THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

only synagogue where the cantor Meislish sang the melodies of the German Jewishcomposer Lebendowski, convinced that these were the melodies that the Levites hadsung in the Temple.Lea then broke his heart, running away to England with a British officer, whom inturn she dumped for an Egyptian senior official, later disappearing without trace.Avikarius did not want to stay there any longer, and the house became the propertyof the British Mandate. At the end of the 1930s, the British gave the home to theEthiopian emperor Haile Selassie, who fled Mussolini’s troops when they conqueredhis country. This is a true story. Nobody believed me when I told my friends in schoolthat I lived in a royal palace. But one day I saw the African king on our porch under aparasol to protect him from the blazing Jerusalem sun. Well, not with my own eyes,since I had not yet been born, but in the Israeli television series Pillar of Fire.Is it only a coincidence that my parents chose that house to be their home? Mymother was an Arab Jew from Hebron and my father was a German Jew fromDresden. If more of us knew the stories that our house walls know and remember,there would be more peace in the world, in the way of my father, and much morelove in the way of my mother. With peace and love, the world is so much better. Itwas from this house my mother left for her last journey. On a rainy night in Jerusalem,an old Turkish gentile woman who worked for us had said to me her very last wordsever, “Avraham, all of you fill me with happiness.” Then my mother went to bed andleft us forever, calm, reconciled, loving and loved. Her love won.