Pausing to reflect has been a rarity lately as the miles have racked up during business and family trips. Everywhere there is a sense of change, an awareness of losses sustained and those to come on the one hand, and the need and potential for growth on the other.
In California we visited our son, one of thousands of college graduates scrabbling to gain traction in an economy not so welcoming to young men with liberal arts degrees. He’s working for several restaurants, paying his bills, and wondering what to do next. Will he go back to school? Will some other opportunity knock? As parents we wonder, thankful that if he needs a roof over his head, we have one to offer.
Not everyone is so fortunate, which is all the more reason to support JUF, whose J-Help: A Boost in Tough Times initiative is aiding those struggling to pay mortgages, utilities, and other expenses.
Visiting relatives in Cleveland we saw block after block of devastated housing, shuttered stores, and decaying industry. Gutted buildings stand amidst the weeds like neglected tombstones, marking the passing of prosperity. But there among the blight were signs of hope in the form of Cleveland’s curious crop of splendid restaurants, clubs, and bars, their neon lights audacious and optimistic in the gloom. Cleveland never will be what it once was; it will become something else, and my civic-minded relatives, who support the city’s down-but-not-out Jewish community, believe it will be sustainable.
In Israel on a visit to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev a surge of optimism overtook me. Be’er Sheva, not long ago a sleepy desert outpost, has become a bustling city where cutting edge research in health sciences, environmental technology, and a host of other fields has taken flight (see story, page XX). Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa, Weizmann Institute of Science… for a country of less than 7.5 million citizens, Israel has eight world-class universities and nearly three dozen academic colleges.
Is hope alive in the Jewish state? Absolutely. And thanks to Israeli research and new technology product development, there’s hope for the world in taming diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s, in developing renewable energy, and in squeezing benefit from every precious drop of water.
Speaking of water, over Pesach we were in Amsterdam to visit our daughter and to see relatives. To be a Jewish visitor to a city that was once a major Jewish mercantile center, but which now has practically no Jewish presence, evokes a whole spectrum of emotions.
Indeed the cast of characters who came together on our visit somehow spoke volumes about the Jewish condition, past and present.
Our daughter, who is studying in Krakow, came up from Brussels where she had seder with my wife's cousin, Chip, and his family. Chip moved to Israel from Ohio when he was 11, when my wife's aunt and uncle made aliyah. There he met his wife Matti, the daughter of Jews from the Island of Rhodes, who had escaped the Holocaust in Congo when it was under Italian rule. After the war Matti's family moved to Belgium, where she grew up before moving to Israel. Chip and Matti moved to Brussels from Israel six years ago; their two sons have Israeli, American, and Italian passports.
My daughter in Poland is visiting places where her great-grandparents on both sides were born and lived before fleeing as refugees to America. At Auschwitz she saw a photograph of a woman—a relative?—with the same rare, Hebrew family name as my maternal grandfather.
Nowhere, it seems, do unbroken Jewish roots run deep. And so many of the places where we dig for them harbor shadows. Always when visiting Europe there is the specter of the hunt, the corral and the slaughter of Jews. About 105,000 of Holland's 140,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
The line to the Anne Frank house wound around the block but we weren’t among the visitors. The simple answer is, we didn’t want to spend our limited time waiting in line with European tourists assuaging some vague sense of guilt. The harder answer is, we know very well how Anne's story ends and had little stomach to see the place where she and her family hid and were hunted down.
In this transitional time many stories are ending while others are beginning. The chapters yet to be written are compelling: we don’t know where they’ll lead but glean what's at stake. We are the ones who must write them; as Jews, however far we wander, let's continue to write them together, as we have since the beginning of the journey.
Want to tell your story? Write to aaroncohen@juf.org.
