Last Sunday I went with my ward to visit the Yad vaShem institute. The tour itself was fairly interesting, I learned a lot, and I was surprised at how neutral the tour was, not using the Holocaust as a political tool for any means (it’s usually used to get support for Israel’s existence, as a justification of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus, a condemnation of Israeli cruelty or whatever pops into one’s demagogue head). Our tour guide took us after that tour to a lecture about Holocaust denial and showed us some televised news article about David Irving’s libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt (1996), featuring Abraham Foxman (which I referred to as ‘the male Frida Hecht’, the notorious beastly, violent, holier-than-thou cow from the latest season of Big Brother). That, and the mistake he made regarding the identity of Fred Leucther (a man I whole-heartedly believe is not antisemetic, just arrogant), were the only things that made me feel uncomfortible about the lecture.
On the other hand, after many a Holocaust joke I made (I only dared utter any after the tour guide said the Jews had tonnes of gallows humour in the camps), we were brought to listen to a ‘testimony’ given by a survivor named Ephraim Moll. Oh, that ‘testimony’...
About 15 min. of the lecture were actually dedicated to his wartime experience: his family had originally come from Poland, they wanted to find refuge in Switzerland but the man who smuggled them would help either refugees or the Gestapo based on whatever he felt like doing at that time, his parents were taken away never to be seen again, he was sent to some convent, he was taken out of it to live with a foster family just before the entire convent (that hid many other Jewish kids) was taken away, he lived with that family till the war ended.
The rest of the story had to do with how he decided to immigrate to Israel, what he went through, how he met his wife (he was a soldier in the war in Algiers, where he met her and her Jewish family, and they reunited in Israel some time after he’d ‘cleared his debt’ to France), and increasingly with how he became religious.
He started off very subtly, referring to how he felt a need to explore is Jewish identity, then mentioned reading Maïmonides and realising ‘the Jewish existence is only in fulfillment of the mitsvot’, followed by mentioning how shocked his future wife was to find out her very kibbutz had bread at the seder and mentioning that ‘along with the physical resurrection of the Jewish people a spiritual resurrection must take place, otherwise it’s pointless’, summarising Hasidic philosophy (he quoted the rav who told him everyone else is fumbling in the dark for the truth and whatnot, while Jews get to use the world’s divine manual; this was justified as it was part of the plot and was quoted), and finally mentioning people who turned secular after the Holocaust and said one ‘shouldn’t talk to them’ (I might have misinterpreted or misheard it, as he did mention some other surivor who was living next to him, and whose son was envious when he saw his neighbours being able to celebrate Sukkot).
But when he had the unbelievable nerve to say some scientist in the ‘50s discovered some fact in genetics about ‘all the info being in the genetics’ or something ridiculous statement like that and claimed it discredited Evolution, that’s when I couldn’t take any more of it. I could say everything he’d said hitherto was his own experience, beliefs, thoughts, whatever, and was able to tolerate it as such, but when he blatantly lied like that I grabbed my bag and stormed out of the synagogue the ‘testimony’ took place. Kot, I have never seen a more cynical abuse of the Holocaust in my life, and by a survivor, to boot!
That shook me on so many levels. The unbelievable audacity needed to bring military personnel, people who are supposed to be merely representatives of the NEUTRAL executive branch of the state, were brought to hear a lecture by a man with a strong religious and political bias undermining the very basic principle the State of Israel was founded upon: that Jews are not a religious group but a people. I could not believe that not only that I was the only one who felt a need to protest, people didn’t understand what made me so angry and thought I should’ve shown more respect. To a blatant liar who makes such a cynical use of his position? FUCK THAT. Especially since it turns out that after I was gone, he lied even more about how Evolution was a lie.
Now I can really relate to what I’ve been told about how backwards this country and this army is, most notably by Taylor O’Croon. I feel a lot less optimistic about this country. Fuck it, the State of Israel is either going to speed at an astounding pace into the future or fucking DIE.
Unum diem...
(P.S.: I started working on making Hebrew memes and an internet culture. There are very, very, very few Israeli internet memes, and the one attempt at making an Israeli version of 4chan was a failure. I think this will be an important step forward out of the dark for Israel, if it works properly.)
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