THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

grenade. Natan Rapoport, the sculptor, created the hero’s image as a conclusion,memorial, and monument to all that embodies our attitude toward the Shoah.Anilevich the rebel is the symbol of those days. Larger than life, a giant cast inbronze, he is all energy and might, power, heroism, and hope. The image of Anilevichin 1943 shadows the perforated water tower in 1948, leaving the visitor with adistorted sense of concepts and dimensions. How could it be that the Shoah looks sogood, while the Israeli resurrection looks like a tower full of holes that will never holdwater?Edelman did not buy into the Zionist ownership of the uprising and its conversion inthe myth sequence that may have or may have not happened, from Yosef Trumpledorand Tel Hai to the Warsaw ghetto. For him, the uprising was not Zionist, butuniversal, part of the universal plight of humanity against satanic men:The uprising was the logical consequence of four years of resistanceby a population that was confined in inhuman conditions, humiliated,despised, that was treated . . . like a population of subhumans. In spiteof the conditions . . . the ghetto residents organized their lives, as muchas they could, according to the highest European values. At the timewhen the criminal occupying government prevented from them the rightto education, culture, knowledge, life, a respectable death, they builtunderground universities, schools, aid institutions and press. Theseactions, that caused resistance against anything that threatened the rightto an honorable life, resulted in the uprising. The uprising was theultimate means to refuse inhuman life and death conditions; the ultimateway of struggle against barbarity and for the maintenance of humandignity. 8Edelman’s book was not translated into Hebrew until 2001, and Krall’s book didn’tfind an Israeli publisher, even though it was published in many languages throughoutthe world. Zionist Israel did not tolerate divergence from its canon. In the last part ofthe twentieth century Edelman and his memoirs became a litmus test for the Zionistand post-Zionist attitude toward the Shoah. I doubt that this was Edelman’s intention.He lived by his Bundist faith, the heritage of his mother, who sent him to the Bund’syouth movement. He did not compromise his faith under the Nazi boot nor under theSoviet hammer and sickle. Daniel Blatman, his Hebrew editor, aptly described