Remembering Our Children

A Yom Hazikaron Speech delivered in Jerusalem by invitation to Karen Hayesod groups from Canada and Australia – 1st May 2006

Arnold Roth

Growing up Jewish in Australia, we commemorated life’s milestones in ways that were different from how my children, growing up here in Israel, have known them. But there were similarities too. Yom Ha’atzma’ut was echoed in Australia’s national birthday which falls on January 26th. Yom Hashoah had real significance given the very high proportion of Holocaust survivors among Melbourne’s Jews, and was certainly on my family’s calendar. But Yom Hazikaron was different. It was not so much a day as a few reserved minutes of silent reflection scheduled to happen just before the start of the Yom Ha’atzma’ut celebration. Remembrance Day in November had much the same sort of character in the broader Australian society, except that honoring the fallen there meant marches and wreath-layings, rather than sirens and sorrowful music.

Most Israelis would have told you, had you asked them in the nineteen fifties, sixties or even seventies, that Yom Hazikaron was when the rest of us paid tribute to the armed forces. This, as we all know, encompasses almost the entire population of this country. Within the majority Jewish sector, nearly every family is connected to the national military effort, and so the cemeteries are filled with visitors on Yom Hazikaron, not only out of a sense of civic duty but because so many Israelis have buried a husband, a sibling, a spouse or a child.

In Australia, we also paid tribute. We would honor our country’s fallen while standing in silence or saluting in the school yard or at an obelisk in the center of town. Dignity and respect were the themes of the day. And although it has been nearly two decades since I was part of such a commemoration in Australia, I am confident it still has much the same character.

But life in Israel is dynamic, with its own way of getting complicated. When we remember here, it comes with nuances and overtones. They deserve our thoughts for a few moments at least.

Remembering has always played a focal role in Jewish life, irrespective of how religious or nationalistic or secular we may be as individuals. Yom Hazikaron became a formal institution fixed in the national calendar by a law of the Knesset with a date of its own, only in 1963. As the national day on which we remember those who died saving our country, it is placed as close as a day can be to Yom Ha’atzma’ut – establishing a very Jewish and a very Israeli tension between public celebration and mournful solemnity. I don’t know of another society on earth - or in history - that has deliberately set out to highlight the proximity of two such sharply opposed states of mind.

In 1980, a change in the law added the remembering of fallen soldiers of all of Israel’s wars and not just the war of independence; and it added victims of hostile attack – in today’s language: victims of terror. This obviously had some impact on the nature of the day. The official events of Yom Hazikaron on Mt Herzl have included a commemoration of terror victims only since 2002, and this has also brought change to the nature of the day and of the remembering.

Taking into account that religious, secular and universalistic dimensions are in constant competition in this country’s public life, it should not surprise anyone that a final Israeli outlook on our day of national mourning is still, today, a work in progress.

The same is of course true of Yom Haa’tzma’ut, if only because of the effect of time. Most Jews and most Israelis – like most of us here tonight - were born after the struggle to create Israel had run its course and Israel was real, a reality, a country with its own postage stamps and not simply a distant ideal. I’m certain that the day resonated for our parents’ generation very differently from the way it does for us. Nothing could be more natural.

Yom Hazikaron, too, resonates differently for me today compared with what it was in my childhood. I am a son of survivors of the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities, like many of my generation. Growing up, I was very much aware of the presence of personal pain and longing inside my family. I’m sure I internalized messages passed to me by my parents during the years of my youth, even if I was not entirely conscious of that process. They became part of the fabric of who I am.

The development of a personal sense of Jewish history, of being born into a powerful flow of events that started thousands of years ago and has survived unthinkable challenges, eventually led my wife and me – and thousands of olim like us – to make the decision to transplant ourselves, our children and our futures to this land. Here, our personal lives, the lives of our families and the life-force of our people would intertwine, be mutually dependent, reflect a shared fate.

My daughter zichrona livracha was murdered on the 9th of August 2001, a hot summer day in a crowded restaurant, no more than 7 or 8 minutes walk from this place. Malka Chana Roth is one of the names engraved in stone on a wall on Mt Herzl. It’s one of the dozen or so names recited when our congregation remembers its dead, reciting the communal Kel Maleh Rachamim prayer. That Malki is counted among the myriads of Jewish martyrs through the ages is as unthinkable and shocking to me today as it was on the day her life was stolen from her and from us.

For Israelis, Yom Hazikaron marks the day when we delineate the intertwining of our fates as individuals with our destiny as a people and a nation. It is not a comfortable process – not at all. Personally, I find it very hard to allow the intimate and very personal grief my wife and children and I feel to become part of some collective event. I have heard other bereaved families – whether mourning a soldier killed in the line of duty or a child gunned down near home in a drive-by shooting – express similar misgivings. No matter how strong the other person’s empathy may be, our loss remains a private and personal loss, its magnitude impossible to translate into words that make sense to someone outside the immediate circle of intimacy. The most eloquent of speeches, whether by a prime minister or by the school deputy principal, can never turn that into a truly shared experience.

And if we feel the experience cannot be truly shared, what does this say about how it ought to be observed? Does it require a soldier, standing stiffly to attention, saluting as the flag is unfurled on the flagpole? For some, perhaps yes. Do we need to see government ministers, heads bowed, eyes moist? Maybe, but as you will have noticed, Israel is not big on respecting its politicians or on public displays of emotion. Israelis compare themselves to the sabra, a fruit prickly outside; soft and mushy inside. But unlike public Jewish life in the diasporah, the soft and mushy is rarely in evidence in Israel. Stop and ask whether you know how to say “Wailing Wall” in Hebrew. It’s an expression that does not translate. Israel doesn’t like tears.

I have spoken and listened to hundreds of bereaved terror victims here in Israel and in other countries. I have not heard a best way to remember those who died at the hands of our enemies, and certainly no way that will be appropriate for everyone. But there is much wisdom to be learned on the subject.

More than forty years ago, terrorists bombed a house of worship in the United States. My wife wrote an article about it which will be in tomorrow’s Jerusalem Post. I hope you will read it. She describes how the affected families must have been deeply in mourning when Xmas came round, undoubtedly a sensitive time of the year when the distance between the community and the individual is greater and more noticed. A religious leader, a man of wisdom and stature, sent an insightful letter to the parents of the four little girls murdered in that terror attack. Dr Martin Luther King Jr., wrote this:

“In the midst of holiday preparations, my thoughts have turned to you. The fact that this is a time when family bonds are strengthened makes the loss you have sustained even more painful. Many of us are giving up or severely limiting our celebrations this year in memory of the great sacrifice you have made for the cause.”

Dr. King’s understanding was tremendous. All too often, as victims of violent hatred, we hear our leaders – some of them, at any rate – use expressions like “We must not let the enemy sense that he has hurt us because that is what he wants.” Or even “we need to forget our pain.” I believe they are wrong. I believe there are times when it is right to shed tears, to stop our normal lives and recognize that something has changed and will never ever be the same again. And to always remember, and never to forget.

To make one’s home in this great country, Israel, is to feel the joy and the tragedy, the drama and the exhilaration, the cacophony and the silence, all intermingled, complex and rich. There is nothing easy about it. But it is the most intense and rewarding Jewish story of our times. Nothing else comes close.

Just as we crush a glass and remember the loss of Jerusalem at the highpoint of the wedding ceremony under the Huppa, so too it remains for us to remember, and to never forget, those who fell victim to the forces of hatred… like my daughter Malki and her friend Michal Raziel and the thirteen other people murdered in the Sbarro restaurant that day, and the hundreds killed that year and the thousands of non-combatants whose lives ended because we seek the right to make our lives in this land, in Israel - and to say: Yehi zichram baruch.