THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Sometime in the state’s early days, my parents moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,from the outdoor chess games of Ben Yehuda Strasse to the Yekke respectability ofSderot Ben Maimon in Jerusalem.For many years I thought that my parents wanted to raise us in the heart of thesecular Israel, the one open to the new Israeli trends. During many years I loved myneighborhood, where I learned to integrate identities of religiosity and Israeliness.Our home was an Israeli home. Mordechai Bar’on, the IDF’s chief education officerand a peacenik, lived downstairs. Next to him lived the Sidon family, whose fatherwas a waiter from Morocco. They immigrated to America and left me a scar, thesorrow of my first childhood separation.Across from us lived senior officers, such as Moshe Dayan and Chayim Herzogand all their successors. Above us, in a spacious apartment, lived Eliezer Kaplan, thefirst minister of the treasury, and his wife Dr. Kaplan, the scary doctor. Above themlived the Kidrons, the mother Shoshana and her daughters Michal and Naomi, mychildhood friends. Their father, Avraham, was a military judge who sentenced thesoldier Meir Tobianski to death as a spy for the British in the War of Independence,and was later a diplomat and the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Can you imagine a better home to be born in? Today I think that home chooses youmore than you choose it. It wanted me to be born in it so I could understand myidentity through its memories, the stories of others that became the history of myhome. This is a home with a name and a stunning history.If it depended on me, I would ask that all the children born from now on beguests, if just for a moment, at the house in which I was born. The home’s familyname is the Avikarius Residence, and its first name is Villa Lea. The stone tablet at theentrance to the single non-Jewish home in Rehavia says: “Villa Lea, 1 May 1934.”Avikarius was an attorney of Armenian ancestry who arrived in Israel with BritishGeneral Edmund Allenby, who conquered the land in World War I from the Turks.Avikarius fell in love with Lea, a Jewish girl from the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood ofMe’a She’arim, married her and built a home for her in Rehavia, which was verydistant, geographically and spiritually, from her native neighborhood.This is the only home in all Jerusalem that publicly carries a narrative of faiths.Urban legend says that for his lover, Avikarius went to pray at our synagogue,Yeshurun. This is the synagogue where I read the Torah on my Bar Mitzvah, and theonly synagogue where the cantor Meislish sang the melodies of the German Jewish