THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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heard this melody at any other home, on any Sabbath, anywhere in the world. This isour tune, of Grandfather, my father and myself. The rest he would leave to Mother:“Zing Zmires,” meaning “Sing songs” in Yiddish. When klezmers, musicians, playedbefore him, when he heard his favorite melodies, he would smile to himself and nodhis head, either responding to the rhythm or approving the beauty of the moment. Yethe did not sing. Now we were surrounding his bed and singing a nigun, a religioustune.When one of the Rabbis of the Belz Hassiduth got married, the best composer ofthe Belz court composed a cheerful rhythmic melody to the lyrics of the “Days ofAwe” prayer: Avinu Malkenu, “Our father our king, let this hour be an hour of mercyand goodwill from before you.” My father loved this melody very much, and alwaysasked us to sing it. On the evening after Yom Kippur, we slowed the melody’s tempo.We turned this wedding song into a melancholic lamentation. Slowly, with beauty, withall our might, we sang and wept.Then suddenly, from the shadow of death, as if revisiting our world for a moment,my father mumbled something and joined the singing with his blocked throat, his voicemuffled by the oxygen mask. He muttered something twice, as if trying to speak justone last time, to utter those eight Hebrew words that would say it all: Let this hour bean hour of mercy and goodwill from you. He wanted to say it so much and yet couldnot, so we acted as his mouth. This is how my father departed this world, with amelody that has become our own hymn of sorrow and grief.One day we will wake from our long nightmare and sing “End and Beginning,” apoem by the marvelous Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska about the consequences ofwar. Perhaps someone will compose a melody to it, and it will become the secondhymn of us all.When we wake up, history will resume. Life will return to life and it will become clearthat it is impossible to dig in, forever, in the trenches that stretch between thecemeteries. Someone will announce: “That’s it. It’s over.” Another will declare: “Wecan defeat Hitler.”Because it is possible, we must do it. We must leave the Valley of Weeping, theshadows of death and climb up to the hills of hope and optimism. We will remember,but will be hale. Scarred, but whole, balanced. On the first day of normalcy, the newbeginning after what happened to us in the middle of last century, we will begin the
cleaning up of Israeli public life. “Someone must clean up,” wrote the poet. How thenwill the cleaned up, cured Israel look?Holocaust Memorial Day will not be commemorated on its present date, anartificial date, the day of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. This important date will becommemorated on a different occasion. With the perspective of time, it is clear thatthe sublime honor that we feel toward the ghetto rebels is not the Shoah’s mainlesson. Even Israeli independence and the rebuilding of Jewish force are not the mostimportant consequence of the smokestacks. As time goes by it becomes clear thatthe value given to heroism, in relation to the extermination and destruction, wasexaggerated. Heroism will reclaim a more modest place beside the main issues: thecrimes against humanity and the ruining of the thousand-year-old relationshipbetween the Jews and Europe. It was our destruction and theirs. Therefore, threetimes a year, not just one, Israel will commemorate the tragedies.One time it will be with the rest of the world, on January 27. The internationalcommunity designated the liberation day of Auschwitz to commemorate theHolocaust and World War II. On this day we will grasp the universal dimensions ofthat era. We will not think only of ourselves, but of humanity as a whole. This will bea day in which even Israel’s Arab citizens will stand in solemn silence, grieving theirown pain, as partners to the new human obligation. It will be a day of “No more”: nomore violence, no more xenophobia, no more discrimination, and no more racism. Inschool we will study other people’s holocausts; we will understand the origins ofviolence and aggression and the ways to eradicate them; we will fight tyranny andcommit to justice, equality, and peace.We will vow again and again that “Never again” includes everything; it will nothappen again to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It will be the day in which Israeli citizenswill become aware every year of the other heroism of the Shoah, that of therighteous gentiles who were committed to their own conscience and defeated, withmodesty and without fear, the beast of tyranny that was in them and among them.And first and foremost, we will stand together, with the civilized nations, at theforefront of the worldwide struggle against hatred wherever it is. We will convert ourpersonal wounds into a cure for all humanity. This will be the day in which all Israel’sprayers will be as those of my parents-in-law Lucien and Janine Lazar, who werefirst to teach us the alternative Passover Haggadah, and endowed us with the magicof their ways and the light in their soul. No more verses like “Pour your wrath on the
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUSTRISE
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUST RISE
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In loving memory of my late parents
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Notes 243Index 247
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none of this could have happened.An
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word “former” is attached to yo
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This is how I explain the fierce pu
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eternal renewal of the world. But n
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CHAPTER 1
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I WAS BORN IN JANUARY 1955 IN GERMA
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When I finished writing my first bo
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I had heard her say that more than
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of my late father. We traveled far
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CHAPTER 2THE HOLOCAUST, EVER-PRESEN
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youngest son, Noam, did not join th
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Bank; New Age and Buddhist experime
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CHAPTER 3
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WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW DO YOU START CL
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ight, and Eban, if the 1967 boundar
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CHAPTER 4
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MY NEIGHBOR RAMI’S PARENTS CAME F
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When he woke up, he continued the c
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power. The local leadership of Ben
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How could it be that everything “
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As the Zionist movement aspired to
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everything changed dramatically and
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“Masada will not fall again” be
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So, three traumatized communities c
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CHAPTER 5
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WHAT COLOR WAS THE HOLOCAUST? PROBA
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seemed to side with me and my frien
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into ploughshares and wait patientl
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When my initial courtship of Yael c
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only during the long incubation per
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liked to compare the Palestinian Na
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Fanon is an expert witness worth li
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prevention.” How targeted could i
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themselves to speak words that shou
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followed the war? If not, how did h
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war, therefore they should not know
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CHAPTER 6LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
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“nationhood,” including its int
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in anger over the Dreyfus Affair, b
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1943, upon hearing of the Warsaw gh
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is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed b
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ad fortune, to express anger, to re
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e the cause of constant political f
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use the refugee problem to denounce
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Almost everywhere the Shoah serves
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with the moral parity among the chi
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CHAPTER 7
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THE HIGH POINT OF MY SEVENTH GRADE
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at least, before the Warsaw ghetto
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than a million Jews who had walked
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ebels and the disciples of the yout
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exterminated. A group of Jewish you
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grenade. Natan Rapoport, the sculpt
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we will not respond. We will sacrif
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against Us.” It is self-evident,
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of now we got lost. We need to retu
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CHAPTER 8
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BECAUSE OF ADOLF EICHMANN, I CAN’
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discussion about garbage technology
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gap between my father’s world and
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independent Jewish Commonwealth, th
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Eichmann harmony at the right pitch
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the victors at Nuremberg presented,
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the highest order. Without people l
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The landlady did not lie, and never
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of whom only one was a non-Jew, a g
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The Grunwald trial had become the K
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Canaanite left, and the yearling of
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to shape a new Israeli generation t
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trial . . . he would use expression
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light to humanity. But they continu
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suspended daily, and not just to ev
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minister who came from “there,”
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CHAPTER 9
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“WHO REMEMBERS THE ARMENIAN HOLOC
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. . . an ideologue with firm belief
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Today we are armed to the teeth, be
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and Romanians. We would have shut o
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It turned out that the Dalai Lama,
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War II, an estimated half a million
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An empire without colonies launched
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So familiar and yet so far removed
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was the first governor of southwest
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mention other states, the Jewish wo
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square and deserted the universal h
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peoples’ holocausts. In a world i
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we raise our guests and force-feed
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CHAPTER 10
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JUDAISM IS A CIVILIZATION THAT IS T
Page 192 and 193: the Jewish Pantheon, namely in the
Page 194 and 195: dogma are the most dangerously viol
Page 196 and 197: His words express no condolences an
Page 198 and 199: most meaningful clash to take place
Page 200 and 201: Korah’s racism lacks the mechanis
Page 202 and 203: aka HaRambam. All of them belong to
Page 204 and 205: lecture, a professor stood up.“I
Page 206 and 207: The revolution that did not happen
Page 208 and 209: the deceitful war in Lebanon, for t
Page 210 and 211: and not in Le Monde, in French? His
Page 212 and 213: a new prayer book, a Siddur, in whi
Page 214 and 215: CHAPTER 11MAKE GOD SMILE AGAIN
Page 216 and 217: Does it really matter who is guilty
Page 218 and 219: Divine intervention did not come to
Page 220 and 221: enemy-brethren? My Shoah question i
Page 222 and 223: wept, and kept watch; but when the
Page 224 and 225: acceptance of those who were discri
Page 226 and 227: and impatient beliefs win over many
Page 228 and 229: Chinese tyranny.The sum total point
Page 230 and 231: —Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund
Page 232 and 233: and outlooks. It was not just a dif
Page 234 and 235: CHAPTER 12
Page 236 and 237: HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD A MAN DIE? H
Page 238 and 239: Israelis made a motion. So I starte
Page 240 and 241: innovation that included my sister
Page 244 and 245: nations that do not know you and on
Page 246 and 247: I never made secret of my opinion t
Page 248 and 249: admissible. I am sorry, but this do
Page 250 and 251: prime minister with Germany’s pre
Page 252 and 253: only synagogue where the cantor Mei
Page 254 and 255: 3. An official press release by Net
Page 256 and 257: 6. Yehuda Elkana, “In Defense of
Page 258 and 259: INDEXAbraham, 107, 158, 178, 184, 2
Page 260 and 261: British Mandate of Palestine, 99-10
Page 262 and 263: faith, 206-9, 211, 213, 240Finkielk
Page 264 and 265: 198, 203-16, 226, 231-3, 239; color
Page 266 and 267: Jonas, Hans, 205-6Jordan, 67, 82-3,
Page 268 and 269: Namibia, 161-5, 174Napoleon III, 52
Page 270 and 271: Rwanda, 86, 144, 151-2, 155, 158, 1
Page 272 and 273: Ukraine, 29, 32, 36, 74United Natio
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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