen-Belsen, the largest of the DP camps, was in the British Zone of Germany. There, the survivors elected a Jewish leadership, headed by my father, Josef Rosensaft, who made Zionism the order of the day. At the first Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone, convened in September 1945 in Belsen by my father and his colleagues without permission from the British military authorities, the survivors formally adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and expressing their

    In December 1945, my father told the leadership of American Jewry assembled at the first post-war conference of the United Jewish Appeal in Atlantic City, according to a report in The New York Herald Tribune, that the survivors’ sole hope was emigration to Palestine, the only place in the world “willing, able, and ready to open its doors to the broken and shattered Jews of war-ravaged Europe.” The following week, The New York Journal American quoted him as declaring at an emergency conference on Palestine at the Manhattan Center in New York City, that, “We know that the English are prepared to stop us with machine guns. But machine guns cannot stop us.” Testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine back in Belsen in early 1946, my father told its members that if the survivors would not be allowed to go to Palestine, “We shall go back to Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, and you will bear the moral responsibility for it.”

    My father understood that the goal of a Jewish state was a spiritual lifeline that gave the survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the other centers of horror a sense of purpose and a basis for hope. The DP camps were among the most important rallying points in the propaganda battle to persuade the United Nations to partition Palestine and enable the creation of a Jewish state. In the fall of 1945, David Ben-Gurion, then Chairman of the Jewish Agency, traveled throughout Germany. “The memory of my visit to Bergen-Belsen will live in my heart until my last moment,” he wrote to my father 20 years later.

    Sixty years after the birth of the State of Israel, and 63 years after the end of the Shoah, we know that our future as a nation is rooted in the unity of the Jewish people. Today, the question, “Od Avinu Chai?” must refer to a commitment to and belief in fundamental Jewish values. For it is only if we, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, can maintain, nurture and, if necessary, revive the spirit, the willingness to sacrifice, the ideals and idealism of our fathers and mothers inherent in “Od Avinu Chai” that we shall be able to continue to proclaim that “Am Yisrael Chai.” •
    About the author
    Menachem Z. Rosensaft is one of more than 2000 children born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen between 1945 and 1950. A lawyer in New York, he is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Honorary President of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan, and a former National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance.

    Dance in the Street

    Seymour Mayne
    It was on a Friday, a few days before my fourth birthday mid-May, as my mother was fond of telling it. The night before I had had a bad bout of coughing. Although we had been enjoying spring I was still nursing the chronic winter bronchitis that brought me to Dr. Goldberg’s office on Cote Ste Catherine Road. All through the winter I was subjected to constant injections. Dr. Goldberg was not going to allow any young patient of his to surrender to such an obnoxious bug.

    It was still a year to the time I would be going to kindergarten. Growing up in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, I could attend any number of Jewish schools, each representing yet another ideological denomination among Montreal Jewry.

    We sat in the waiting room to Dr. Goldberg’s office, which, in fact, was the downstairs living room in his small mansion. He practised out of his home.

    He was a distinguished and kindly gentleman, probably in his fifties then, and he always bore a smile which had an edge of pain to it. Something that had to do with his family life, it was rumoured. He always spoke softly, knowing that his patients hung on every word.

    We were here again to have my chest checked and to decide how my bronchitis could be put into full retreat for the summer months.

    “Do you know what day this is, Mrs. Mayne?” Dr. Goldberg asked as soon as we entered the examining room.

    “What day?” she repeated.

    “Yes, what day is it? It’s a great momentous day in which we are privileged to witness a miraculous event.”

    “Miraculous, Dr. Goldberg?”

    “Yes, a great miracle of our time. Just a little while ago the Jewish State was declared in Tel Aviv. I should shut my office and dance in the street.”

    “State of Israel?”

    “Don’t you follow the news and especially what is happening in Palestine?”

    “I have a full-time job, Dr. Goldberg, a son who has not been well, and a household to maintain. I don’t have time to follow the news. State of Israel, you said?”

    The conversation continued and Dr. Goldberg for the first time ever forgot to take his stethoscope and examine my chest. He got more and more animated as he explained what had happened that very day on the other side of the world. And when he learned that my mother’s views had been shaped by her first boyfriend in Bialystok, a confirmed Bundist (Socialist), he went onto a full attack. Within a half-hour, he had turned her head. She had walked in half-aware of what was happening elsewhere; now she had a fervent new cause that was to be her escutcheon for decades to come, for the rest of her days. She became the most fervent supporter of Israel no matter the actions of the government of the day. Not a day passed when she would not be glued to the radio, looking out for any bit of news from that war-torn center of the Jewish world.

    That day had cast my lot. Instead of going to a public or Yiddish school, my destiny was set. Dr. Goldberg kept an eye out on his disciple; he not only encouraged but he pressed on her to send me to the Montreal Hebrew Academy, the Zionist school four blocks from our triplex flat. On the way to school I would pass a small yeshiva, a Yiddishist school, and a Protestant public school whose student body was overwhelmingly Jewish in number. But my destination was the Zionist school, and eventually to visit and to sojourn in Israel years later, as if decreed as of yore.

    So something good did come of that bronchitis after all. And while those puncture points have disappeared over the years, I think of Dr. Goldberg’s fervour that morning of May 14, 1948 and all the Dr. Goldbergs who had in mind the health of the Jewish body politic that was to turn lives around to a renewed national vigour. He and my mother would both have qvelled—in sync together, of course—on the 60th anniversary of the State.





    The Visitor

    When did I first hear of that little land that held such big sway? Not the ancient land to which Abraham was commanded to migrate; not the one where the matriarchs and patriarchs were laid to rest; nor the kingdom of Saul, David, and Solomon? Not the land the ten lost tribes had to abandon at sword point or the polity where the prophets railed at back-sliders and fetishists in love with the female spirits of trees? But the new land, redrawn out of a new story, shaping a bold new direction in our communal lives.

    Probably at the Montreal Hebrew Academy where we were first introduced to the personages of the Bible, in a simplified Hebrew accompanied with line-drawings that were serious and not exaggerated like the characters in Classic Illustrated Comics.

    One day we were ordered to close our books, in mid class, and set out for the large school auditorium. Everyone was in attendance from kindergarten up. What a noise and commotion until we were shushed quiet. And then, as if just uttered, the principal introduced the person for whom we changed the rhythm of our days. “Children,” he bellowed, “here is the prime minister of the State of Israel!”

    I strained to see who it was. A short, stocky little man, with wisps of white hair on both sides of his skull, not unlike my grandfather, who then proceeded to speak as if in harangue. What did he really want?—I asked myself years later. What did he actually say?

    We were led back to our classrooms, the exercise was done, and the usual routine of lessons followed. But what did he have to say? Whom did he think he was addressing? Did he plant some subliminal message in us that would articulate itself loudly in our minds in years to come? He wanted us to do something, no doubt, but why didn’t our teachers dwell on it further? Why did we not hear about it a year or two later? Was the principal convinced that the moment of oration was all that was needed and his young wards needed no further commentary or illustration?

    And here I am, fifty-five or more years later straining to catch the import of those heated words, the tenor of that oratory. Mamenu, what did he in fact say?

    Some message did get through to a handful of the school’s graduates who, once they had completed university to satisfy their parents’ immigrant wishes, set out to re-invent their lives in the State of Israel. But for most of us, something was stirred up that was never to allow us rest complacent again. How could we simply sit it out here in the sub-arctic Diaspora when the most compelling story of all was unfolding there at the core of the Mediterranean basin, the center of the world in fact?

    What could David Ben-Gurion have thought that day after he had spoken in passionate tones to a gathering of Canadian youngsters? Could he have imagined us in the distant future either living in the new commonwealth of the Jews or wherever we chose to remain, never untouched by her daily urgencies to which our education would also rarely leave us indifferent? •
    About the author
    Seymour Mayne is the author, editor, or translator of more than fifty books. His latest poetry collections include Light Industry, a selection of humorous and satirical poems, and two companion volumes, Ricochet: Word Sonnets and September Rain. Four selections of his poetry have appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. He is Professor of Canadian literature, creative writing, and Jewish Canadian studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

    Re-defined

    Rochelle Mass
    Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong, that’s what my inner voice keeps on repeating as I face the immigration clerk. “You are stubborn, very independent-minded,” he says.

    “I should have a choice,” I say.

    He stands up from his chair, raises his voice to the level of public humiliation. My husband touches my shoulder; other clerks gather round.

    The atmosphere has turned sour. Just moments before we were served orange juice, “freshly squeezed,” they said, “to celebrate your arrival in Israel.”

    It’s 1973, mid-August. The clerk stands with my file pressed against his chest. His face reddens: “Nothing more I can do for you.”

    “Well?” my husband asks me. “Do you still think it’s the right thing to do?”

    I shake my head, not in response but in despair, then mumble: “Rachel, okay I’ll take Rachel.”

    All I am arguing for is to keep my name ‘Rochelle.’ No one really understands my passion for it, including my husband. I wasn’t sure exactly what changes I believe would occur if I became ‘Rachel,’ but I am sure that I have grown into ‘Rochelle,’ feel it really suited me now. I don’t want to give it up.

    I walk out of the Immigration Office with my family, not the elegant Rochelle I had hoped to be, but a scowling Rachel. The clerk had even turned to the Bible to persuade me that sharing a name with ‘Rachel,’ one of the four mothers of the Jewish nation, was a great honor for a new immigrant. I walk into the bright sun of Tel Aviv feeling disillusioned.

    My husband grips my elbow, my young daughters each twist round a leg as I stomp out. I couldn’t have predicted such a start.

    I know that names have a life of their own. Here I am beginning a new life with one I’m not ready to accept.

    The clerk had stirred things up. I’m not trying to force my feelings into a theory, but I want to offer myself to my new country with a name I want.

    I want a name that suggests wonder rather than work. I know how Rachel had endured her husband’s life with her sister Leah, how she had demonstrated constant devotion to him over the years, waiting after each of Leah’s birthings, waiting for her time. For me, ‘Rachel’ meant quiet desperation.

    I don’t want ‘Rachel’ to replace ‘Rochelle,’ like ‘Leah’ replaced ‘Rachel.’

    When I hear the clerk say ‘Rochelle’ with his Israeli accent, it sounded like a serenade. I was thirty-three. ‘Rochelle’ was no longer the big-girl name it had been when I was in grade school. I even told my third grade teacher my name was Rose because I thought ‘Rochelle’ too worldly, too gracious, for me. After all, I was chubby, with thick hair and eager eyes. And I talked too much. I didn’t look like a ‘Rochelle,’ nor did ‘Rose’ fit me either, but it was shorter, that’s all I aimed for. ‘Rochelle’ sounds triumphant now, a name for an evolving woman.

    Looking at my Identification Card, I felt as though I’d been given another woman’s clothes.

    “Well! We’re here,” my husband shouts.

    Josef, our cousin, welcomes us with great emotion. The children quickly tell him how upset I am. Josef says his mother arrived from Poland as ‘Krayndel,’ Polish for ‘crown,’ and the Immigration clerk quickly handed her ‘Atara’—Hebrew for ‘crown,’ saying, “We don’t want you to be Polish here, be Hebrew!!” “My mother,” Josef continues sadly, “told me that moment was more painful than traveling third class by ship on stormy seas from Europe to Jaffa.”

    “That’s how our Mom feels,” chime in my daughters.

    I hug them to me.

    Days pass and I begin to study Hebrew. One student mentions that in the Bible Avram became Avraham. Sorai, Sarah. Avram and Sorai would not have a child, but Avraham and Sarah would indeed bear a child. Name change, in this case, altered a bad decree.

    A new immigrant from India in my Hebrew class tells me, when I relate my sad story, of the practice in her country of changing one’s name when one passes on to a new stage of life.

    I nod each time someone adds more information about the naming process. In African culture, I hear, they believe one’s name carries the life path the owner will take, that within one’s name is their mission and goal. I feel as though the Immigration clerk has re-defined me.

    I’m willing to wear ‘Rachel’ as a badge, carry it as a torch, light the way on our new journey. But, I’ll do it as ‘Rochelle.’

    That was 35 years ago. Now its 2008—Israel is 60 years old.

    I'm still referred to as 'Rachel,' but this is a more forgiving place. Israel has matured as fits her age. The country and the people have grown into a more accepting, more understanding country than what I saw in l973. Just yesterday, a waitress said, after I'd placed my order in 'good enough' Hebrew: "I love your accent; I wish I could talk like you do."

    I'm appreciated here, feel people are interested in me. Yet they still wonder why I came, wonder still more why I stay.

    I believe in Israel. That's what gives me a firm base here. I admit that problems are growing in complexity. The media make it clear we are dealing with huge conflicts of basic humanistic values and misunderstandings of fundamental democratic tenets. Our politicians convince us we have few statesmen in office—more are determined to add to their personal lives than improve the public good.

    Being 'Rachel' rather than 'Rochelle' wasn't as fateful as I feared. Yes, that clerk at the immigration desk re-defined me, but the important thing is: I found my place here. •
    About the author
    Rochelle Mass was born in Canada. She moved with her family to Israel in l973 to a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. They now live in a village on the Gilboa Mountains. She has published three collections of poetry, most recent The Startled Land, Wind River Press. A prose collection is to appear in 2008, Wind River Press. Two of her works have been Pushcart Prize nominees.