Yom Hashoah

I was just sitting and working away when the siren went for Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). It has been many years since I was here for Yom Hashoah and I must have forgotten how intense the sound of the siren is or else I am closer to a siren station than I have ever been. It was a deeply powerful experience since the vibrations from the siren penetrate right into your body, shaking your bones as it were. Then it stops, but gradually with a sort of an exhausted and oddly organic moan which echoes for a few minutes as various sirens around the city die away, since something so penetrating cannot be cut off instantly. The sirens went off at 10:00 in the morning which has its own power because it gives you just enough time to get involved in your day-to-day activities and then get 'woken up' from them. I am at home and there is not much to see out the window here, no big roads with traffic coming to a standstill or crowds of people standing silently in a busy pedestrian walkway. What is extraordinary though is to look out at the little patch of the Jewish part of Jerusalem and consider that there are roughly the same number of Jews living in Israel today than died in the Shoah. A demographer recently published a report that said that there would be approximately 31 million Jews alive today if the Shoah hadn't happened in contrast with the 13 million today (That second number seems low to me and I am guessing it is using some slightly more restricted definition of 'Jew' than other demographers might use, but the point remains). It is hard not to imagine what differences there would be in Jewish life. How would our attitude to history be different? Our ideas about non-Jews? And Israel? What would the view look like out this window? All the good and also the bad that has been built here, would there be more apartment buildings, here, full of Jewish people living their domestic lives, hanging out their laundry on the line and sending their kids to daycare? Would there be fewer? Would there be a security fence encircling the city, snaking over the hills?
It is a beautiful time of the year in Jerusalem which adds to the power of the day. The city is in full bloom. Fields that were parched when we got here and only brown and grey are now bright green with lots of beautiful wildflowers, gigantic purple thistles and poppies, orange wild sweet peas. It is the season of smells here since the sun is bringing out every odor both good and bad. All the rosemary hedges are slowly baking and the lavender is flowering. When you walk by them, the bees look fat and happy and you think of the purple honey the must be making. The citrus trees are blossoming again and jasmine too which are very heady smells, so that you walk along the street and suddenly feel like you stepped into a pasha's pleasure garden in the thirteenth century and you look around and spot the culprit -- some orange or lemon tree or a bush with small white flowers -- looking very coy. As I said there are terrible smells emerging, too. I was pusing Lev in his stroller down Bethlehem Street past -- well, I won't mention the name of the restaurant -- which had had some kind of horrible bathroom malfunction and a giant vacuum truck was pumping out their septic tank or something.
It is public time in Jerusalem. With the warm weather everybody is out in the parks. Yesterday we celebrated Lev's birthday (a little late so that we could have a cake made from flour instead of Matzah meal). We did it in Gan HaPaamon (Liberty Bell Park) and it was packed. Mostly it was Palestinian/Arab-Israeli families who have a great culture of public barbeque picnics but there were a lot of Jewish teens out, too playing basketball and flirting and enjoying the warm (hot for Canadians) weather. There were sixteen-year-old girls on roller-blades looking very 'seventies, a pair of very put-together moms in hijabs, smoking a hukkah and blowing thick dragon-y plumes of smoke out their noses (I've never seen women smoking hukkah before). I saw the first Yiddish speaking Hasidic family I have come across in Jerusalem. We saw Japanese pilgrims. The park was just a great welter of people having a good time. Kids everywhere. We nearly lost a few but then the pizza came -- delivered to the park by our buddy from our local pizza store on a tus-tus -- and the kids all reconvened and we managed to hold on to them after that until everybody went home stuffed, filthy and high on sugar and fun.
Now, I have to go gear myself up for Benjy's questions about the Holocaust. We haven't ever talked to him about it because we always wanted his Jewish identity to be rooted in a sense of delight at being Jewish, not fear. It sort of crept up on us through school and he has been talking about it. He asked about relatives who were killed in the Holocaust and we told him that both of his grandmother's parents had been 'in the Holocaust' (How do you talk to a six year old about concentration camps. Or that his great grandparents wore tattoos for the rest of their lives? About how some people survived when others died and at what a terrible cost? How they didn't talk about what happened, ever?) I feel perfectly comfortable answering the questions about where do babies come from or about goldfish dying, but the question I am dreading is about the Shoah and it is "Why?"