Israel | HEART AND MIND

11 Jun 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel Permalink

The Nova Testimony

Sticky Post By admin On June 11, 2026

https://novaexhibition.com/london-exhibition

On Tuesday I visited the Nova – I don’t want to call it ‘exhibition’ – rather, I’ll say I visited the Nova Testimony, because testimony is what it truly is. In whatever state you walk in, through the necessarily tight security, you walk out different.

I shall not try to describe the testimony. The evidence is taken, all of it, – objects, pictures, videos, recordings, – directly from the grounds of the Nova Festival at Re’im, or from survivors and rescuers shortly afterwards. It would be as inappropriate as it is impossible to put all this into words. The testimony needs to be seen, heard and witnessed.

But I shall mention three features that struck me.

I never thought about what that festival meant prior to 6.29am on that appalling morning of October 7. I’m not a dancer, so I was all the more struck and smitten by the joy of so many people rejoicing together in music they love. And when the sun rose that dawn over those who had danced all night, the whole space glowed with wonder. Nor had I realised that this was an EcoNova Project, banning single use plastics and creating a green culture with a dedicated team ensuring ‘commitment to Mother Earth.’ Then, at 6.29, came the missiles, followed by the murderers.

I had met Romi Gonen’s father in early 2024. ‘There is only one phone-call I want to hear,’ he said. For everything else he had no interest in his phone whatsoever. I rejoiced when, a further terrible twelve months later, Romi, a passionate student of all kinds of dance, returned from captivity to the embrace of her family. We put a picture of her with her mother in the synagogue. But I had before heard the call she made to her mother while trying to hide in the terrible minutes before she was taken hostage. Romi’s mother says, and repeats in desperation: ‘Everything is going to be Okay. I’m with you, sweetie…’

I knew only small parts of the extraordinary work of care and healing that survivors, those who saved others, and supporters have undertaken since 2023. ‘Despite my trauma I had to help others,’ testifies one courageous rescuer. As, with an aching heart, one leaves the room with all the pictures of the dead, one is guided through the work of healing to which the Nova community has committed itself since just two months after the horrors. They support the ‘hundreds of families [who] must now navigate the desolate landscape of insufferable loss and unending longing, desperate for the presence of those they can no longer embrace.’ As The Tribe of Nova they have established workshops, healing centres, memorials, and therapeutic activities including horse riding, surfing, nature trips, sound and meditative healing and the provision of emergency micro grants.

The Nova Exhibition / Testimony is about remembering and preserving the spirit of the 413 people, mostly under the age of 25, who were murdered there:

‘We will forever remember the beautiful angels who shined on the dancefloor and are now dancing in heaven. Your light will never be extinguished.’

But it is no less about working for a world of healing and hope, a world in which We Will Dance Again:

We are the flame

That remembers

The voice

That carries healing

Into the world

We are here

We are Nova

You can support Nova’s healing work through the UJIA, specifying that your donation is for Nova. The UJIA helps fund retreats for Nova survivors. These include Group Therapy and professionally facilitated Sharing Circles, led by clinical social workers and therapists, providing a safe space for participants to share experiences, process grief and trauma, and build mutual support within the group.

21 Apr 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel, The Jewish Year Permalink

Yom HaZikaron

Sticky Post By admin On April 21, 2026

Today is Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for the dead in Israel’s wars.

No family is unaffected. My father’s uncle, Alfred Freimann, was among those murdered in the shayarah, the convey of academics on its way to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, when it was ambushed on 13 April 1948 and everyone was killed. (https://honorisraelsfallen.com/fallen/freiman-dr-avraham-chaim-alfred/) He was a leading jurist, involved in preparations for Israel’s independence. I cannot imagine the impact this had on my father, who was in the Haganah in the siege of Jerusalem, in that grim, courageous year. ‘I lost many friends in the Old City,’ he would say. His Yahrzeit falls on Yom ha’Atzmaut.

I’m thinking today of many friends: Raba Tamar, whose brother lost his life in Tsahal; Aaron Barnea, who lost his son in Lebanon; Rami Elchanan and Bassam Aramin, fellow leaders of the Parents Circle, who each lost a daughter to terror; Sharone Lifschitz, whose father was murdered in Gaza; Steve Brisley, whose sister Lianne was murdered with her daughters on October 7; the Hathaleen family whose brother Awad was killed by violent settlers.

That is why I have lit a candle here at home and have made a list of friends to call during the day. It is also why, last night, I joined the members of our synagogue watching together the 21st Israeli Palestinian Joint Memorial Ceremony, ‘We Are the Day After.’ (https://www.familiesforum.co.uk/21-st-joint-memorial-day-ceremony)

What can I say, but the silence of an aching heart?

Women and men, Israeli and Palestinian, spoke of how violent death took away their loved ones, children, brothers, cousins; of how the horror of loss and the destruction of their homes shook their families. Unable to travel, most of the Palestinian participants testified by video.

Each person, every circumstance, was unique. But key feelings were not:

‘I was brought up to respect all life;’

‘I asked myself, “What do I do with my grief?”

‘I joined the Parents Circle, because here I can speak of my loved one, and people understand.’

‘We have the same grief in our hearts;’

‘Here is where I feel hope: in the end, we will find a way to live together in peace.’

As the organisers bravely wrote:

This year we gather in a burning reality – war, death, rockets, oppression and injustice on all sides. Despite everything and in fact because of everything we choose to look forward. The joint ceremony does not seek to compare losses or measure pain but to recognize that every life taken was a whole life with dreams, with family and with a future cut short. Together we chart a path that acknowledges pain but refuses to surrender to it. A path of humanity, solidarity and hope.

What can one add, but the silence of an aching – yet somewhere hopeful? – heart?

16 Apr 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel, The Jewish Year Permalink

As we read about healing

Sticky Post By admin On April 16, 2026

The painful nature of these days between Yom HaShoah, Yom haZikaron and Yom ha’Atzamut has been brought home by the appalling antisemitic attack against Finchley Reform Synagogue, down the road from my own community. I feel for their clergy, lay leaders, and all the congregation, and have written to them in solidarity.

It can’t be by chance that this week’s Torah reading concerns healing. The descriptions of the diseases may seem abstruse and dated: red, green and white creeping sores eating away at living flesh, infected clothing and even the walls of buildings. But the hurts across the body of humanity, and of life itself, are real and rife, and the need for healing is as urgent now as ever.

selective focus photography of woman holding yellow petaled flowers — Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Such healing must be threefold. What can I say about personal pain? It wouldn’t be right for me to record the details of the conversation at our shabbat table last week between a Ukrainian couple and an Israeli family devastatingly affected by October 7. I only note that they found plenty to share in heartfelt words, and in fellow feeling that words will never capture. What can I say about when I went to thank the man who prayed with me for his family in Beirut and mine in Israel? ‘What do you hear about your dear ones?’ ‘Lost,’ he whispered. Unsure if I heard right, I asked again: ‘Just lost,’ he said, ‘Lost.’ In the Torah, the Cohen who inspects diseased persons requires them to go into isolation for a period of potential incubation, before bringing them back into the community. In our day the isolation, the inexpressibility of pain and trauma, the inner loneliness, is all too real. The question is whether we can we create community with enough sensitivity and heart to include those who bear these deep wounds and, without inflicting further pain, embrace them in our lives.

We need deep healing both across the Jewish Diaspora and in Israel. The Torah speaks of breaking apart those buildings which show ongoing signs of disease across their walls. We are in an opposite position. How can we rebuild after the devastation of war, in Beer Sheva, Haifa, Tel Aviv? I recently officiated at the wedding of a couple whose flat was largely destroyed. How sorely relevant were the traditional words about building ‘a faithful home in Israel.’ Harder is the question of how we can rebuild destroyed houses in the West Bank, like the homes in the village of Khallet a-Sidra, destroyed by Jewish extremists, which the army is preventing the families who lived there for years from rebuilding. This has to be wrong. Harder still is how trust, hope and belief in our shared humanity and future can be restored, for Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and non-Jews alike, not just in Israel but wherever we are in the world. There is too much hurt, and too much hate, plenty of it directed at us too. Every word, every deed that expresses and deepens our shared humanity matters immensely. I hardly dare call this healing, but at least it may mitigate the hurt.

As humanity, as life on earth, we desperately need healing. I think of the Torah’s words ‘I am God, your healer,’ and ask myself, ‘Who is that “you”?’ It’s not just people; it is all life. ‘The earth is God’s’ said the poet of Psalm 24. That includes the rainfall and rivers, the soil and all that it sustains, the tall trees of the forests and their vital underbelly of shrub and scrub, ground nesting birds, beetles and even ants. The Torah instructs us to rip the diseased fabric from an infected garment if the rest of it can be saved. But we are here altogether on this earth, interwoven in one web of destiny, and no single part of life can be isolated and torn away from the rest. If we poison one domain, we allow that poison to seep slowly into us all. Time and again the Torah repeats the word ‘tahor,’ pure; the role of the priest is letaher, to help the ill and inured back to a state of health and purity. I used to think tahor was merely an outdated term for an ideal ritual state. Now I understand the word more truly and see little more urgent that the cleansing of our way of life to allow the very earth to become pure and wholesome once again.

The task of healing is immense. The Torah delegates it to the priests, the Cohanim. Contemporary reality demands it of us all.

May this Yom ha’Atzmaut, on which we celebrate all the many positive achievements of Israel and our People, mark a significant turn on the path to true healing.

07 Apr 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel Permalink

This War

Sticky Post By admin On April 7, 2026

Just to say that I am horrified by the suffering of millions of civilians, and appalled at the thought of what has now been threatened. Innocent people caught in this war in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, in the West Bank, and beyond, are in my prayers. And all the nature that is being destroyed.

I fear no good will come from this and pray that better ways are found to end the nuclear threat and bring freedom, justice, dignity and peace.

05 Mar 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Israel Permalink

This Springtime, This War

Sticky Post By admin On March 5, 2026

I don’t understand.

The world is so beautiful. The world is so full of horrors. Life is so precious, so treasured. Life is so cheap, so brutalised. I can’t be the only person who struggles, uncomprehending, with these contradictions.

Here’s a glimpse into our gorgeous garden: rhododendrons I’ve loved since childhood in Scotland, when I put the fallen trumpet flowers, full of rain, like thimbles on my fingers.

Here’s to the apricot which blossoms so early that the March frost sometimes ruins it. Could this be a glut year, with so much fruit that my jam-making friends can collect ten jars’ worth? If so, I’ll bottle some too, remembering my father’s aunt Sophie who loved her fruit garden but perished in Auschwitz.

See the pink flowers of the copper beech reaching into the sky. Soon they’ll be followed by red-brown leaves.

The birds are serenading the sunshine and its time to put out soft wool as additional lining for their nests. In a month we’ll say in The Song of Songs ‘The call of the turtle dove is heard in the land.’ That bird is almost extinct in Britain, but I met a small-holder who’s breeding them until they can be released and make their return, such love people have for life.

And such is the contempt for life: the hatred that makes its own leaders murder tens, hundreds, of thousands of their own people; the rhetoric of success that makes no place in its heart for the hundreds of innocent people who die as ‘collateral damage.’ Meanwhile millions spend their days and nights in resigned exhaustion in safe rooms and bomb-shelters, if they have any. My heart goes out to them, in Israel and everywhere.

And yet it’s not simple. Evil and cruelty cannot be ignored. They can’t be left to stockpile forever; stockpiles are never just for show. Might there be, or have been, better ways of confronting them? How can we truly know?

Then, too, there is the immense courage of those called to risk their lives in fighting. This, also, must be recognised, especially by those of us currently far from danger.

Who can see where all this will go? ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep:’ those lines from Shakespeare stick in my head, – except that sea-monsters don’t cause so much damage or risk the lives of everything.

What does one take from all this? Cynicism? Hopelessness? No! That’s not the way of the human spirit, certainly not the Jewish way. Love of life is too strong; the need to care is too compelling; the roots of compassion go down too deep.

Even in wartime, we must honour and cherish life with as much respect and mercy, and in whatever situation and manner, we can. We must not let our heart be shrunk, our soul extinguished, our compassion exhausted, or our eyes be blinded to beauty and blessing.

Back in April I went to the Iranian supermarket where I sometimes shop. ‘Your friends in Tehran?’ I asked the women at the checkouts. ‘They’re OK. Yours in Tel Aviv?’ ‘OK,’ I answered. ‘Thank God,’ they said. ‘Thank God,’ I said. I must go there again. We long, together, for freedom, peace and life.

10 Oct 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

Fragile Hope

Sticky Post By admin On October 10, 2025

‘God of salvations,’ we prayed this morning, ‘Hasten and save us.’ Finally, finally, after more than two years, we pray that we may look to the coming days with hope.

May the hostages return home, those living to the love of their families, and the dead to a dignified burial in Israel. May there be an end to the fighting, deaths, homelessness, hunger and destruction in Gaza. May no more soldiers of the IDF be killed. May there be plans for a lasting peace!

Friends have suggested four possible berachot, four blessings, for this time of precarious hope:

Baruch matir assurim: Blessed be God who frees the bound.’ Eli Sharabi describes in his searing and courageous book ‘Hostage’, just published, how his hands were tied behind his back, how he and his comrades in captivity were shackled. May the hostages be free from captivity. May Israel and Gaza be free from war. May we all be free from the shackles of hatred.
‘Baruch Hatov Vehameitiv; Blessed be God who is good and does good:’ these words are recited on hearing good tidings, such as the first drumming of rainfall after long drought. We have had a prolonged dearth of positive news. Like many, I have found it hard to listen to more than a few moments at a time. Now at last, there’s something good, maybe, maybe, hopefully, please God, enduringly good. Yesterday I watched the crowds in Kikar Hachatufim, Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. I’ve been there several times in solidarity and sorrow. Now the place is on the verge of joy.
‘Baruch shehecheyanu; Blessed be God who has kept us alive, preserved us and brought us to this time:’ these familiar words were WhatsApped to me by the wonderful writer Osnat Eldar, whose poem of anguish ‘Mothers’ I have several times read out in our synagogue:
‘Mothers…They come to me at night
One by one
I hug them with compassion, with longing…’

Some, at least some, will once again hold their loved ones in their arms. Some will recite the shecheyanu with joy and tears, and unutterable relief.
‘Baruch mechayei hameitim; Blessed be God who revives the dead:’ one says this blessing on being reunited someone whom one has not seen for a very long time. The relevance is obvious. Yet I can’t help but think of those whose loved ones are gone forever, whose dead will not return.

I cherish these blessings. But, like many with whom I have spoken, I have not yet dared to say ‘Amen’ to any of them.
There’s a time for joy and a time for sorrow, writes Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, whose words we read tomorrow. But what when there’s a time for both at once?

May God let us rejoice with those whose loved ones, for whom they have yearned and over whom they have worried for so long, return to their embrace. May God open our hearts to the grief of those whose dear ones will never come back from the dark tunnels of Hamas, or from under the rubble of Gaza. May God guide us to help tend the wounds, physical and spiritual (today is World Mental health Day) of those who carry incurable hurts in their hearts.

But, above all, may God bring us hope for the future, and may God inspire our leaders to nurture that hope and make it real.

And here in the UK

Our hearts are with the community of Heaton Park in Manchester after the appalling terror attack and murders on Yom Kippur.

We appreciate the commitment of the CST, community volunteers and the police in their courageous, ongoing work to protect us.

Many rabbis, myself included, have been moved by the numerous messages of support from Imams, Muslim leaders and ministers of the Church.

Since last week there have been several attacks on Muslim places of worship, in particular, a vicious arson attack on Peacehaven Mosque. We stand together in solidarity against all racist, Islamophobic and Antisemitic outrages.

Last night, the Board of Deputies brought together the leaders of different faiths to hear excellent addresses, including from Miatta Farnbulleh, minister for faiths and communities. The focus was on finding light, despite these bleak times, through demonstrating our solidarity, protecting each other and deepening the cohesion of our society.

29 Aug 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel, Refugees, The Jewish Year Permalink

Hearing God In Our Heart

Sticky Post By admin On August 29, 2025

This week brings the new moon of Elul, the month of Teshuvah, return. From its first day until Shemini Atzeret we recite Psalm 27 every evening and morning. I know one shouldn’t have favourites, but I love this Psalm. It’s filled with the longing to find God, to feel God’s presence in the world and the gift of God’s breath in our hearts.

The Psalms begins: ‘God is my light.’ The rabbis differentiated between the outer light of the sun which brings dawn and dusk, and the inner light of the sacred, hidden within all creation, which only the eye of the spirit can see. The Psalm invites us to look at the world through such eyes.

Sometimes this is gifted to us in moments of wonder. Nicky and I were standing on the slate-rock shores of the Isle of Seil at twilight when we saw an otter climb out of the sea onto the deck of a small fishing boat, walk slowly along it, pausing twice to look cautiously in our direction, before sliding back into the water. With it slipped away the last orange band of sunlight behind the black outline of Mull. For a few gracious minutes we saw into the world’s secret life.

At other times, we have to earn deeper vision by looking with eyes of compassion. I’m at the supermarket cash desk, someone annoyingly slow is in front of me and the cashier’s taking too much time. I look again and see differently: here’s a man who’s grown frail, struggling to manage with just one functioning hand. The woman at the till, knowing she’ll get complaints from the queue, gets up from her seat, speaks cheerfully, helps the man pack and place his card on the reader.

The incident may be trivial. But if we looked more often with compassionate eyes, we might be less impatient, less frustrated, and notice more often the sacred dignity in lives we might otherwise have ignored or even despised.

The Psalm continues: ‘God is my light and my salvation.’ Sometimes this is an urgent prayer. Bishop Nowakowski texted me yesterday:

I’m in Ukraine for several days… last night was especially challenging with the bombs of death and destruction… With prayerful best wishes, Kenneth.

It’s a supplication Israelis, and Palestinians, know only too well.
But, hopefully more often, God is our salvation in a different sense. Seeing into the inner life of the world, becoming more aware of people’s dignity and struggles, and the fragile beauty of non-human life around us, we appreciate more deeply that we’re here to care for all being, because God’s presence resides in it all. We are saved from hopelessness, aimlessness and depression, and find new strength and purpose.

‘For you my heart speaks,’ says the Psalm, meaning that God is present in our hearts and speak to us there. If, amidst our fears and distractions, we can nevertheless listen with our heart, with attentiveness and humility, we will perceive life with deeper wonder and compassion and find our purpose in caring for it in whatever ways we can. That is a great secret of the path of Teshuvah, return.

In these harsh times, may God be our light and our salvation on this road.

20 Jun 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Israel Permalink

On our anguish and on healing

Sticky Post By admin On June 20, 2025

In these deeply frightening times, I pray that everyone we love and care for should be safe. Like us all, I’m calling Israel, messaging, worrying about what last night brought and what today will bring. Magen David Adom, the Herzog, other trauma hospitals and numerous organisations are calling on us and we must help as best we can. Meanwhile, the hostages remain in the grip of Hamas and the sufferings in Gaza continue.

We rightly reach out to our own people first. But I was touched by what happened when I went to my favourite vegetable stores:
Your family in Israel, are they OK?
Yours in Iran, are they alright?

The London borough of Barnet has both the largest Jewish and Iranian communities in the UK. We’re all human, desperate for those we love. A synagogue member of Iranian origin sent me this verse by the Persian poet Saadi (c. 13):
Human beings are like parts of one body,
For in creation they come from one gem.
If one part is in pain,
Other parts cannot in comfort remain…

Israel is not at war with the Iranian people, but with its evil regime and terrorist proteges, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi and others, because of the unbearable risk that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But it’s always ordinary people who bear most of the suffering.

Meanwhile, I’m acutely aware that our community is torn by different opinions. Deep anxiety leads us each to our allegiances, fears and hurts. So, as we come together for our Annual General Meeting, my fortieth + and my last as senior rabbi, I want to stress what I understand to be core Jewish values, for at heart we are a religious community.

Chesed, faithful lovingkindness, means being here for each other in joy and anguish, from birth to death, with care and consolation, through companionship, food, and the wisdom of ledabber al lev, listening and speaking to the heart.

Tesedek means commitment to doing and promoting justice. Tzedakah requires supporting social justice, giving where there is hunger, poverty, homelessness and medical and mental need, in the Jewish community, Israel, our local community, and the world.

Avodah means serving God by serving human life created in God’s image, and by caring for all life in its multiple manifestations of God’s presence, wonder and glory.

Kehilah, community, means being together in good times and bad, in prayer, study and action. It means solidarity with our Jewish community here, in Israel and worldwide, as well as with people of different faiths, with refugees, with those who need us and whom we need, and ultimately with the community of all life.

These values lead me to ask, especially now in wartime when we are constantly anxious for our people, that we place ourselves in solidarity with life and healing in whatever ways we can, whatever our political views and affiliations.

I received from Israel yesterday:
While death and destruction, chaos and fear exist all around, I took a sweet girl and her mother from Tarkumia checkpoint to Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv. We drove on roads usually packed at this time of the day. They were empty. We laughed, we talked a little English, a little Arabic, a little Hebrew. When we arrived at the entrance to the Pediatric Department, this sweet girl put her arms around my legs. I got a hug. I wish I could show you a photo of her.
I’ve been criticized for just about everything – for being naive, for being patronizing, for paying lip service, for not taking a firm stand one way or another.
This IS my stand. This is my answer to what has been happening all over this region, a small tikkun olam, a small act of reparation, in a broken world.

There are many ways of taking our stand. Wherever possible, can we take it on the side of healing, in whatever ways we understand. For there is no end to the wounds in our bleeding world, and no limit to the healing that’s needed.

23 May 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

The Horror and the Hope

Sticky Post By admin On May 23, 2025

I have so wished to write today about the beautiful vision in our Torah of the Sabbatical year, when the fences come down, the fruits of the earth are shared, and citizen and stranger, farm-owner and refugee, rich and poor, wild beasts and domestic animals, appreciate them together.

But how can I do so, when we mourn the murder in an act of terrorist antisemitic hatred of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lichinsky, officials working for Israel’s Embassy, outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, after an event about peace-making and on the threshold of their marriage? Yaron, who grew up in Germany, was known to my colleague Rabbi Levi as a gifted, talented and very likeable young man. He and Sarah were dedicated longtime peacebuilders – Sarah wrote her graduate thesis on “the role of friendships in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding process.” (The Jerusalem Youth Chorus Newsletter)

Our hearts go out to their families and friends, and we pray for the safety of all our communities.

This has also been a week of powerful international outcry, including from within Israel, at the lack of adequate humanitarian aid reaching Palestinian children in Gaza, trapped between the cynical nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks. I stand with those Jewish, Israeli and international organisations who urge that sufficient aid be let in, with all due and essential safeguards to prevent it from falling into the vicious and merciless hands of Hamas. I don’t know the names or characters of the children who may be hungry, or have been killed, but their parents for sure do. Judaism teaches that an innocent life is a life, that every life matters, that we try to protect innocent life even amidst the horrors of war, and that we all carry within us, whether we honour it or desecrate it, the image of God.

Amidst these terrors, it would be wrong, un-Jewish and lacking in faith and hope to lose sight entirely of the vision held out in our Torah. ‘Ukeratem dror: Proclaim freedom,’ the Torah commands: ‘Let everyone return to their inheritance and their family.’ If only it were so! Dror, which here means freedom, is also the name of a bird, probably the swallow, that dips and rises over the fields. So do our hopes fall, – and must rise again. So must we cherish what gifts, friendships and solidarity we can gather.

In that vein, I received the following messages yesterday. Lord Kahn’s office called, sharing deep concern and offering support for our community. Julie Siddiqi, an eloquent Muslim leader who’s worked for Nisa-Nashim and Hope Not Hate, sent a what’s-app: ‘Senseless, heartbreaking, the young couple killed in Washington. Sending love to you and your community.’ Judith Baker emailed on behalf of The Quakers: ‘We send our condolences to you and the Jewish community and hold the victims and their families and friends in our prayers.’ Our rabbinic colleagues in the States shared verses from Psalms: ‘God stays close to the broken-hearted, providing salvation to those crushed in spirit.’

Among these greetings, which cannot be taken for granted, I am especially moved by these words from The Jerusalem Youth Chorus:

It is precisely in these darkest moments that [our] work becomes not just important, but urgent—. Our Palestinian and Israeli singers know intimately the weight of this violence; each of them has been touched by loss, fear, and grief. Yet they continue to choose each other. They continue to choose the radical act of singing together…of refusing to let the loudest voices around them define their future. (https://www.jerusalemyouthchorus.org/ )
Time and again I’m asked to focus on hope, on what we can do to take a sad world and make it better. Therefore, I try to pray and work, alongside so many others, for my own Jewish People, for all people across our countries, faiths and communities who simply seek to live a good, honest and happy life, and for this very earth, with all its species of life, that we must cherish and nurture, so that it continues to sustain us all.

25 Apr 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust, Israel Permalink

In memory of my father, who died on Israel’s Independence Day, 18 years ago

Sticky Post By admin On April 25, 2025

It was my brother, Raphael, who thought to move our father’s bed in his dying days so that, if he was able to lift his head from his pillow, he would be able to see his beloved garden. Twice I saw him raise himself up, semi-conscious, and say the words of the daily prayer ‘mekayyem emunato – God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,’ before slipping back into sleep. Perhaps he meant the restorative powers of nature, perhaps his hope in his maker.

I think of our father in these days between Yom haShaoh, the Hebrew date established by the Knesset for remembering the Holocaust, its horror and the valour of resistance, and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day with its longing for a different future. Aged just sixteen, our father fled Nazi Germany with his immediate family, fought in the British Army repairing tanks behind the lines at El Alamein, and served in the Hagganah during the siege of Jerusalem.

He had a tough life. By the time he was 42 he had lost two of his aunts and his grandmother, murdered by the Nazis, his sister Eva who suffered heart failure in Jerusalem in 1944, his favourite uncle Alfred, killed in 1948 in the convoy ambushed on its way to Mount Scopus, and his beloved first wife Lore, Raphael’s and my mother, who died of cancer in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Looked after by Isca, our second mother, our father lived to see the Bnei Mitzvah of his two eldest grandchildren, and died, aged 86, on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut 18 years ago.

I can’t speak about God’s side of the matter, but for his part our father definitely kept faith. I remember him coming up to our bedroom after Lore’s death to continue where she had been forced to leave off in teaching us the Shema: ‘If you’re good, I’ll tell you a few more words each night.’ I remember how, when I was sixteen, he came into my room and asked me, ‘Are you still saying the Shema every night?’ I fear my answer ‘Yes’ was less than a half-truth. But since then, I have never, unless overtaken suddenly by sleep, omitted to say those words, which define the Jewish faith.

I remember our father telling me one night, unexpectedly, out of nowhere it seemed to me, ‘Do your homework, because they can take away from you everything except what’s in your mind.’

Our father was a craftsperson, skilled with his hands; we did many house and garden jobs together. I recall how I was once rude to him; it was about some tool, perhaps a pair of pliers. I saw his face and realised: I must never speak like that to anyone, ever again.

I think of our father now when saying the words of the morning service: ‘For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, put it into our hearts to understand, listen, learn and practise all the words of your Torah and teaching in love.’ Our father loved his Judaism and felt especially close to Rabbi Louis Jacobs. They even both (under pressure from their wives) gave up cigars at the same time.

I think of our father in these cruel, uncertain and frightening times, his deep resilience, his love of gardens and nature, and the history about which, though a great raconteur when he got going, he rarely volunteered to speak: ‘We told aunt Sophie when she visited us in Jerusalem in 1938, “Don’t go back to Czechoslovakia,” but her husband was an ardent Czech patriot and she wouldn’t listen.’ I have Sophie’s last letter before deportation, written in January 1943 and smuggled to the family: ‘In this manner, we take our farewell.’

But our forebears don’t make their departure, at least not entirely. Our beloved dead stay with us in our hearts, and, through memories and stories and the places, foods, music and pursuits they enjoyed, continue to impart their love and strength.