Israel waiting

Editorial

"We had no place to go to, nobody to hug. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere."

Hadassah Rosencraft, liberated from Bergen-Belsen, crystallized the plight of those Jews fortunate enough to have survived the Holocaust, but ill-fated enough to return to a world bereft of home and family.

Rosencraft's quote appeared in the exhibit, "Liberation 1945," which opened at the United States Holocaust Museum on May 8, 1995, exactly 50 years after the allies declared victory over Hitler's Third Reich and 47 years after the establishment of the Jewish state.

Her poignant words capture why it is seemingly impossible to speak of Shoah without speaking of Israel. They convey the wisdom of the Jewish calendar which places Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day, before Yom Hazikaron, Israel's memorial day, and exactly a week before Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel Independence Day. They underscore the appropriateness of observing these holidays during the counting of the omer, the days between Pesach and Shavuot, when we recall the Israelites wandering in the desert and the daily omer, or portion, of manna God provided.

Historians estimate that in the spring and summer of 1945 some 65,000 of Hitler's victims, Jews and non-Jews, went home every day. But in the ensuing months, nearly one million people, including 50,000-100,000 Jews, were sent to displaced persons camps. They became the modern-day wandering Jews, dependent on others for sustenance, waiting for doors to open.

The vagaries, and striking parallels, of history that we recall now can surely torment our spirits as they can test, and renew, our faith. We remember those who perished in the Shoah and those soldiers who died defending Israel to preserve a home for a new generation. And we are reminded that from the death and destruction of the Holocaust came the birth and flowering of the Jewish state. And it is that miraculous founding which provides those like Hadassah Rosencraft and a continuing flow of olim, new immigrants, a place to go. Israel, even as it suffers now, waits and welcomes.

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