Last spring, Milwaukeean Isaac Rowlett traveled to Poland for the March of the Living. He saw concentration camps and ghettos. He saw railroad tracks for Jews being brought to their death. He saw barracks and gas chambers.
But perhaps most appalling to him was the presence of two little Polish villages perched above Majdanek, one of the camps. The residents of those villages knew. They couldn’t have avoided knowing. They had to have seen and smelled the smoke of Jewish bodies burning.
“Tons upon tons of babies, sisters, brothers, grandparents, human beings reduced to a pile of ashes by a cruel minority, and an indifferent majority,” Rowlett wrote after his return.
“There, [March of the Living participants] held hands with Jews from all over the world, and we sang ‘Hatikvah’ [Israel’s national anthem]. I made an oath that day, that I would obey God’s command to his people, ‘Lo taamod al dam reakha’ — You shall not stand idly by the shedding of the blood of your fellow man” (Leviticus 19:16).
For Rowlett, 19, that oath leads directly from Poland to Sudan’s Darfur region. And it propels him to act on behalf of the victims of the three-year old genocide there.
“I don’t understand how you or I or anyone for that matter is any better than those Polish people who didn’t act. Not only are we not under an oppressive Nazi regime, but we have the power and we know what’s going on in [Darfur],” Rowlett said in a recent telephone interview from New York, where he is a first year student at New York University.
Almost exactly one year after Rowlett’s march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, he is walking almost 300 miles from New York to Washington, D.C., for the Sudan Freedom Walk. With other activists, Rowlett hopes to raise awareness for the victims of violence and injustice in Sudan.
The news is horrific. According to recent reports by the World Food Program, the United Nations and the Coalition for International Justice, 3.5 million people are now hungry, 2.5 million have been displaced due to violence, and 400,000 people have died in Darfur in the past three years.
That is, 400,000 innocent human beings who have been murdered in the government-sponsored campaign to clear civilians from areas considered disloyal to the government. Each day, more than 500 people die from violence, malnutrition and disease.
Men and women are afraid to leave displaced persons camps, for fear of attacks by the Janjaweed militia. Women searching for firewood are gang raped, and then are ostracized from their family and community.
The stories and images are crushing. It’s hard to fathom people who are so far removed from humanity, who murder and rape without pause, who don’t let the screams of their victims reach their hearts.
We have seen this before, though the Holocaust begs no comparisons. But the Shoah that took more than 6 million of our people created within Jews the obligation to take action.
“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed,” Rowlett said, quoting American Jewish World Service president Ruth Messinger, who has long been a leader in the fight to save Darfur.
Rowlett and Messinger are not alone in their passion. In July 2004, one year into the genocide and before much of the world had taken note, the AJWS and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had organized the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York.
There, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel asked the audience, “How can a citizen of a free country not pay attention? How can anyone, anywhere, not feel outraged? How can a person, whether religious or secular, not be moved by compassion? And above all, how can anyone who remembers remain silent?”
“…Not to assist Sudan’s victims today would be for me unworthy of what I have learned from my teachers, my ancestors and my friends, namely that God alone is alone: His creatures must not be.”
This Shabbat falls in the April 2-9 Week of Prayer and Action for Darfur, part of the Million Voices for Darfur Campaign, which is sponsored by the Save Darfur Coalition.
Synagogues around the country will be saying prayers for the people of Darfur, devoting their divrei Torah to educating congregants, reading about God’s power and the sin of indifference, discussing our duty to rescue the powerless and the power of saving even one life.
As we gather, let us find not solace for our pain but channels for our fury. Let us gather not to feel safe in our separateness but to feel solid in our power as agents of justice and change.
“We have the historical imperative and the moral imperative. If we truly mean ‘never again,’ we have to mean never again for whoever the victims might be,” said Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, which is administering the Save Darfur Coalition of Wisconsin.
That coalition is working to organize transportation from Milwaukee to the April 30 Save Darfur: Rally to Stop Genocide in Washington, D.C. For more information about that rally, the local coalition or to add your name to its mailing list, contact Simon at 414-390-5735 or paulas@milwaukeejewish.org.
On Passover, we celebrate our freedom from slavery. We remember the days when our ancestors suffered in Egypt and we are thankful for our own liberation and self-determination. This Passover, let us dedicate ourselves to exercising that freedom in the duty of rescuing others.
Let our freedom be not in vain but for a pressing purpose. Let us live up to the lessons of our history and learn from the young members of our community, like Isaac Rowlett, who draws no distinction between compassion and action; he truly “walks the walk.”
As we sit with our family and friends at our seders this year, let us remember the people of Darfur and ensure that we will be unlike the Poles in those little villages overlooking Majdanek. And when our children and grandchildren ask what we did to stop the genocide in Darfur, we can say that we were not indifferent.
What can we do?
• Attend the April 30 Rally to Stop Genocide in Washington, D.C.
• Send a postcard to President Bush asking him to use his power to support a stronger multinational force to protect the people of Darfur. To see the postcard or order large quantities, go to www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org.
• Write letters to the editor of our daily newspapers.
• Write to senators and representatives, encouraging their action to protect the people of Darfur.
• Send a message to members of the U.N. Security Council. For more information, visit www.sudanactivism.com/un-petitions.html.
• Stay informed. For more information, contact Paula Simon of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, 414-390-5735 or paulas@milwaukeejewish.org.
Passover lessons are bitter and personal for Gush Katif expellee
By Sara Layah Fruchtman
Special to The Chronicle
Nitzan caravilla site, Israel — At the close of each Passover seder of my youth I passionately recited “Next year in Jerusalem,” drawing the conclusion that my place was here in Israel.
In adulthood my actualized dream became a bad dream. This year it is as a Gush Katif expellee at the Nitzan caravilla displaced persons site that my family, along with 470 former Gush Katif residents (some 2,000 people), will celebrate Passover.
We have no storage space, no closets, in our 90 square meter pre-fab caravilla. One wall in three of our four bedrooms is lined with large cardboard storage boxes containing religious and secular books, clothing, photo albums, framed family photographs, blankets, bedding, videotapes, music cassettes, and miscellaneous items. Once only our Passover dishes and cookware knew such hibernation.
In past years there was always such an air of excitement in readying the house for Passover. Spiffy clean and empty of chametz, the house was finally safe to bring down the Passover dishes from the attic.
My husband would climb up a ladder while the children and I held it securely for him. He would then pass down the dusty cardboard boxes, one at a time, to the children’s and my eagerly waiting hands. It was a group effort.
Now these very same boxes which once held such loftiness have assumed an ordinary status and resentfulness as they take away living space in my daughter’s bedroom.
The eventual removal of the many Passover boxes from her bedroom will not give any reprieve. Soon more cardboard boxes containing non-Passover kitchen supplies will take their place.
My husband’s reading and instruction of the hagaddah has always included a discussion. This year the Israeli government’s “disengagement plan” has given me a new outlook on Passover.
Certainly former Gush Katif residents were not enslaved nevertheless similarities can be drawn:
While we were taken out of Egyptian bondage by G-d’s strong and mighty hand, in this case the hand of the Israeli government carried us out of our homes, our Land.
Unlike then, we left without riches and belongings. Likewise the day of Gush Katifs’ evacuation left no time for our bread to rise in the oven. And once out of our territory the enemy gave chase.
Like then, we cried out and prayed to G-d. But G-d didn’t split the sea this time. Rather the enemy followed us with mortars and Kassem rockets. We were taken to hotels; a proverbial desert. Like then, we wanted to return to our land and former lives. Like then, we questioned our leadership.
Likewise some of the Passover symbolism assumes new food for thought:
• Matzah — A flat humble, modest bread. The caravillas, whether 60, 90, or 120 square meters are of a uniform, plain mustard color. They are pre-fab and modest.
• Chametz — Leavened foods are tasty and bring joy. Gush Katif was comprised of dynamic, vibrant growing communities. It was a major exporter of flowers and insect-free vegetables.
• Zeroah — A piece of roasted meat symbolizing the Passover sacrifice. Gush Katif and parts of the Shomron are like that sacrificial lamb.
• Maror — Bitter herbs remind us of the bitter hardship of our Egyptian bondage. Our bitterness is the Arabs’ targeting us with rocks, bullets, mortars, roadside bombs and Kassem rockets. We know about shrapnel in bodies, loss of limbs and deaths.
More maror is in the impotent government response: Bombing empty buildings and fields, and expelling us from our homes and our Land.
• Chazeret — More bitter herbs frequently symbolized by romaine lettuce. Though the leaves aren’t bitter, the stem is hard and bitter. Though former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is the father of the settlement movement, his “Disengagement Plan,” its execution, and aftermath is hard and bitter.
• Salt water — Our many tears.
This Passover, no matter how many bitter herbs we eat, we still won’t understand. There won’t be the past eager anticipation as the household changes over to a Passover atmosphere but there will be a passionate “May Jerusalem be rebuilt soon!”
We find hope in the encouraging words of our sages: In Nissan, Israel was redeemed; and in Nissan, [we] will be redeemed again!
Sara Layah Fruchtman was raised in Wisconsin. She along with her husband, seven children and pets lived in Neve Dekalim, Gush Katif, for more than a decade.
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