Day 6- Yad Vashem
Today marks the second half of our trip. Many of us began the day with a clean slate having taken advantage of a rare “down night”--few activities and no partying--to sleep. The writer of this blog slept clear through dinner and Israeli dancing, waking in the morning to find himself an astounding 14 hours older. Rip van Winkle is the story of a man who slept beneath a tree for 100 years and awoke an old man, I explained to Dvir, my Israeli roommate for the night. “It must have been after Birthright,” he reasoned with a nod. The extra strength was necessary. In the morning we visited Yad-Vashem, the new Holocaust museum in the fertile hills of Jerusalem. Yad ‘in Hebrew means “hand,” Vashem “the name.” In the Hebrew Bible the hand signifies memory; Yad-Vashem compels us to remember the Holocaust by the 6 million Jews who perished in it. We first watched a short film on one of the survivors. It is one thing to hear about round-ups, train rides, work camp, even death marches…it is quite another to put a face to a story. No one was left unmoved. Every part of the museum is thoughtfully constructed and imbued with significance. The exhibit is planned around a single bleak corridor. The towering concrete slabs bend inward to create the tense claustrophobic environment of a Jewish ghetto or concentration camp bunker. The story of the Holocaust develops chronologically as you serpentine toward daylight at the other end of the corridor--future freedom, hope, redemption. The last room is especially provoking: the walls lined with heavy black books containing the names of every known victim now 4 million of the total 6. A wishing well in the middle reflects the faces of victims overhead and most poignantly a glimpse of our own. We also visited the memorial for the 1.5 million murdered children, a darkened chamber with five candles at the center exploding into infinite stars through a kaleidoscope of mirrors. As Maimonides said: “When we take a life, we destroy the world; when we preserve a life, we save it,” suggesting that each child contains a great lineage. Heavy traffic forced us to expedite our plan for the day and after a brief lunch break we continued straight on to Kibbutz Farod and then at night to the largest annual folkloric festival in Israel held in the northern town of Carmiele. After an emotionally exhausting day at Yad-Vashem, going to a dance festival seemed somewhat jarring, though we are reminded that the solemnity of Israel's Memorial Day ends with the festivities of Israeli Independence Day. Just as the Jewish wedding is interrupted by ceremony to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, such mingling of pain and joy is central to Jewish tradition. At the Israeli dance festival, for which we had been preparing this whole week with intermittent dance activities, we had the rare pleasure of seeing our own Israeli soldier Tom perform with his group during the opening ceremony. Afterward, too tired to dance ourselves, we mostly ate fair food, milled about and took in the scene: 10,000 Israelis singing and dancing in couples or alone to the songs they grew up with. Tomorrow night we will have another chance to partake ourselves.
--Submitted by Jeremy Sorgen
