Memories of a Gentle Woman

My mother-in-law (z"l) was an amazing, gentle woman who held within her such strength. It was a quiet strength no one who didn't know her would recognize.

She was 18 in 1945...when the war ended, when she began a life after Auschwitz with one sister and one brother...she had lost two brothers in the war, a younger sister (Gavriella), her parents, her grandparents, all her uncles. All her aunts.

Cousins gathered together...most a bit older than her. They too had lost their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts. Generations erased. Young adults released in a world with no anchor except their memories.

How their parents did things, as they remembered them, became holy. Traditions they held on to with the strength of love and loss.

She married one of those cousins...a man who fell madly in love with her and never stopped loving her even to the last day of his life, even, I believe, after.

She told me many memories of the Holocaust, things she had learned. But she never told me that they had put her in a gas chamber...that I heard from her children later.

She died 12 days before he did...I always imagine it was to go and set up their home in the world to come. He waited and gave her those days. The 7 days of mourning their children observed, and a few more.

Today, they have four children who remember and mourn them, and all those that came before. And they have six grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. Two carry his name. One carries hers.

All but one of their grandchildren live in Israel. All of their great-grandchildren live here as well.

They are all remembered...those murdered by the Nazis, those maimed in spirit and in body. Those who held on to the past to give it to the future.

Six million were lost and from the depths of our agony...from the pain caused to us in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, we rose up and reclaimed that which was ours, that which is ours, that which always will be ours.

I stood on my balcony and watched and listened. I heard the siren sound. Two minutes of a wailing that cuts through the soul. And I saw Jerusalem on the next mountain. Cars stop and pull to the side and people stand at attention.

And I watched cars, mostly Arab, continue driving. A show that they don't recognize our pain; they don't respect our history.

No matter. We do respect their pain but we will not allow them to hurt us and as for their history. We are entertained. A people of 100 years is nothing to a people of 4,000. You can't claim a land that was claimed thousands of years before your "Prophet" was even born.

No matter. Today is bigger than you will ever be and so we turn from your insensitivity to the greater issue - the hate you cause around the world by the lies you've told so often, you actually have begun to believe them.

No matter. Today is for remembering. David Levi and your beautiful wife, Elise...your parents, your brothers and sisters...all but one who remains with us, please God, ad 120. Your grandparents and uncles and aunts...all the Jews who lived in the places where you are born.

All gone...except in our memories and today we stood and reached into the heavens to tell you all, we will not forget. We will not allow what was done to you to be done again. Not in Europe, not in the US, and not from whoever remains in the very few buildings remaining in Gaza.

Never Again.