Uncategorized
How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
—
The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Turkey Expands Regional and Global Ambitions, Raising Alarm Bells in Israel
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkey is rapidly expanding its regional and global influence — strengthening ties with Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and the Gulf states, while pressing for a role in post-war Gaza — a trend that is raising alarm bells in Israel and the broader region amid shifting Middle East power dynamics.
As part of its push to expand regional influence and strengthen strategic partnerships, Turkey has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Syria, expanding their military cooperation to cover training, advisory support, and access to weapons systems and logistics.
On Thursday, Turkey’s Defense Ministry announced that Syrian armed forces have begun training at Turkish facilities and will also attend the country’s military academies, as both nations seek to deepen their defense ties.
Turkey’s push to expand its ties with Syria comes as the latter is reportedly in the final stages of negotiations with Israel over a security agreement that could establish a joint Israeli–Syrian–American committee to oversee developments along their shared border and uphold the terms of a proposed deal.
Ankara has also been working to establish closer diplomatic and military relations with Israel’s other northern neighbor, Lebanon, at a time when the country stands on the brink of renewed conflict with the Jewish state.
Amid mounting international pressure, the Lebanese government is intensifying efforts to meet the ceasefire deadline to disarm the terrorist group Hezbollah, while trying to avoid plunging the nation into a civil war.
As the Iran-backed terrorist group continues to refuse disarmament, Turkey is leveraging the opportunity to bolster its regional influence and expand its alliances.
Last week, Turkey’s Defense Ministry confirmed that the country’s peacekeeping forces would continue to support the Lebanese army in its mission to restore stability and peace.
“Ongoing efforts will focus on enhancing security in the region, promoting stability, and supporting the development of the Lebanese armed forces, with the goal of fostering and sustaining peace in Lebanon,” Turkish officials announced, following the approval of a two-year extension to their mission in Beirut.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who has been openly hostile toward the Jewish state for years – has repeatedly condemned Israeli offensives targeting the Iranian proxy and its terrorist operations in Lebanon.
He has previously said that Israel’s “genocidal” and “expansionist” policies remain the biggest threat to regional peace.
Ankara has also been working to expand its regional influence in the Gaza Strip, which borders Israel to the south, positioning itself to play a pivotal role in post-war developments under the US-backed peace plan.
However, experts warn that Turkey’s growing involvement in the enclave’s reconstruction efforts could potentially strengthen Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure and undermine the fragile ceasefire.
As one of the biggest backers of Hamas, Turkey could potentially shield the Islamist movement in Gaza or even bolster its power, especially as the Palestinian terrorist group continues to reject disarmament — a key element of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.
In the past, Ankara has provided refuge to Hamas leaders, granted diplomatic access, and allowed the group to fundraise, recruit, and plan attacks from Turkish territory.
Under Trump’s plan, Turkey has sought to join a multinational task force responsible for overseeing the ceasefire and training local security forces.
Erdogan declared that the country is “ready to provide all kinds of support to Gaza,” and insisted that the Turkish Armed Forces “could serve in a military or civilian capacity as needed.”
However, Israeli officials have repeatedly rejected any involvement of Turkish security forces in post-war Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Turkey’s participation in the International Stabilization Force would be out of the question, labeling it a “red line.”
Gulf states have also raised concerns about Turkish and Qatari involvement in Gaza’s post-war reconstruction and governance efforts.
While the Trump administration has ruled out sending US soldiers into the war-torn enclave, Washington has also considered involving Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Azerbaijan in the international peacekeeping efforts.
US officials have confirmed that any participating countries in the international task force will be selected in close coordination with Israel, ensuring that no foreign troops will be included without Israel’s consent.
Despite Turkey’s efforts to advance its regional ambitions in the enclave and secure a role in post-war Gaza, Erdogan continues to attack Israel while defending the Palestinian terrorist group, as he has repeatedly in the past.
He has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he describes as Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He has even gone so far as to threaten an invasion of the Jewish state and called on the United Nations to use force if Jerusalem fails to halt its military campaign against Hamas.
On Thursday, Erdogan reiterated his anti-Israel rhetoric, targeting Germany for its alleged indifference to what he called Israel’s “genocide, famine, and attacks” in Gaza.
In a joint press conference with his German counterpart, the Turkish leader said that it is the international community’s duty to end what he described as famine and massacres in Gaza.
ERDOĞAN: “HAMAS HAS NO BOMBS – ALL THESE WEAPONS ARE IN ISRAEL’S HANDS”
“Hamas has no bombs, no nuclear weapons. But all these weapons are in Israel’s hands.
And Israel, using these weapons, for example just last night, again struck Gaza with these bombs.
Don’t you see… https://t.co/Z5eDHq1exW pic.twitter.com/LoKHNHUIvC
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 30, 2025
Ankara’s regional ambitions have led the country to expand bilateral ties with Iran, seeking closer cooperation on political, economic, and security matters.
This week, Iranian and Turkish officials pledged to deepen their ties during high-level talks in Tehran — a move likely to raise further alarm bells, given both countries’ longstanding role of supporting Islamist terrorists and their hostile stance toward the West.
In a message to his Turkish counterpart, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stressed the importance of deepening mutual cooperation to strengthen security, development, and stability for both countries and the region.
Ankara has also engaged with Saudi Arabia in an effort to strengthen bilateral ties and secure Riyadh as a regional partner amid shifting power dynamics in the Middle East.
On Wednesday, Turkey’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Emrullah Isler, praised the growing defense cooperation between the two countries, including joint training and other initiatives, amid the signing of new agreements.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia “are key regional actors that share a commitment to peace, stability, and international law,” Isler wrote in a post on X.
“As reaffirmed by both countries during various high-level meetings, we are confident that our military cooperation will continue to grow in terms of both scope and depth,” he continued.
As part of Turkey’s push to expand its influence across the Middle East, Erdogan set out last week on a diplomatic tour to Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman.
During this official tour, he aimed to secure new trade, investment, energy, and defense deals, while also seeking regional support for his proposal to deploy Turkish troops in Gaza.
But Turkey’s efforts to boost its regional influence have also extended beyond the Middle East.
On Thursday, when Erdogan met with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, they discussed regional developments and exploring opportunities to strengthen their bilateral cooperation.
At a joint press conference, Merz described Turkey as a key partner for the European Union, noting that Berlin aims to help Ankara expand its relationships with other EU member states.
“I personally, and the German government, see Turkey as a close partner of the European Union. We want to continue smoothing the way to Europe,” the German leader said.
Uncategorized
Hamas Challenges Terrorist Designation in Australia, Citing International Law, Palestinian Rights
Demonstrators hold a banner during the ‘Nationwide March for Palestine,’ after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza went into effect, in Sydney, Australia, Oct. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
Hamas is mounting a legal challenge against the group’s terrorist designation in Australia, arguing that the listing breaches international law and provides legal cover for Israeli attacks on Palestinians — its second such attempt after a similar case in the United Kingdom.
Earlier this month, Hamas filed a legal petition seeking to be removed from Australia’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations, Australian media first reported on Friday.
Pro-Palestinian activist and radio host Uncle Robbie Thorpe filed the application in Australia’s Federal Court on behalf of the Palestinian Islamist group, claiming that its terrorist designation restricts freedom of political communication in the country.
In the lawsuit, Hamas contends that the government denied procedural fairness when reviewing its application to be removed from the terrorist list.
According to the application, Hamas was denied the chance to present evidence showing how the proscription “undermines Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, as well as the right to organized armed self-defense and resistance against the illegal siege of Gaza, illegal occupation, apartheid, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”
The filing also claims that the group’s terrorist designation undermined ceasefire negotiations and the implementation of any peace deal, while inciting “Israel to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“The ongoing proscription purports to declare as unlawful the armed self-defense of the Palestinian people against genocide carried out by the State of Israel, contrary to international law, and the armed struggle … for liberation from the unlawful occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the lawsuit says.
After its initial request was rejected, Hamas filed a follow-up application with the Federal Court and submitted a formal request to the Australian government seeking removal from the terror register, local media reported.
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, condemned Hamas’s legal action, saying it exposes a troubling level of support among some Australians for the terrorist group and its atrocities.
“Since Oct. 7 we have seen public expressions of support for Hamas as an organization and specific support for its invasion of Israel and the horrors that accompanied it,” Ryvchin told the Sydney Morning Herald, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel in 2023.
“Now we can see that even as a ceasefire and peace plan was being implemented, and the full terror of their crimes both against Israelis and the people of Gaza was becoming apparent, there were Australians doing Hamas’s bidding,” he continued.
“The fact that any Australians would put their names to a document aimed at lifting Hamas’s terror status and asserting its so-called rights should shock and alarm all of us,” he said.
In 2022, Australia designated all of Hamas as a terrorist organization, joining the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other nations, after previously listing only its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Once an organization is proscribed, it means Australians are legally prohibited from providing financial support, joining the group, or recruiting others on its behalf.
Earlier this year, Hamas sought to challenge the organization’s terrorist designation in the UK, prompting fierce criticism from British Members of Parliament and Jewish organizations.
Hamas filed a legal petition arguing for its removal from the country’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, describing itself as “a Palestinian Islamic liberation and resistance movement whose goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.”
“The British government’s decision to proscribe Hamas is an unjust one that is symptomatic of its unwavering support for Zionism, apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine for over a century,” the filing read. “Hamas does not and never has posed a threat to Britain, despite the latter’s ongoing complicity in the genocide of our people.”
Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, led thousands of Palestinian terrorists into southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. During the invasion, they murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped 251 hostages, and perpetrated widespread sexual violence.
Uncategorized
How Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin find grace in their shattered world
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin need no introduction. Since their son, Hersh, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, taken hostage in Gaza and, later, murdered by his captors, the American-Israeli couple have become, for many, the personification of an entire nation’s pain.
They didn’t want this. They surely didn’t ask for it. “We’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare,” Rachel said. And yet, it is precisely that fact, coupled with the almost supernatural grace they have brought to their international advocacy for Israel’s hostages, that helped make Hersh one of the most recognizable faces among the captives and why his death last year hit so hard.
It’s also why Jews have looked to them as exemplars of how to respond to one of the worst periods in Jewish history. Despite all they’ve gone through, and all they continue to endure, Hersh’s parents still see this as a moment of opportunity for cross-cultural connection.
“You’ve got your narrative, we’ve got our narrative,” Jon said. “You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You’ve got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You’ve got your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us. I still feel that way.”
The couple is speaking next week at the Z3 Conference in Palo Alto, California, near where they lived in Berkeley before moving to Israel in 2008. This interview, conducted by J. Jewish News of Northern California, has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of people here in the United States, and also in Israel, felt as if they knew Hersh after Oct. 7. Some did, but most of us didn’t. I wonder if you could tell us about him as a person, and what it was like to be his parents.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Hersh, obviously, was a curious citizen of the world. “Obviously,” just because that’s really what I’ve come to realize is the most apt way of describing him. He was always hungry for knowledge, but very much outside of the confines of normative learning. So school was not really interesting to him. He did enough to get by, but was always an underachiever in school. And yet he was this voracious reader about whatever subject was floating his boat. As a young kid, he was obsessed with geography, obsessed with American presidents, obsessed with Native American history, obsessed with the Civil War.
And as he became a young man — I still think of him as a boy. He was a very young 23. He had just turned 23 on Oct. 3, three days before we said goodbye to him and he went down to the Nova festival. He was obsessed with his favorite soccer club, his Jerusalem Hapoel soccer club. He loved trance music and music festivals, and used them as an opportunity to get to know and meet different people from all over the world. He was very committed to traveling by himself when he went to those festivals, because he said when you travel in a clump, then you stay in a clump. And he wanted to meet people from everywhere.
He was also a real professional listener, which I’ve grown to understand is such a rare gift that is hard to learn. I’m trying to learn it in his memory and as part of his legacy. To train myself to really be with whoever’s speaking and not be thinking, what am I going to say next? What do I want to share? What do I want to say? What do I want to ask? And he was not afraid of having those pauses in between when someone was speaking. He would digest it, and then he would react.
We’ve had so many people come to us in these past two years to tell us about little moments that they had with him that were special, because they really felt heard. And in this time of such challenge in civil discourse everywhere around the world, when the new way of speaking is screaming, it is, I realize now, a unique blessing.
Jon, I saw you recently wearing a T-shirt that had an image of Hersh, and under it the Hebrew phrase “yehi zichrecha mahapeicha” — may your memory be a revolution. What kind of revolution did you have in mind?
Jon: It’s not the revolution of taking to the streets with fires burning. It’s a revolution for good. Hersh really, really — in some ways, naively — wasn’t jaded, and really it’s a revolution for bringing more good to the world. I was walking down the street this summer with my daughter, and a man who we didn’t know stopped me and said, “Hey, Hersh’s dad” — that’s how he referred to me — “can I show you something?” And he shows me that the screensaver on his phone is a picture of Hersh. And he said to me, “Every morning the first thing I do is turn on my phone and look at this picture and say to myself: What can I do today to be better? What can I do today to make the world better?” And right then I said, that’s the greatest legacy a person can have.
Rachel: Hersh still believed in goodness and possibility. But he also was a realist. When he was in high school in 2014, a young Israeli Ethiopian man named Avera Mengistu wandered into Gaza and Hamas took him hostage. Hersh was 15 years old and he came home and he was beside himself. He couldn’t believe that people were not on the streets advocating for Avera Mengistu. There were four or five people who would stand up on this square at the top of Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem a couple times a week, and they reminded me of the people on the UC Berkeley campus lawn who say “No nukes” — like, six people with gray hair and long braids. And then there was a short, dark boy with big, black-framed glasses standing with them. And it was 15-year-old Hersh. [Mengistu was released by Hamas in February.]
The resonance of him being out there as a kid, protesting in the street to bring someone home from Gaza, is quite extraordinary.
Rachel: We said before he was a hostage, he was a hostage advocate.
You’ve become the personification of an entire nation’s trauma. Obviously, you never wanted to be symbols like this, but you are now. Can you talk about what it’s like to have people look to you in this way?
Jon: We talk about this a fair amount, and sometimes wonder, can we just go and escape in privacy somewhere? And the answer is, maybe — but not in Israel. Part of us just wants to do that. But another part of us is saying, this has been thrust upon us, this horrific, terrible personal tragedy that’s part of a national tragedy that’s part of a global tragedy. And somehow, largely due to Rachel’s eloquence, there are people who are strangely looking to us. And we’re saying we might need to embrace this. Because part of the story is also the lack of clarity, leadership, morality, voices of sanity in the world today. And if somehow, in some small way, we can be a little bit those voices, it’s so important that we need to do it.
Rachel: We all experience loss. It makes us human. It’s a commonality that we all have. What’s different about our experience is that it was so completely public, and that is really scorching. And it is definitely hard, you know? When we go out, we are kind of the trigger for people — we’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare. That is a sad thing to be. A lot of people see us and they can’t help but cry. And I know that they are coming at it from a place of empathy and love. They’re feeling our pain. But it’s difficult to have that when you’re walking down the street just trying to go wherever your destination is, and to have people crying along the way, whenever they see you.
Jon: To the extent that we, in some way, are offering strength to anybody out there, it’s symbiotic. I’m not asking that people start coming up even more on the streets to say things and hug us, bring things to our apartment. But that stuff that we’ve been experiencing for 751 days has been remarkably strengthening. We buried Hersh 419 days ago, and we continue to be strengthened by the people who come anonymously and leave baked goods by our door every Friday. We take so much strength from so many people around the world who think they’re taking strength from us.
Rachel: Everybody is holding everybody, and I feel like that is where we as the Jewish people are, and have to be, now. And I don’t care if your hair looks that way, and you cover your knees down to here, and you pray with this book, and you don’t pray at all. It doesn’t matter.
It seems that many believe what you’ve endured must afford you special insight into what’s going on in the Middle East. That you’re singularly able to see through the confusion, right into the heart of what’s happening. I’m wondering if the terrible price you’ve paid has given you any particular understanding that’s different from what you understood before Oct. 7.
Jon: We have definitely been, against our wishes, thrust into the underworld of geopolitics and how it works. We watch the news like everybody else, and we read newspapers like everybody else, and we now understand that there’s the story that we all look at and hear and are told, and [then there are] the things we see out there every day of how the world [really] works. And I wish we could unsee it but, unfortunately, we’ve now learned that the world works on concepts like interests and equities. Every leader has them. And sometimes those interests and equities align with the will of the masses. And sometimes there are other things at play. I don’t know what to do with this information, other than it’s a hard burden to carry to know this reality.
With all that being said, I go back to something that I thought on Oct. 6, 2023, and I still think it today. There’s a better way. There’s a better path. And despite the pain, despite the suffering, despite all the agony that so many have felt, we can’t lose sight of that better path. I always say, let’s pick a day and say, “We’re moving on. We’re only looking forward. You’ve got your narrative. We’ve got our narrative. You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You get your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us.”
You made aliyah in 2008. Can you tell me what it means for you to live in Israel? And I’m also curious if that meaning has changed over the course of the years you’ve lived there and specifically after Oct. 7.
Rachel: What really brought us here was very simple. Jon had said for years, we have an opportunity to be part of this giant Jewish experiment of living as a Jewish people in a Jewish homeland. We happen to be observant Jews who pray every day and we thought, how is it that every day we’re asking God to please allow us to return to Jerusalem? And Jon said, “We can go.” When you’re actually able to get on a plane and 12 hours later to be in this place, it started to feel inauthentic to be praying for that when we had the ability to do it.
So we came and we really did feel, and do feel, that we are privileged to live here. I certainly have had challenges all these years, because my Hebrew is not great, and I’ve felt like a fish out of water, and I’ve felt like a stranger in a strange land. And yet it’s my land. I feel privileged that I have lived here. I feel privileged that I raised children here. I feel privileged that my three children were and are bilingual, and that they had an opportunity and have the opportunity to still be part of this experiment.
We’ve had an enormous challenge thrust upon us. When I say us, I mean all of the nation of Israel and the people of Israel worldwide. But at the same time, with this great calamity comes extreme opportunity — extreme, extreme opportunity. And I pray that we will have the resilience, the recovery, the healing and the comfort that is needed to take this chance and make something really luminous.
Jon: You asked what we’ve learned or how things have changed. Something that’s become really clear to us, maybe to everybody in the world, is there is an intertwined sense between Israel and the Jewish people globally. We’re all connected, like it or not, and I would like to see us use this as an opportunity. How do we take this little country in the Middle East, this concept of an independent Jewish state with sovereignty and agency, and say, no matter who the government is, who the prime minister is, who’s in charge, this is a concept that’s bigger than us or any entity. How do we make this a source of pride and inspiration for all of us?
This is going to be your first time in the Bay Area since Oct. 7. What are you anticipating on coming here?
Rachel: Unfortunately, we won’t be there very long. But I know that it will be an embrace from the wonderful Bay Area Jewish community. We have felt the love and support and appreciate it. It sounds crazy to say that we feel it, but it’s like a visceral, tangible, tactile feeling of support and love. And we felt your confusion and we felt your pain and we felt your concern, and it helped us, and it touched us, and we will always feel a huge debt of gratitude to the Bay Area, because that’s where Hersh was born, and that’s where our older daughter, who’s younger than Hersh, that’s where she was born. They were both born at Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland. Jon and I had just gotten married, and we spent almost three years before Hersh was born in the Bay Area. It’s very much woven into the core of who we are. And I think in many ways, it was a foundation that made us strong as a unit in order to face this unbelievable mission that we are in now.
Jon: I just specifically want to bring it to Hersh for a minute and say, it’s amazing that we lived in the Bay Area for seven years. It left such an indelible, lasting mark on our identities. Hersh left the Bay Area when he was 3½ years old. He was blessed to grow up at Gan Shalom in Berkeley and to be part of Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and the Berkeley JCC. He lived 20 more years outside of Berkeley, yet Berkeley, California, and the Bay Area more broadly were such a prominent part of his personality, his thinking, who he was as a person. You could take the 3½-year-old out of Berkeley, but you can’t take the Bay Area out of the boy. It was the embodiment of so much about who Hersh was.
Rachel: I think it’s a lot of why he never liked to wear shoes.
I’m curious about the power of prayer. You talked about living in California and praying about returning to Jerusalem. Can you talk about your own approach to prayer now, and if that’s changed in any way — but also what it’s like to know that there are thousands of people you don’t even know praying for you every day?
Rachel: It absolutely works and is felt and is appreciated. And I am bottomlessly, endlessly grateful to the people who still have us in their prayers. Because I’m telling you, unfortunately, we need it. I think we might always need it.
I’m so thankful that I have prayer as a tool that I use daily. Every day, I open my eyes and immediately say the line that many Jewish people say upon waking, thanking God for giving me back my soul, and [saying] that God has tremendous faith in me, and that’s why I woke up this morning.
When I go to do my morning prayers, it’s such a relief. It’s the best therapy. You know, Rabbi Nachman, the famous mystical Kabbalist, said, “Life makes warriors out of all of us, and the most potent weapon is prayer.” And so I say to people, use it. Everyone has their pain, and we have this toolkit accessible to us. I pour my soul out in the morning, and then I can start my day. The question was, how has it changed since Oct. 7. I think I use it more. I lean on it more. I think that it’s more transformative. All of us have a different idea of God. What is God? Nobody knows what God is. It’s very confusing. But I have this idea of God, and I’ve been in a relationship with this idea of God. I’m so thankful, because when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn’t approaching a stranger. I’m thankful that I still have that and I’m grateful that people are shooting energy our way. I think it changes the sender and it changes the recipient.
This interview first appeared in J. Jewish News of Northern California. It is republished here with permission.
—
The post How Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin find grace in their shattered world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.