On Friday, January 23rd I boarded an intercontinental flight. This year on Kivunim is full of such dramatic itineraries, but this one was particularly meaningful. I woke up Friday in an empty hotel room in Madrid; all my roommates had left for an early flight back to Israel. I met Kivunim’s director Peter Geffen in the lobby, and before I knew it we were on our way to the airport. We would be flying from Madrid to the United States.
The idea of coming home during the year had always been up in the air. My parents and I had flip-flopped several times between not wanting to ruin the momentum of the year and feeling that it was only logical that my international experience would have to include North America. Yet, on December 31st, as I stood on the beach of Eilat, the southern tip of Israel, killing time before a New Years celebration, the decision of whether or not to go home was taken out of our hands. My phone rang. When I heard Peter’s voice on the line, I thought for sure he was calling with an urgent security update as the situation in Gaza continued to unfold. But his voice carried a different tone altogether. He was calling with an invitation for me to speak at the United Nations. After months of hopping from country to country, I would be going home and visiting international territory—perhaps the best expression of my goals for the year.
He had presented an excerpt of my writings about our trip to Greece and Bulgaria (from Routes to Roots entry “The Routes Less Traveled By”) at a Kivunim Board meeting. One of the Board members, who directs the UN’s Global Teaching and Learning Project, thought it would be appropriate for me to speak at this year’s annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust at the UN. By coincidence, this year’s week of commemoration programs would include a briefing on Sephardic, and specifically Greek, Jewry during the Holocaust. Sitting on the panel would be the Greek Representative to the United Nations; an Oxford professor of modern Greek linguistics and son of a Greek Holocaust survivor; and a Holocaust survivor from Salonika, one of the most significant places in our travels to Greece. At a briefing on such an unlikely subject—as far as mainstream Holocaust commemoration is concerned—I would be playing the unlikely role of youth representative.
From the moment I hung up the phone with Peter, I began to grapple with how best to approach such an assignment. I realized that the only way to have integrity as a young speaker in such a forum would be to try as hard as possible to connect to the enormity of the topic. I knew I wasn’t even close to being an expert, but at the same time I realized that I was part of a small handful of people my age who had been exposed to the stories of the Greek Jews. I had to put my voice in context.
As Thursday, January 29th, the day of the briefing, approached, I became more and more humbled by the subject matter. I tried to reflect as honestly as possible on the Holocaust in general and on the specific stories of the Greek Jews. I read other commemorative pieces about the Holocaust, seeing how people had broached the topic in the past. I tried to combine my own personal philosophy and family stories, the goals of Kivunim, and my experiences into a presentation that would express a representative perspective on the Holocaust, from a Jew, an American, and a member of Kivunim and my generation. I would explore how the importance of constantly striving to enrich our perspective and collective memory of the Holocaust represents the broader importance of keeping these lesser-known stories alive in general—and how that relates to the many challenges that face my generation, in the Jewish community and beyond.
By the time my parents and I arrived in New York, the fact that I was speaking had become real enough that the final touches on my speech fell into place—though I’ll admit they often had to be dropped several times before they fell the right way. It had been quite a powerful and eye-opening experience to immerse myself in the Holocaust commemoration mindset, and this process led me to places of equal parts sadness and hopefulness, intimidation and resolution.
It was the second time I had ever been to the United Nations building. The first time was last summer as a counselor for a global activism program at my summer camp Tel Yehudah. My parents and I met family and friends who had come in for the briefing, and then we made our way to the room where it would take place. The room resembled a miniature version of the General Assembly. There were between 300 and 400 seats, each of which had a desk and a microphone. The seats wrapped around the stage at the front, where a series of microphones were set up with the names of the panelists and our moderator. I felt the buzz that I had felt before public appearances in the past—the nerves giving way to shear excitement.
I was the fourth and final speaker of the day, so I sat and listened to the other panelists for about an hour. I was glad to have this opportunity to take in the mood of the event and continue to put my perspective in context. Between viewpoints ranging from the political to the academic to the powerfully personal, the vibe in the room was somber and meditative—the feeling of a room full of people engaging in an experience of collective learning and introspection. Once I began to speak I felt right at home. I felt at peace with the voice I had found on the subject, and I felt even further endeared to my experiences in Greece. After the hour-and-a-half of question-and-answer time following my speech, during which the audience and panelists got to know each other and their perspectives better, I talked briefly with a few representatives of different NGOs who had come to the event. Then it was off to lunch with the family before heading back to the airport and Israel.
Today words cannot do justice to how grateful I feel to have had the opportunity, and the responsibility, to reflect on the questions that the briefing presented. If this blog has been a meaningful way to process and get more out of my experiences in retrospect, then preparing for the briefing was the epitome of such a learning experience—forcing me to reexamine not only past experiences, but also a deeper past that I feel I have a responsibility to face. I feel truly lucky to have seen how my philosophy and Kivunim’s vision fit into a professional context. As much as I have felt so fortunate to be able to explore both my Jewish identity and my curiosity in the world in tandem on Kivunim, to be able to address Jewish questions that I believe transcend the Jewish world at the United Nations, of all places, was a symbolically fitting and humbling format for what has been one of my greatest privileges.
My experience at the UN was not a climax but a jumping-off point to continuing to explore the challenges that face my generation and the concrete lessons we can learn from our past—perhaps especially when it comes to the Holocaust. Whether we like it or not, these past events come to define entire cultures and public discourses. However, the quality of that definition can only be determined by how we embrace our history and evaluate it as a means to get the most out of our present and future. This, I think, represents the meaning of commemoration—as a deliberate effort to reflect and set goals, striving not to take history for granted and live conscientiously for the future. Today I have renewed conviction to continue the journey and find further meaning in the stories that we tell ourselves.
The video webcast of the briefing can be found here: http://www.un.org/webcast/SE2009.html
Just look under January 29, 2009: NGO Briefing on "The Sephardic Jews in Greece: The Untold Story" in Observance of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
Below is the full text of my prepared remarks from the event:
Good morning. Firstly, I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to Maria-Luisa Chávez, Bill Yotive, and everyone at the United Nations Department of Public Information, who have afforded me the opportunity to speak here today. Also, efharisto to Ambassador Alexandrakis, Professor Benmayor and Mr. Mullah. I am honored and humbled to be here with you today. I would especially like to thank Peter Geffen, the Director of Kivunim: New Directions. Peter, today I speak on behalf of my peers when I say thank you for being our leader, our educator-in-chief, and an inspiration to us all.
It is truly an honor to have been asked to participate in this discussion. As an 18-year-old Jew from Boston with Eastern European ancestry, I feel I would be remiss not to acknowledge that I must seem like an unusual candidate to be speaking at an event focused on commemorating Sephardic and specifically Greek Jewry during the Holocaust. Of course I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on the topic, but the recent contact I have had with the powerful stories of the Greek Jews has revealed to me what I consider to be some of the most pressing questions facing my generation of Jews, as well as issues that transcend the Jewish world altogether—challenges we all face now as we move into the next chapter of history and Holocaust commemoration.
As a student on the Israel-based gap-year program Kivunim: New Directions, over the course of the past four months I have had the privilege of being exposed to a broad view of the Jewish people, an exploration of our history and culture that includes study of various Jewish communities that all too often lie outside the consciousness of North American Jews and the general mainstream Jewish narrative. These studies are part of a rich academic curriculum that includes Hebrew and Arabic language studies, along with a Middle East Studies course that explores the history, politics and culture of the region through Jewish and Arab lenses. The more my peers and I learn the more conscious we are that any year-long study of history and culture can really only touch the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, this exposure feels increasingly significant, as we, many of whom have had over a decade of formal Jewish education, find these lesser-known threads of the Jewish narrative providing poignant addenda to our concept of what it means to be Jewish, developing parts of our Jewish identity that we never knew existed.
Such a sense of awe in deliverance from ignorance is perhaps most potent when our studies touch on the Holocaust. Having left hardly any Jewish families on earth unaffected, and having led to watershed changes in the life and geography of those families, the Holocaust is an endlessly challenging subject that makes up much of the bedrock upon which modern Jewish identity develops. As an only child, I grew up with the story of how my great-grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Perlstein, the youngest of twenty-two siblings and the only one to emigrate from Poland prior to the Holocaust, ended up also being the only one to escape the family’s fate at Auschwitz. Yet today, observing Tuesday’s anniversary of the European liberation of Auschwitz, I feel the roots of my Jewish identity reaching into that bedrock that is the Holocaust, and wrapping around it in entirely new ways.
In the last week of this past November, Kivunim took its first international trip of the year, visiting Greece after a month of studying the roots of Jewish life there and its intersection with the broader history and culture of the country, as part of our World Jewish Civilizations course. As we walked the streets of Salonika, which before Kivunim most of us had never even heard of let alone linked to our Jewish heritage, we tried to imagine the city teeming with Jewish life—a place where for centuries one out of every two people we met on the street could have been a Jew. For the first eighteen years of my life, any international consciousness of my Jewish identity had been largely focused on the relationship between the United States and Israel, so standing in a synagogue with Jews chanting familiar prayers in the middle of Greece was a dramatic revelation in itself. Yet it was really only when the congregation at one point began to pray in Spanish, or more accurately, Ladino, that I began to feel how deep this new avenue toward the heart of Jewish history could go.
As we met with the small remaining Jewish community in Salonika, perhaps the only thing as powerful as what we saw was what was missing. Indeed, as remarkable as it was to experience Jewish life in Greece, the fact that it felt we were saying goodbye to the Jews of Salonika no sooner than having met them was not just a function of the briefness of our visit. As we stood in Liberty Square, where the deportation of Salonika’s Jews was preceded by unconscionable public humiliation, we imagined how uprooted, terrified and betrayed these people must have felt. Just behind us was the port, which used to close early on Fridays because even the stevedores in this city were Jewish, and they too observed the Sabbath. To have to celebrate our discovery of this past center of Jewish culture, where Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 had found a new home under the Ottoman Turks, and at the same time mourn the loss of ninety percent of its nearly 50,000 Jews, who were taken to Auschwitz in 1943, was positively wrenching. Realizing that so many hundreds of Greek Jewish families were at one point together with my own in that particular concentration camp, personalized their stories, challenging and enriching my own.
As incredibly unique and unexpected the richness of Jewish life in Salonika was, it would appear to contribute to an easy assumption that Greece was just one more European country that willingly gave up its Jews to the Nazis. Yet, while the horrors are certainly real and unimaginable, we would learn that the reality is truly not so simple. In contrast to the apologetic air in Salonika’s Liberty Square, we were shocked to find that the Holocaust memorial in Chalkida, a struggling community that claims to be the oldest community of Jews in Europe, pays tribute to the Greek Orthodox Bishop Grigorios, who hid many sacred objects from their synagogue in his church and facilitated the protection of ninety percent of Chalkida’s Jews. This moving example of courage in the non-Jewish Greek community, in the face of Nazi threats against their Jewish neighbors and anyone found assisting the Jews, was not unique. We learned of Greek Archbishop Damaskinos, who was responsible for saving thousands of Jews through initiatives to produce false baptismal certificates from the Greek Orthodox Church and appeal directly to the Germans, namely in the form of a letter written by the famous Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos that was signed by many prominent Greek citizens. “In our national consciousness,” he wrote, “all the children of Mother Greece are an inseparable unity: they are equal members of the national body irrespective of religion or dogmatic differences.” (He is speaking about Greece. Perhaps today we could expand this statement to represent not only our ideals for minorities in all nations, but for the equality of all peoples around the world.) These uplifting stories of heroism amidst such excruciatingly painful and threatening circumstances continue to remind us of humanity’s potential for redemption even in the darkest of times. It is truly difficult to recognize now how little is known not just of these places, but these stories in particular—and not just among Jews, but Greeks and other students of the Holocaust as well.
Of course, when it comes to the Holocaust, in the end the pressure to settle for simplification is great. It is certainly easy to despair. While there are examples of courage and resolute moral principle in the face of senseless persecution, it is sometimes difficult to keep them in mind amidst the obvious and overwhelming devastation. The sheer numbers of dead and the inconceivable actions of human beings against others challenge our capacity to accept the reality of this tragic chapter of human history. Indeed, when we allow ourselves to lose track of the strands of courage, the instinct to preserve the Holocaust as merely a symbol of evil in our memory can be an excuse to neglect the exploration of its inevitable nuance. We may begin to shy away not just from the examples of hope, but also from the depth and darkness of the individual stories, the diversity of the people, and the ultimate acknowledgement that even though those involved may have been dehumanized—both as perpetrators and as victims—we must not distance ourselves from them to the extent that we do not learn from the Holocaust as a human tragedy that relates to us all—perhaps especially now in our interconnected and technologically advanced 21st century world.
This cuts to the core of why it has been such an important experience for me and my peers to be exposed to the stories of Greek Jewry. Kivunim’s mission to educate us about the Jews who live and have lived in countries and cultures of the world beyond our limited experience is not only an effort to broaden our sense of what it means to be Jewish, but also to foster the development of what our mentor Peter calls “world consciousness,” a term that I have come to define as a commitment to the challenges of embracing both the complexities and commonalities among us. If anything, Kivunim has taught me that the story of the Jewish people can be a model for the story of humanity, of a group with seemingly endless diversity and fragmentation combined with an ultimately common core identity. Perhaps, these experiences suggest, despite the many challenges that we currently face, the roots of the Jewish people’s transnational history and present day life may in fact embody the ideals for which the United Nations itself ultimately stands.
During our study-tour to Greece, we visited a synagogue in the town of Veria, which has been essentially entirely empty of Jews since World War II. As the 51 of us held a short prayer service, we quite literally brought the synagogue back to life. Perhaps never in its entire history had it housed a congregation made up entirely of so many young Jews—let alone Americans. Being in Veria gave us a special sense of humbled empowerment, reminding us that the processes of history and society that seem to transcend us all as individuals really cannot happen without us. However, foreshadowing the slow disappearance of many other Jewish communities around the world like Salonika and Chalkida, whose stories lie outside the mainstream Jewish consciousness, Veria is an example to us all of how important it is not to take anything for granted. For if we are not careful to move forward conscientiously, our history can easily slip out of memory.
When the day comes that my children are old enough to learn about the Holocaust, any remaining Holocaust survivors will likely not have been old enough during the War to remember much from its darkest days. So today members of my generation and I ask ourselves: when that day comes—and it is on its way—will we remember the Holocaust? Will we remember the Jews in places like Salonika, whose communities have all but fallen off the map because of their decimation? Of course memory can never be truly perfect, but will we have risen to the challenge of forging a collective memory that is rich in detail and perspective? Will we have succeeded in broadening our sense of who we are and where we stand in the process of history? Will we have learned to balance appreciation for both complexity and commonality, difference and similarity, tragedy and redemption, specifics and the big picture? For me these questions are at the core of the many seemingly pivotal tasks that appear to hinge on the aptness and agency of my generation—not just of Jews, not just of Americans or of Greeks, but of all peoples. Thank you.
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