Jerusalem — The peacefulness of the Shabbat just doesn’t fit. It is a beautiful day. I walked back from the Shabbaton held by the Jewish Agency for Israel, for a Shabbat nap.
It is a 30-minute walk past empty streets and into Sachar Park at the base of the Knesset. The park is filled with people picnicking, playing or strolling in the dappled sunlight beneath the Jerusalem pines.
Behind the fence giant schnauzers protect the government buildings and watch over us. Everywhere in Jerusalem are beautifully painted lions put up by the Jerusalem Foundation. The peace of the Shabbat is so deep in Jerusalem.
The newspaper pictures of the faces of the 31 innocents murdered in this city in the last four days haunt my steps. So what should those of us whose pictures are not in the newspapers do? Shall we just inhale the Sabbath breeze like amnesiacs wandering back to our asylum?
I keep thinking of what I’ve seen and heard these past weeks. The horror of innocent children blown into tiny pieces exceeds what any one can describe with words. The face of a five-year-old girl, Gal Eisenmann, smiling at me from the newspaper, particularly touched me. She could have been my own granddaughter.
She lived in Ma’aleh Adumim. She was murdered together with her grandmother, Noa Alon, 60, on French Hill near the bus stop. Penina Eisenmann, her mother, was holding Gal’s hand, while Noa Alon, her grandmother, wheeled her 18 month-old-brother in a baby carriage ahead of them.
I think of the Yad Vashem memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis. Each murdered child’s name is recited over and over in darkness lit by a candle. Gal Eisenmann’s name should not be snuffed out before she could even live.
Really about individuals
The Zionist group with which I attended the 34th World Zionist Congress has been trying to help in Ma’aleh Adumim, so the director of B’nai Zion called the mayor. How shall Gal’s name be remembered? The mayor sent his bulletproof car on Sunday to pick us up, and he drove us back to Jerusalem on his way to yet another funeral.
Ma’aleh Adumim is one of those settlements that some make out as an excuse for terrorism. It sits on the hills commanding the road as it climbs to Jerusalem. This is the road that leads to Iraq, Iran and other lovely neighbors we’ve got. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin drew up the original design for the city in 1975. I saw the wilderness before there was a city there.
Now there is a city of 27,000 that is 70 percent secular and 30 percent religious. It is essential to the defense of Jerusalem. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the disputed lands, he did not include Ma’aleh Adumim, nor will future prime ministers.
A new tunnel is under construction under Mt Scopus to where the Hyatt Hotel stands, because the present route is so often raked by gunfire. The tunnel wouldn’t have helped Gal. The bus connects at French Hill, a part of Jewish Jerusalem.
The federation emergency fund will help with terrorism prevention and victim relief. Everyone should give until it hurts to give more.
But we were looking for a specific way to perpetuate Gal’s memory with something positive and hopeful. The mayor of Ma’aleh Adumim said what would help most is a scholarship fund to help other children of the city continue their education.
After all the speeches and politics of the two international meetings I attended, everything is really about individual human beings; comforting the mourner, remembering the deceased as a blessing and doing all to see to it that the murderers are neither rewarded nor enabled to kill the next innocent. Whatever ones politics are, the shedding of innocent blood must never be rewarded.
The entire universe is in one human life. So this whole journey and all my feelings come down to Gal Eisenmann. The murderers will not obliterate her name.
It is a startling fact that at the present rate of murder it would take 50 years for the number of deaths to equal one day at Auschwitz. Am Yisrael has survived horrors even worse than the current horror.
Fifty years of this equals one day at Auschwitz, but haven’t we already forgotten Auschwitz? Until the bomber comes to our door….
Dare we forget Jerusalem and abandon it … until it all comes to our own door? And it most certainly will.
Herzl R. Spiro, M.D., Ph.D., recently returned from Jerusalem where he attended the 34th World Zionist Congress and the Assembly of the Jewish Agency for Israel at which he has helped represent Milwaukee for the past 20 years. He is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
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