|
|
May 30, 2003/Iyar 28 5763, Vol. 55, No. 40
Auschwitz visit unique
GIL SEDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
A Hollywood director could not have staged a more dramatic scene: In the middle of a forest, on the ruins of a former gas chamber at the heart of the Birkenau death camp, an Israeli rabbi from a West Bank settlement stood and said Kaddish, surrounded by a group of Arabs and Jews.
Rabbi Avi Gisser changed the Kaddish's traditional ending.
Instead of the usual "He will make peace upon us and upon all of Israel," Gisser said, "and upon all the peoples of the world."
It was a gesture of gratitude to the 120 Israeli Arabs who initiated this unusual visit to the death camps, an unprecedented act of Arab solidarity with the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people.
When Gisser concluded the prayer, no one said a word. People stood in silence for two or three minutes, Jews and Arabs, some weeping, some lost in thought.
Gisser is the rabbi of Ofra, a Jewish settlement in the eye of the Palestinian intifada. When he goes to Jerusalem, a 20-minute drive away, he must reckon with the possibility of a terrorist attack.
The Palestinians are his enemy, and he is theirs. Yet he decided to go on this visit to Auschwitz precisely because Arabs - Israeli Palestinians, as many now call themselves - initiated it.
More than anything else, the visit of some 450 Arabs and Jews to Auschwitz and Birkenau was an act of courage: It takes courage for an Israeli Arab or a French Muslim to identify with the Jews' plight when it is so much easier these days simply to hate.
And yet they came - 120 Arabs and 130 Jews from Israel, as well as a delegation of 200 Jews and Muslims from France.
The visit was the initiative of a group of Israeli Arabs headed by Archimandrite Emile Shoufani, pastor of the Greek Catholic community in Nazareth, one of the foremost leaders of the Christian community in Israel.
On May 26, Shoufani stood on the podium at the Temple synagogue in Krakow and pledged: "We are here to be with the Jewish people and its suffering, and tell them, we are with you."
|
