Day of pride, day of sadness
If Friday was the most amazing day I’ve ever had being a Jew, today was the most difficult.
This morning we visited Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem and saw the graves of Theodore Herzl, Yitzhak Rabin, and Golda Meir, among others. These were interesting sites to see, but the most moving part of the experience was when soldiers from our Birthright trip spoke up and told us stories of their friends who had been killed in the line of duty.
Omri, one of the soldiers on our trip, told the story of how his best friend fell. Tearing up, he told us that today was his friend’s birthday – he would have been 25.
Our tour guide, Kuti, who is in his early 40s, spoke about a good friend of his from yeshiva who was on the last plane of Jews from Iran to Israel before the Iranian revolt in 1979. He was the only member of his family to get out of Iran, and when the students left yeshiva every other weekend to go home for Shabbat, Kuti’s friend and the other Iranian refugees at the yeshiva would stay there because they had no family (except if they went home with a friend). When he was killed in battle, Iran granted his mother a 30-day leave of absence to attend the funeral. She couldn’t defect, Kuti explained, because the Iranian government was holding her family hostage while she was abroad.
That afternoon we went to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. The experience was less intense than our trip to the cemetery, I think because I had been drained of most of my emotions before we arrived. We spent four hours there and heard a survivor speak, and I learned a lot of history, but it took a back seat to that morning’s stories from the soldiers who have become my friends. Tomorrow, they leave our group and return to active duty. It’s frightening to come to the realization that they could end up buried in that cemetery in the not-too-distant future. But it’s also comforting to know that they are here in Israel fighting for our homeland, and that as long as they are here, we will always have a home away from home.
This will be my last blog post from Israel. Tomorrow night, we’re sleeping in a Bedouin tent in the south, and Wednesday night I’m flying the redeye back to New York City. I’m planning to write about those experiences either on the plane or during my 12-hour layover at JFK, so more to come, but not for a couple of days.
We visited the grave of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir at Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem.
07 Feb, 2011 >
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