A Blog from Israel

        Last week I was too busy to write a blog entry because I was too overwhelmed with the end of the spring semester. I had to give grades to nearly one hundred students and write a few letters of recommendations before leaving for Israel, the place I still call home.
     “How could you have left all this?” my American-born daughter asked me six years ago, as the two of us were walking with her toddler daughter on Tel Aviv’s waterfront esplanade. She did not allude to only the sweet scent of the Mediterranean summer, emanating from the vapor of the powder blue transparent sea, and the golden scorching sand under that bluest of skies. Neither was she alluding to only the energy rising from the beach-goers, protected by rows of orderly placed persimmon orange, hunter green, or ultramarine blue umbrellas, depending on the section in which the bathers sat; the beach-front cafés, the hip shops, and restaurants.
      Nor was she referring just to the neighborhood and home where I grew up, our visit there being the highlight of that trip for my daughter. She mostly meant the friendships and the deep love and warmth that are revealed to me by family and friends whenever I visit my place of birth, regardless of how often I do so.
     “Life can take you to places you had not planned to be, and force upon you decisions you never thought you would have to make,” I answered her.
      This time I arrived in my beloved Tel Aviv yesterday, both excited and emotional to meet the family and friends and visit the place I missed. There are already family gatherings planned for my husband and me, as well as concerts, operas, and plays to see.
It’s a fantastic feeling returning home, as I am sure many who emigrated from their birth places sense when they visit their home towns, regardless of how assimilated they have become in the places where they chose to live or how deeply they love their adopted countries.
      For me, the anticipation when I visit Israel is always mixed with a heaviness I describe as a rock that is sitting in the center of my chest, solid and gray and defined. The rock is my past filled with tragedy: losing a husband to a brutal death, and growing up with a mentally ill mother.   I only understood the extant of her illness after reflecting on my childhood with the depth of a writer.
Next week, following the holiday of Shavuot, which is so connected with the tragic death of my husband, I’ll visit his grave in the military cemetery that is located outside of Tel Aviv proper. My husband of forty years, whom I married five years after my first husband fell in war, may join me. Regardless, my past and present will intertwine as they always do, making me the person I have become.
      My conversations about Prime Minster Netanyahu, whom Time Magazine featured on its cover, labeling him the king of Israel because of the wide coalition he managed to build, and the prospect of him making peace with his Palestinian neighbors, will wait for my next blog entry. Right now I have to prepare to go to my grandniece's Bat Mitzvah party.

Mother

   

    I’m reading and enjoying Phyllis Schieber’s The Manicurist. One of the novel’s characters, Ursula, reminds me of my mother. Like Ursula, my mother was mentally ill, and suffered major depressive episodes, dipping into psychosis at times, if not outright bi-polarity. Both Ursula and my mother were stunningly beautiful and neither was institutionalized because their husbands prevented that from happening. In my mother’s case, my father refused to have my mother separated from my sister and me, since she only suffered from her “nerve disease” (as her condition was called in the 1950s in Israel) in winter time.  In the summer, my mother thrived. In these happier times, she became a mother who cared for her daughters and was always over-protective of me.

    Ursula’s daughter, Tessa, could not come to terms with her haunting memories of her mother’s illness—at least not in the parts of the book I have completed. I, however, was able to make peace with most of my own recurring memories. Unlike Ursula, my mother did not abandon me. Still, there are names my mother called me and harsh things she told me that have been harder to process and have had a lasting effect on my own mental disposition.

     When I was a child, and then a teenager and a grownup, my mother repeatedly told me that she would have committed suicide were it not for my sister and me. I do not know if she chose life because we were rays of hope in her existence, or because she felt responsible for us as the mother of two young girls. One way or the other, I was glad she stayed alive, although I admit it is sometimes hard to think that she might have lived in misery for our sake.

     I have powerful childhood memories of her illness. The most distressing is an episode that happened in the winter of 1950, when I was six. It was an experience I fully describe in my memoir War Widow. I was standing alone on the balcony of my aunt’s apartment, watching through a glass door as my mother started to undress; her bare breast and back completely revealed. Her sisters yelled at her to do stop, their husbands being present, too. But appearing as if she was in a trance, her big green eyes like that of a stranger, she did not stop. My father, himself looking distraught, tried to stop her, grabbing her hands. But she fought him off. It was then that, sobbing, he began hitting her naked back with both his hands, trying to get her out of her spell. She quickly came back to her senses.

       I remember my terror and the sense of sorrow I felt for my father, coupled with a keen sense of understanding that I should stay on the terrace. I knew enough not to cry or be heard, and I understood that no one inside that room could pay attention to me, no matter how frightened I was. I knew I had to protect myself using an imagined shield I’d created long ago to help me cope.

      But did I think it was my fault that my mother suddenly turned into that unrecognizable wild woman and my temperate father morphed into a seemingly violent man? Did I feel helpless because there was nothing I could do to help my parents? The answers to these questions I do not have. What I am certain of is the compassion I feel for my mother and her memory.

    When she was in good health, I felt secure with her and loved. When she was well, she was the mother who put me first, who fought to place me in a better grammar school and who went to school to defend me when necessary. She made me the most beautiful Purim costumes (Purim is a Jewish holiday that commemorates the rescue of the Jewish people in ancient Persia). Many of her costumes won first prizes in school. She was the mother who took me to buy my first bra, even though at fourteen I did not need one yet. She thought it was still important because she said she wanted me to have pretty breasts when I grew into a woman. She was the mother who took me to the dermatologist to prevent acne and to the gynecologist when my menstruation was unsteady. She was the mother who made sure that my sister and I wore the finest clothes and that we ate the best foods that our family could afford. And, in her good moods, she made me laugh with her humorous stories about her shtetl’s colorful characters, such as Motke the ganef (thief), Tzipe the pleplerke (babbler), Moishe the Kailiker (handicapped) Yankel the hoiker (hunchback), and Leib the rizikant (gambler).

    These memories, good and bad, stay with me on Mother’s Day and always.

On Death and the Memoir

     On Tuesday evening, I attended an inspiring Fordham University celebration “The Art of the memoir,” marking the recent publication of four memoirs and a collection of personal essays written by five faculty members of the university’s English Department. The writers, including Mary Bly (Eloisa James), Richard Giannone, Eve Keller, Kim Dana Kupperman, and Elizabeth Stone, discussed the genre and read from their work. Topics included love, loss, the AIDS crisis, the Holocaust, and the experiences of an American temporarily living in Paris. During the Q&A period, Susan Greenfield, another faculty member in the university’s English Department, noticed a common death theme in all five works and asked whether death is a prerequisite for memoir writing.
     The moderator, Susan Kamil of Random House and Dial Press imprints, replied that the requirement to write a memoir is not necessarily death but a strong urge to tell a compelling story the writer must share with others. I agreed wholeheartedly. But when Professor Greenfield asked her question, it hit me that my own memoir War Widow is filled with deaths: my own widowhood and the deaths of my infant brother whom I had never seen, the deaths of my premature newborn, my brother-in-law, my sister, my parents, friends who were taken by war or disease, a former lover, the death of relatives who perished in the Holocaust and the deaths of others who lived long and productive lives.

     But my memoir is not about death; it is about strength and courage, hope, determination, resilience, endurance and triumph.

     Yet, I must admit that I think of death when I realize how quickly time is passing as I get older. But it is not the fear of death or my afterlife that preoccupies me, for I do not know if human consciousness exists after we physically leave earth.
     But what if there is an afterlife? Séance practitioners say that we can connect there with the same people with whom we knew on earth. If so, will my mother be finally happy? Will she be pleased that I defended her when my aunts spoke ill of her, or will she blame me for not doing so forcefully enough? Will my father be able to show his affection for me openly instead of waiting for me to be asleep, unaware of his kiss on the cheek? Will my sister and I be as close in heaven as we were on earth?

     And Yigal, my husband who died in war, I can’t help but wonder:  Will I finally confront him about the lack of trust I had for him because of that French woman on the beach and the other women? Will I tell him how I got even that one silly time? And what about his best friend, Aaron, who raped me when Yigal was no longer on earth? Will I tell Yigal that I resented him for having such friends? Will I tell Aaron that though I had never forgiven him, I learned to make peace with that dreadful event?
     And Danko, my powerful, charismatic married lover who was the reason I left my familiar life behind: Will I ask him why he shunned me after I had my abortion? Did I dishonor him when I aborted his child without his knowledge? Will I have closure with him there?
     But why wonder about death and the afterlife when I can rejoice at the richness of the life I have created for myself here on earth?
     Perhaps like many of us I wonder whether the afterlife, if it exists, is the place we’ll be accountable for our lives and how we lived them. That’s what a memoir is, too. It’s not just telling a story, but it’s also taking responsibility for it. It’s also the place the memoirist shapes a story and frames it the way she or he wants it framed. 

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On the Holocaust and a Kosher Cafeteria

     By chance my senior seminar on global ethnic conflict ended our class discussion on Alan Rosenblum’s book Is the Holocaust Unique? a day before Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, which was commemorated world wide last Wednesday (April 18). Concluding the debate on that book we moved along with our syllabus to discuss Peter Univ’s book on the 1994 Rwanda genocide Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda.

     I usually schedule one or two seminar meetings to discuss an assigned book. But Rosenblum’s reader, which compares the Holocaust to other genocides and mass killings of ethnic or racial groups, generally provokes an arousing debate, and this time was not different. It took nearly three sessions, and it could have been potentially longer. I usually begin the discussion on the book by asking my students whether we need to know that the Holocaust was unique. If so, why do we need to know that?

     I have been teaching this seminar for sometime. Usually my students agree that each genocide we study was unique, and that each was distinctive to the ethnic group that had endured it.  Still, the Holocaust was different on a number of levels, including its magnitude, the creation of a sophisticated killing technology, the level of participation of ordinary Germans, or the fact that the Jews had been completely assimilated into the German society and having made no threatening nationalistic claims against the Germans.

     The nature of the debates in this multiethnic, multicultural seminar often depends on the makeup and chemistry of the students, making each semester different from one another even though the subject matter is the same. But this semester I heard statements from some of my students I had rarely heard in my classroom.

     It began with the question some students posed, why the Holocaust is commemorated while other genocides are not. I reminded them that the Armenian, Greek, and Rwandan genocides have been commemorated as well.

     Why then is the Holocaust talked about more than any other genocide, a student wanted to know. “Because the Jews control America!” another student exclaimed. “What do you base this statement on?” I asked. “The Jewish Lobby,” the student replied.

     I responded that while no one can dispute the strength of the pro-Israeli or Jewish lobby in Washington, it was still a myth to believe that the Jews control American politics. I then offered students extra credits to write an extra research paper, comparing the influence of the Jewish Lobby to that of the Cuban Lobby, the Big Pharma Lobby, the Big Oil Lobby, the Financial Lobby, the National Rifle Association, or the mining and defense industries lobbies.

     “What are you talking about,” another student lashed at me with visible anger. “You even have a kosher cafeteria here in Queens College. Why don’t we have a vegetarian cafeteria?” “It’s a business decision,” a Jewish student answered excitedly before I had a chance to answer. “We have a Sushi place and a Chinese place, and you can get vegetarian food in every cafeteria,” yet another responded to the remark that seemed to have anti-Semitic undertones.

     At the end of our debate over the Holocaust I fulfilled my promise to share with my students my experience when I had visiting the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in the summer of 2010, an experience I wrote about in my essay “A Knock at the Door in the Darkness of Night,” published in Lilith (Volume 35 No. 3, Fall 2010) and extracted from my memoir War Widow.

     “Nothing I have studied, read, seen, not Yad Vashem, not even my previous visit to Terezienstadt, prepared me for Birkenau and Auschwitz-for their enormity and for the efficiency with which the Nazis ran their death-oiled industry.

     What shocked me was that not even the minutest detail was left to chance: not the place where the trains would first stop, where victims would initially be "selected," where they first undressed, where they were first disinfected and shaved, their hair used by the Nazis to manufacture fabric; not where they were disinfected for the second time, where their clothing was first fumigated, where their clothing was fumigated for the second time, where their clothing and belongings were collected, sorted and stored, where they would die by Zyclon B poisoning gas, where their corpses would be burned.  It took merely twenty-five minutes from the time the human cargo arrived to Birkenau, selected to die and turned into ash.”                 

On Slavery and Freedom

     During our Passover Seder last Friday, as our family and guests finished reciting those portions of the Haggadah that narrates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and their regained freedom after four centuries of enslavements, I felt compelled to bring up the story Jim Yardley had written in The New York Times only for days earlier (April 4^th). In it Yardley revealed the plight of a thirteen year old maid who had been practically enslaved by her captors, both doctors, who had bought her from a job placement agency, which in turn had bought the girl from her uncle.

     In the article, Yardley tells about the growing problem of child labour in India, caused by an expanding middle class, a development that has created a greater demand for a cheap domestic labour force that include children between the ages of five to fourteen, who are usually sold by poor families to those who can pay.

     “Debbie Downer,” two guests cried simultaneously, referring to the former Saturday Night Live character that used to habitually interrupt a pleasant group conversation with depressive comments, bringing down the group’s mood.

     But I insisted that we recite the Haggadah not only to retell the story of the Jewish People’s exodus from Egypt, but also to apply our own historical narrative to current world events. As I was doing that I looked across the table at my beautiful grand children, a girl age seven and a boy age four, thankful for their relative safety, and comparing their sense of security to the predicaments of the girl in Yardley’s story, and that of other  girls or boys like her.

     My insistence to apply the Jewish People’s saga to today’s world brings symmetry with my introduction to a Haggadah that I had edited a decade or so ago for our own use in our Seders. In those passages I paid homage to oppressed minorities who yearn for freedom, tolerance, dignity and the preservation of the human spirit; as well as the many men, women and children who are denied basic human rights, and Peoples who have suffered the indignities of prejudice and persecution, impoverishment and landlessness.

     Yardley’s story was published a week or so after Rod Nordland’s piece, also in the New York Times (March 29), telling the sad story of jailed Afghan women, ages fifteen to thirty-six, whose only crimes were reporting their own abuse, mostly domestic violence. I was thinking about those women too, as I was sitting safely in my Upper East Side apartment, looking at my elegant Passover tables, with their white table cloths, fine china, and beautiful flowers I had so carefully arranged.

     I did not always feel so safe. As a child of four and then twelve, and as a young woman, I personally suffered the consequences of war. I tell about my experiences in my memoir War Widow. But my experiences, harrowing as they were, were distinct from the experiences of the young girls and women in both Nordland’s and Yardley’s stories: Unlike those girl and women, I was surrounded by a loving family, and I had choices and conveniences those females did not have.

     I do not have the answers of how to solve the problem of Afghani women, Indian girls, or other women and girls around the world—as-well-as boys--who are sex slaves or are victims of other abuses. There are numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations that have resources and skills to deal with these problems. But as an individual and as an educator I feel I have the moral obligation to raise the consciousness of those around me concerning the plight of those who are less fortunate. And if each of us who are privileged enough to live in places where we can speak out will do just that, we can help address the problem.

On Terrorism Part II

     When we spoke, Hava was a 67 year-old widow. Her husband Menachem, an internationally known history professor, was killed in June 1989, by two Palestinian Arabs, who committed their murderous act to assure an induction to their terrorist cell. 

     A retired teacher who had become an editor, Hava spoke poetically about her childhood in the lush, green fields of the Jordan Valley. It was a happy and fearless childhood until the breakout of the 1939 Arab riots. She was eleven.

     At eighteen, following "Black Saturday,” she joined Palmach, the elite fighting force of the mainstream Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine. “Black Saturday” was a Sabbath day in June 1946, when the British authorities arrested a large number of Palestinian Jews, accusing them of clandestine activity.

     At twenty four she married Menachem, whom she had met at Hebrew University when both were students there. In time, they had a son, three daughters, and six grandchildren. A seventh grandchild was born three months after Nenachem's murder.

     Menachem was born in 1925 in Poland. In 1938 he immigrated with his parents to Palestine, escaping the Nazis.

     Believing that his best ideas came to him while walking, Menachem walked each morning from his home in Emek Hamatzleva (Valley of the Crucifixion) to Israel’s National Library at the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University. It was on his way there that he was murdered. Through her living room window she showed me the spot where he had been killed, covered by then with newly grown trees. Her friends had suggested that she move to another part of the city, but she loved the valley and the apartment, where she had hoped to grow old with her husband.

     As a historian Menachem was concerned with the rise of extremism among the Israelis and Palestinians alike. Yet, the optimist that he was, he enthusiastically supported peace between the two communities, predicting that they would come to an agreement. But he did not live to see the day when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) took the first step toward peace (defunct now) when they signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993.

     Like Menachem, she supported peace with the Palestinians. Recognizing their suffering, she believed that most were decent human beings who desired peace. But she could not view Menachem's murderers as humans. And even though she generally supported the release of Arab political prisoners, she agreed with the Israeli government’s decision not to release prisoners whose hands were stained with blood; for, their acts did not constitute freedom fighting but acts of a vicious murder. And while she acknowledged that such thinking might appear to be influenced by Menachem's murder, she insisted that in reality it reflected her own sense of justice.

     While Hava realized that all conflicts had casualties, she could not accept victims of terrorist acts as casualties of war, for to her murderers were not warriors. And even though her opinion on that matter was similar to that of the right-wing Association of Terror Victims, she insisted that her view was removed from the vision of that organization, which vehemently opposed peace with the Palestinians.

     In spite of the fact that she was born into the reality of a bloody conflict on the eve of the 1929 Arab riots, and even though her generation, like mine, was raised to believe in the idea of sacrificing one’s life for the sake of the state, like Bat-Ami, as told in my last blog, she valued human life over all else, believing that life must be sanctified for the sake of life itself.

     She was prepared to capitalize on her status in order to influence public opinion in favor of peace with the Palestinians. But she realized that some terror victims could be the first to oppose peace with the Arabs. And even though for her there was no alternative but peace, she understood that like all historical processes the peace process would be long, with up and down cycles; and yes, common memories of past violence cold serve as a tool for reconciliation.

     She confessed that her friends wondered why she was still so hopeful about peace with the Palestinians after the murder of her husband. But she did not equate all Palestinians with Menachem's killers. That was why she disapproved of collective punishment; and that was why she deplored the demolition of houses belonging to the families of Palestinian terrorists.

                                                      *** 

     For few days in the autumn of 1994, Esther was seen by millions of television viewers around the word, when she was desperately trying to secure the release of her son Nachshon from the hands of Hamas militants who had kidnapped him on his way home from a one day-training course in northern Israel.

     We met in her family’s home in the Ramot section of Jerusalem sixteen months after the loss of her son. Her story was that of dismay, hope, desperation and agony.

     She was born in Germany to Holocaust survivors, who immigrated to the United States when she was two and a half.  She described her upbringing as Zionistic and religious, bestowing upon her the values of love for her People, the Land of Israel, and the Torah.

     Her studies at the Teachers Institute for Women in Yeshiva University granted her a stipend to study in Jerusalem. Those years in Jerusalem convinced her that Israel was the place where she wanted to permanently live and raise a family.

     A year after she had met her husband at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, they got married. They had seven sons, the oldest of whom was twenty-four at the time of our conversation; the youngest were nine year old twins. Nachshon, her third son, had served in an elite commando unit, following in the footsteps of his two older brothers.

     She described Nachshon as an average child, outstandingly happy and easygoing. Unlike most of his commando friends, he was thin and small. On Sunday, October 9, 1994, at a busy intersection in central Israel, while trying to catch a ride back to Jerusalem, he was kidnapped by Hamas militants. Dressed up like orthodox Jews, displaying a Hebrew prayer book on the dashboard of the car they drove and playing Jewish music, he believed them to be friendly and entered their car for the ride. After they had captured him they threatened to execute him the following Friday, unless their demands for the release of their spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and two hundred others prisoners, were met. On that Friday, October 14, 1994, Nachshon was killed during a failed military rescue attempt.

     Aside from her devastation over the loss of her son, she felt deep anger at the Israeli government for not negotiating with her son’s captors. She thought, too, that the Army should have delayed the rescue mission, giving its planners more time to adequately prepare for it.

     In her opinion the Army had made a grave mistake. But as a believing woman she accepted her son’s fate; and, she trusted that the mission his soul had had on this earth was fulfilled.

     She alleged that because of the heavy human cost Israelis had paid in their repeated wars with the Arabs, the Israeli population had become accustomed to an impossible situation. They had become immune. They had become entranced with some sort of a mass hypnosis, a force for which she had no name.

     She never believed Nachshon’s life was sacrificed in the name of Israel’s values. On the contrary, had the government negotiated with her son’s captors rather than trying to rescue him in a failed military mission, things might have, or should have ended differently. Military people in her opinion have had a narrow way of looking at options, limiting their decision-making spectrum. And they were inconsistent. In Nachshon’s case they refused to be blackmailed by a terrorist group and release prisoners to save the life of one soldier. But two weeks later they were willing to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners when no one’s life was on the balance (it is worth nothing here that in October 2011 Israel freed 1,027 Arab prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldiers who had been kidnapped by Hamas militants, keeping him in captivity for five years).

     Esther did not think that common experiences among women on both side of the conflict could lead to reconciliation. On the contrary: Because she believed that children were influenced by their parents, she had no doubt that the Palestinian mother, whose son was killed because he was holding Nachshon as a hostage, was an integral part of her son’s actions.

     Besides, Esther was distressed with the Palestinian side. She understood that countries make peace with their former enemies, and that Yasser Arafat was the person with whom Israel had to negotiate. But she could not accept him as Israel’s peace partner. In her possession she had tapes of speeches that he had made, not in Israel or Washington, but in Gaza and Jenin. In those speeches, which he made for the consumption of his own people, he repeatedly referred to Palestinian suicide bombers who had blown up buses with women and children, as holy martyrs. She could not imagine any other country negotiating with those who seek its destruction at the same time they were signing a peace treaty.

     She thought that women were certainly able to transform their personal experience into political power. In fact, various political parties in Israel had pursued her. But she believed that joining a party would diminish her credibility as well as her voice. 

     She knew that people were influenced by her experience. In spite of losing a child she maintained her composure, symbolizing strength and reason rather than emotion.

On Terrorism

     The terrorist act on March 19 in Toulouse, France, has been on my mind ever since. That day, 23 year old Muhammad Merah—a French national of Algerian origin arrived on his stolen scooter to Ozar Hatorah Jewish Day School and cold bloodedly murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, aged 30, his two sons Arieh 5, and Gabriel 4. Then he captured Miriam Monsonego, the 7 year old daughter of the school’s director, and brutally killed her. A week earlier Merah had murdered four French paratroopers, reportedly accusing them of killing his Muslim brethren in Afghanistan.

     I know the anguish of losing a husband to the violence of war, and I witness closely the suffering of my bereaved in-laws. My grieving mother-in-law did not look very different from the mother of one of the murdered French paratroopers who was shown by the media at her son’s state funeral. But I am too frightened to imagine the agony of a woman who suddenly lost her husband and her two young children, or the pain of the grandparents who lost their young grandchildren and their son or son-in-law. 

     Muhammad Merah’s senseless terrorist acts brought me back to the conversations I had had over fifteen years ago with women who suffered the consequences of conflict (as part of the same project I mentioned in my last blog), among them four women of different Zionist leanings, each remarkable in her own way, who, too, lost loved-ones to acts of terrorism, and whose stories I would like to briefly retell.

     Bat-Ami was born in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. When she was two-and-a-half years old her parents hid her with a Christian family, hoping to reunite with her at the end of the war, but that was not to happen.

     In 1947, together with other young Holocaust survivors, she had been smuggled to Palestine, the land that would become Israel a year later. There she found her brother, who had survived World War II by escaping to Russia at the war’s onset. They were the only survivors of a large family.

     She was placed in kibbutz Dan in near the Syrian border, where she ultimately met her future husband, Shlomo, who had arrived in the Kibbutz under circumstances that were similar to hers. In time, they left the Kibbutz and moved to a town south-east of Tel-Aviv, raising two sons and a daughter.

     They taught their children the values of equality, fraternity and justice for all, including an unequivocal recognition of the right of two nations--one Jewish, one Arab--to coexist in the same homeland, and rejecting the idea that their country could build a two-class society on the basis of nationalism. 

     In July 1989 Shlomo was killed with fifteen other passengers who were riding on a bus en route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, when an Islamic Jihad terrorist attacked it.

     Bat Ami and Shlomo were preparing to leave the following day for a trip to Poland to rediscover their toots, and continue from there to Canada to visit one of their sons and meet their new daughter-in-law.

     Getting ready for the trip, Bat Ami was at the beauty parlor at the same time that her husband was killed. When she returned home, as a habit, she turned on the radio to listen to the news. Like most Israelis she was shocked to hear about the horrific terrorist attack that unbeknown to her killed her husband.

     Believing that Shlomo spent the day in Tel Aviv, buying gifts for their son’s family, she had no reason to suspect that he was on the bus traveling to Jerusalem. But when he did not arrive for lunch or dinner; when uncharacteristically he did not call to alert her that he would be delayed, she knew that something awful had happened to him.

     She went through the normal stages of grief, including her anger at her husband for traveling to Jerusalem. Perhaps he could not find in Tel Aviv the photo album of Israel’s history that she had asked him to buy as a gift for their daughter-in-law’s parents, and traveled to Jerusalem to get it. That she would never know. What she did know was that Shlomo‘s death was senseless.

     While she had accepted the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, she rejected terrorism as a means. She opposed, too, the idea of sacrificing human life in the name of nationalism, whether Jewish or Arab, and she rejected vengeance, embracing instead forgiveness and reconciliation between both societies. And she believed that women could lead the way.

     Incidentally, the man who had killed her husband was among the 1,027 prisoners who were exchanged for Gilad Shalit in October 2011, after his five years in captivity by Hamas. 

                                                  *** 

     At the time of our conversation Ilana was a twenty-nine year old mother of four young children and a widow who had lost her husband Mordechai in a 1993 terrorist attack near the West Bank settlement of Tekoa.

     After years of frustrating attempts, in 1988 she and her husband had immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. She was a school counselor, he was an artist.

     When we spoke two years after Mordechai's murder, she was trying to live a relatively ordinary life, not only because she felt she owed a sense of normalcy to her children, but because she refuse to be pitied by others.

     Unlike Bat Ami, Ilana embraced the notion of sacrifice, believing that Mordechai expected to give up his life for the pioneering cause of settling the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, as it is called by Israelis.

     They went through much trouble to immigrate to Israel and to settle where they did because of their firm belief that Jews belonged in the land that was once Biblical Israel, and that they had both the right and duty to settle there in spite of obvious dangers of living among Palestinian Arabs outside of Israel proper. 

     In that sense her husband's death was very meaningful to her. As terrible as losing Mordechai was, she was convinced that they had done the right thing settling where they did, and that Mordechai was not murdered in vain. In fact, the sacrifice of his life was an added reason for her staying in Alon Shevut, where they lived.

     Unlike Bat Ami, she did not believe that forgiveness was possible and that shared memories of past violence could serve as a tool for reconciliation. On the contrary: Such memories could only inhibit peace efforts. The pain and the anger that the conflict had caused were too deep; the disparity too wide.

     But she did believe that women, especially terror victims, had a potential political role, not necessarily that of peace-makers, but that of alerting the public about the direction the country was taking negotiations peace with the Palestinians. But she could not be part of it, for, her main function was assuming her role as a mother.

     The stories of the two other women will be told in my next blog.