Gerard Leval
To those in our Jewish community who are inclined to distance themselves from the State of Israel and to deny their support to the state, I offer the following thoughts:
Nearly 30 years ago, I was the first member of my family to return to Poland, the land of my father’s birth. My grandparents had been murdered at Treblinka half a century before.
At the time of my trip, I was serving my law firm as the supervisor of our office in Budapest and had occasion to fly from Hungary to Poland. As I approached passport control at Warsaw’s Chopin airport, the two men standing in front of me tendered their passports to the officer. With a rush of emotion, I noted that the passports were Israeli.
My emotions were mixed. On the one hand, I felt pride and an immediate sense of connection to the two individuals in front of me. On the other, I felt profound sorrow that Israel had come into existence too late to possibly prevent my grandparents’ martyrdom.
This feeling was to be forcefully replicated just a couple of days later. On this first trip to Poland, I had made arrangement to be driven to Treblinka in order to pay my respects at the site at which my grandparents had been killed. It was on a gloomy and cold March day that my guide and I drove into the forest northeast of Warsaw where the death camp was located.
When we arrived, we walked alone and in silence along the railroad tracks that led to the heart of the camp. We then climbed up the small hill leading to the main memorial where the camp had stood. As we moved up the hill, we began to see a circle of Israeli flags waving in the wind. The flags were being held aloft by a several dozen young people dressed in Israeli military garb. They were singing Israeli songs as part of a ceremony inducting these young people into the Israeli air force.
Not surprisingly, I found myself once again in the grip of deep and conflicting emotions. The dominant sensations that I had were that same sense of deep regret that Israel had not existed in the 1940s to provide a haven for my murdered family mixed with a profound sense of pride that defenders of a sovereign Jewish state stood in a place that had caused such harm to our people.
The memory of that first visit to Treblinka has remained ingrained in me, providing a kind of solace in an otherwise unfathomable sense of helplessness about the terrible fate of so many of our brethren.
Today, almost three decades later, I continue to wrestle with the reality of the horrors of the Holocaust. I am less and less able to understand how such suffering could have been inflicted on so many. But I am resolute in the belief that Jewish strength is the only means of assuring that the catastrophe that befell the Jews of Europe during World War II will not again occur and that only the existence of a powerful Jewish state can provide any assurance of that strength.
That belief was once again strengthened this past Shavuot during the Yizkor service. As is the case on every holiday when we recite Yizkor, I expressly said an El Maleh Rachamim prayer for my grandparents. This moment of communion with individuals I never met, but to whom I feel a deep connection, is one of significant emotion. This year, as I recited the memorial prayer, among the turbulent emotions I encountered, was that same complex mix that I had felt upon my first arrival in Poland and during that first visit to Treblinka.
As I recited the El Maleh Rachamim, I was very conscious that sitting just two seats behind me was the Israeli ambassador to the United States. His presence, the tangible evidence of Jewish sovereignty, served to yet again re-enforce the vital and critical role that the State of Israel plays in providing a sense of assurance that the destruction of the past will not happen again.
We live in a time when so many within our own community have begun to question the role of Israel and seem alienated from the state by reason of various political actions taken there.
There are accusations that Israel is not conforming to our notions of liberal democracy. Among some segments of the Jewish community, including even some religious leaders, there are assertions that we must limit or even cease our support of Israel because its comportment does not fit our political views.
To those who would suggest that we should distance ourselves from Israel because of whatever political differences they may feel, I would urge that they remember what the world was like for our fellow Jews without a sovereign Jewish state. I would ask them to try to feel, even for a moment, the anguish that my grandparents and so many others must have felt as they were being locked in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Focus on the sense of comfort that I experienced when I beheld the sight of the young Israelis being inducted into a powerful Israeli military standing atop the ruins of the death camp, or the similar sense of comfort I felt from the presence of the official representative of a sovereign Jewish state as I said Yizkor for my grandparents.
Any Jew who is not conscious of the growing antisemitism that, from all sides of the political spectrum, yet again threatens us is blind to today’s reality. Now is not the time for divisiveness, rather it is a time for communal unity in our unwavering support for Israel regardless of political or theological differences with the state. ■
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm.