Yad Vashem

This week of orientation has been absolutely crazy (as well as beautiful, powerful, painful, tragic, and impressive) and even though it ends in two days, it will not slow down. We started by exploring the complexities of the city of Jerusalem while living in a hostel in the Old City. The situation with the occupation here is different than anywhere else in the country – which I have found to be a theme in most of the different areas where Palestinians live. No two Palestinian stories are exactly the same but they are incredibly sad, complicated, and wrapped up in bureaucracy and imperialism outside of their control and sadly outside of mine as well. I would love to/ probably will at a later time go into the details of this as well as other reactions/feelings/insights, but at the moment it is late, we are waking up early to go to Hebron and Bethlehem and stay overnight in a refugee camp (and by camp I am referring to the semi-permanent housing that some Palestinian refugees have been living in for the past 40-60 years. So far we have also traveled to a few villages in the West Bank: Anata, Bil’in, Bar’em, as well as some communities of Palestinians who are technically within Israel and considered Israeli citizens, such as Sakhnin (where we stayed in homestays last night) but who still suffer from discriminatory laws and a full perimeter of Israeli settlers that do not acknowledge that they or a problem exists. And then today we drove around Galilee and then saw Akko (Acre) and Haifa, which is where I will be living for the coming month. I would love to go into more detail about everything, but time and battery power are limited. So if you desperately need more, I have below a reflection I wrote about Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in West Jerusalem. Good Night!

Love, Emma

YAD VASHEM- The names of the two mountains flanking Yad Vashem, Mount Herzl and the Mount of Remembrance, was enough to convince me that what I had been expecting of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem would most likely be true. This was to be a museum that commemorated, quite appropriately, the immeasurable tragedy that was the Holocaust and a place to give faces, voices, and stories to the millions of Jews (and anyone else not of the Aryan race) who were senselessly, pointlessly, and horrifically massacred. It also seemed  that this was to be a museum  strategically placed in the lives of the Israeli people and in the training of the IDF soldiers so as to be a reminder of what the Jews have been through, and more importantly, why they need a Jewish State.

If you just look at what the Museum was – what the content of it was – not the ending and not the dozens of young Israeli soldiers that filled it up – it is easy to feel the intense emotion that was and continues to be tied to this atrocity. It is really quite impossible not to feel it as you watch videos of men digging their own graves, or see the gentiles who risked their lives to help, or even more tragically, the millions who didn’t. Being reminded of the hopeless and oppressive situation the Jews were facing almost everywhere, it is possible to see where the desperation for an accepting homeland – for a place where you don’t have to live in fear or as a second class citizen.

By the end you are almost ready to continue with the thinking of the Yad Vashem by jumping unceremoniously to the obvious creation of the Jewish State of Israel on the land that has belonged to the Jews since the beginning of time and which may or may not have been occupied by another people previously and unimportantly.

At that point I was ripped from the heartbreak of the Holocaust and could only see the tragedy that was occurring with the establishment of a new state with a new population where one already existed. The politics that surround it all came rushing back into focus and I found myself completely confused by the juxtaposition of so much sadness and betrayal of human dignity – by everyone involved – and unable to see any way out of the conflict without a mutual respect for the strong beliefs and sensitive, emotional backgrounds and upbringings of the people on all sides of the violence.