ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION
May 10, 2011
Over 10,000 supporters of Israel will gather on May 10, 2011 to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. The Israel Day celebration will begin at 11:00 am at Phillips Square.
This multi-cultural event is the largest of its kind in Canada and draws Montrealers–Jews and non-Jews alike—together in support of Israel.
At 11:45 am the gathering will proceed with a march from Phillips Square along Rene Levesque to Place du Canada. Adam Stotland and his band as well as Israel's own Mey Orav Tel Aviv group, will provide the music for song and dance. Greetings to the assembly on behalf of Israel and Canada will be delivered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
For more information, visit the event’s official website, http://www.israeldaycelebration.com.
EACH MAN HAS A NAME
Each man has a name, given him by
G-d, and given him by his father and
mother. Each man has a name given
him by his stature and his way of
smiling, and given him by his clothes.
Each man has a name given him by the
mountains and given him by his walls.
Each man has a name given him by the
planets and given him by his neighbours.
Each man has a name given him
by his sins and given him by his
longing. Each man has a name given
him by his enemies and given him by
his love. Each man has a name given
him by his feast days and given him by
his craft. Each man has a name given
him by the seasons of the year and
given him by his blindness. Each man
has a name given him by the sea and
given him by his death.—Zelda Mishkovsky, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, The Viking Press and Penguin Books, 1981, Pg. 558.
THE VOLUNTEERS OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, 1948
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of Malca z’l
In honor of IDF warriors in all Maarahot Israel
As Israel celebrates its 63rd Independence Day, our thoughts are directed towards the unforgotten heroes of Mahal—Mitnadve Chutz La’aretz—the military organization of the foreign volunteers who fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Today, and always, we remember all the volunteers, Jews and non-Jews, from all parts of the world, who flocked to the gates of the as yet unborn State of Israel, to offer their services as part of the Israel Defense Forces.
The story is dramatic, and incredible. Five thousand volunteers were organized after the United Nations General Assembly, in November 1947, recommended the partition of Palestine. Jewish ex-servicemen in so far off places as here in Canada heeded the call to fight for the newly-created State of Israel. In the United States and Scandinavia, Jews contacted and recruited Shlichim, foreign representatives of the Haganah, who worked under cover, to return to Israel to defend the infant Jewish State. In South Africa, fighters were organized after the arrival of a Jewish Agency representative, who had previously contacted the South African Jewish Servicemen Association.
By early 1948, volunteer organizations existed in most Jewish communities in the Western world. The majority of volunteers were channelled through training camps in France and Italy. Most of them were WWII veterans.
Approximately 150 Mahal volunteers were killed in action during Israel’s War of Independence, the majority of whom were from the United States and Canada. Of the estimated five thousand volunteers, close to three hundred settled in Israel after the war.
On this solemn day, I call upon everyone to remember the Mahal volunteers’ unique contribution to our beloved and incredible State of Israel; the eternal home of all Jews all over the world.
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
NATION MOURNS 22,867 FALLEN SOLDIERS AS SIREN SOUNDS
Yaakov Katz & Jpost.com
Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2011
The nation bowed its head Sunday evening for Remembrance Day, mourning the 22,867 servicemen and—women who fell defending the land of Israel since 1860—the year the first Jews left Jerusalem’s Old City walls to settle other parts of the country.
In the past year, 183 soldiers and security personnel died while serving the state. The figure includes the Prisons Service victims of the Carmel fire.
Remembrance Day officially began at 8 p.m. Sunday when a one-minute siren sounded across the country. President Shimon Peres opened the state ceremony at the Western Wall, which was attended by Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz and representatives of bereaved families.
“We didn’t seek war. It was imposed upon us. But when we were attacked, we didn’t have the possibility to lose, even one war. And when we won, we returned to seek peace,” Peres said at the ceremony.…
On Monday, when a two-minute siren sounds at 11 a.m. nationwide, the day’s main memorial ceremony will begin at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery. A special ceremony for overseas Mahal volunteers who fought and died during the War of Independence will take place at the Mahal memorial near the Sha’ar Hagai Junction.
Ceremonies will be held at an additional 43 cemeteries, and the Defense Ministry said it expects over 1.5 million people to visit soldiers’ graves throughout the day.
In honor of Remembrance Day, the Defense Ministry has placed a miniature flag and black ribbon on the graves of all fallen soldiers. On Wednesday, Gantz laid a flag on the grave of the latest soldier to have died during his service—Cpl. Niot Watzman from the Golani Brigade, who was killed during a diving accident on vacation in Eilat in April.
“Israel’s renewal was achieved through a rare combination of vision and action, but in order for it to materialize, generations of soldiers and commanders needed to fight and fall,” Gantz said.…
I MISS YOU, ALWAYS
Karnit Goldwasser
Ynet News, May 9, 2011
It’s sad. Sad and painful.
I see how it starts, a week before Memorial Day, after Holocaust Remembrance Day ends. I see how the air changes and the colors turn grim; I see the country withdrawing into its pain; into its bloody history.
As for myself, I have been sad since the moment we bid farewell to each other. And that happened almost five years ago, in July 2006.
His story is yet another standard story about an almost 31-year-old guy who left his family, his wife, his studies and his job and went to safeguard the homeland. People like him are referred to as “salt of the earth.…”
Udi managed to return to his homeland after two difficult years. He was returned in order to be buried in the place where he was born, grew up and got married. He was my man. He still is. Upon his burial, the counting of a new time started. A different life got underway.
They say time heals the wounds and that it’s the best cure for pain. For me, it’s different. Time taught me how to live with the pain and sorrow; how to laugh, be happy, get excited and revitalize along with it. How not to fear it. Time allows me to learn how to live with the wounds created upon his departure. Yet, for me they will never heal. A scar that will never heal shall remain in my heart.…
Had it been possible to go back in time, I could have said goodbye properly or maybe not say goodbye at all.
On Memorial Day, the whole country stops and remembers its sons and daughters; the ones whom we, the bereaved families, remember every day, every hour. We miss them always, just like we do every day.
When Independence Day starts, and the flags are again raised to full staff, happiness returns to the streets, and to me as well. Only I’m left with a crack.
(Karnit Goldwasser is the former wife of fallen IDF reservist Ehud Goldwasser, whose remains were returned to Israel two years after being abducted in a cross-border raid by Hezbollah terrorists.)
LETTER FROM A FRIEND TO A FALLEN HERO
Hillel Fendel
Arutz Sheva, May 9, 2011
Noam Apter, 23, a student in Yeshivat Otniel on leave from the army, was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on a winter Sabbath night in late 2002, together with three of his friends. The four were caught in the kitchen of the yeshiva’s dining room on kitchen duty, and Noam heroically locked the dining room door in order to save his dozens of friends eating the Sabbath meal. The terrorists were unable to open the door separating them from the other students, though they kicked, banged, and shot at it. “I do not know how to explain that a person closes himself up inside [to save his friends], knowing that he will die,” said one of the yeshiva staff afterwards.
In honor of Memorial Day, his friend Avishai Mizrachi wrote the following letter.…
Noam:
You would certainly be amused if you knew that I was writing about you. Your smile still appears to me from every direction; you had good-natured eyes, with a spark of mischievousness playing about them. If those accursed terrorists only knew how much innocence and softness they were taking.… If they would have received a soul for just a moment, they would likely have turned away.…
What did you think to yourself there? Tell me, what were you thinking when you locked the doors of the kitchen and closed yourself and your life up and exposed your body to the terrorist fire, and saved tens, tens of your friends? From where did you get the strength, the daring?
For we were together in the same room in Kfar HaRoeh [yeshiva high school], six of us, on three bunk-beds in a crowded room. We laughed so much together, and hiked, and talked about profound things deep into the night. You would always return from Shabbat in your parents’ home with new insights, with interesting thoughts. How did you suddenly turn into a hero? Into a photo in the newspaper? Into words engraved on a tombstone?
And that dark, stark night, the end of the holy Sabbath. Whispers of rumors were heard that there had been an attack in Otniel. I prayed so much that you were not there—but my prayers went unanswered. I traveled from Kiryat Shmonah [in the north] down to the cemetery in Shilo for your funeral, a long night with tears flooding my eyes. To see your friends in the army, with red berets, paratroopers’ wings, carrying your coffin in silence.… And your father humming next to you a last Sabbath song with tearing eyes, “He who keeps the Sabbath, the son and the daughter, will be pleasing to G-d like a [Holy Temple] skillet offering.…”
Noam, the world did not stop, even after your death. Its heart is still beating wildly, and did not stop even upon hearing your last dying gasps. People here, in this world, love life and repress the finality that awaits us, the death that is waiting to come upon us. And you, you are most certainly enjoying yourself there among the angels and seraphim in that other world, the eternal world, the one that is hidden from the eyes of all thinkers.
Yours,
Avishai
WHO CAN COUNT THE DUST OF JACOB
Daniel Greenfield
Canada Free Press, May 9, 2011
“Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel.” Numbers 23:10.
The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking arms and the country’s own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror—Israel’s Memorial Day.
What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war. Where remembrance means adding the toll of one year’s dead and wounded to the scales of history. A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To stand watch or run away. It is not so much the past that is remembered on this day, but the present and the future. The stillness, a breath in the warm air, before setting out to climb the slopes of tomorrow.
Who can count the dust of Jacob. And yet each memorial day we count the dust. The dust that is a fraction of those who have fallen defending the land for thousands of years. Flesh wears out, blood falls to the earth where the red daisies grow, and bone turns to dust. The dust blows across the graves of soldiers and prophets, the tombs of priests hidden behind brush, the caverns where forefathers rest in sacred silence, laid to rest by their sons, who were laid to rest by their own sons, generations burying the past, standing guard over it, being driven away and returning each time.
On Memorial Day, the hands of memory are dipped in the dust raising it to the blue sky. A prayer, a whisper, a dream of peace. And the wind blows the candles out. War follows. And once again blood flows into the dust. A young lieutenant shading his eyes against the sun. An old man resting with his family on the beach. Children climbing into bed in a village beneath the hills. And more bodies are laid to rest in the dust. Until dust they become.…
But there is no counting the dust. And when we walk the length and breadth of the land, as the Maker told Abraham to do, it’s the dust that supports our feet. We stand upon the shoulders of giants. We walk in the dust of our ancestors.…
The [Jewish] calendar itself is a memorial. After Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day, Lag BaOmer, the commemoration of the original Yom Yerushalayim, the liberation of Jerusalem from the Romans, still covertly remembered in bonfires and bows shot into the air. Remembering a victory turned into a defeat and encoded in a story about a plague caused by a lack of brotherhood. That lack was very real and the plague took the form of swords and spears. All in a season that begins with Passover, the exodus that set over a million people off on a forty year old journey to return to the homeland of their forefathers.
The battles today are new, but they are also very old. The weapons are new, but the struggle is the same. Who will remain and who will be swept away. Some 3,000 years ago, Judge Jephthah and the King of Ammon were exchanging messages not too different from those being passed around as diplomatic communiques today. The King of Ammon demanding land for peace and the Judge laying out the Israeli case for the land in a message that the enemy would hardly trouble to read before going to war.
Take a stray path in these hills and you may find a grinning terrorist with a knife, or the young David pitting his slingshot against a lion or bear. This way the Maccabees rush ahead at the armies of a slave empire, and this way a helicopter passes low overhead on the way to Gaza. Like Dali’s melting clocks, time is a fluid thing here. And what you remember, you shall find.
The soldier is not so sacred as he once was. The journalist and the judge have taken his place. The actors sneer from their theaters. The politicians gobble their free food and babble of peace. Flowers in gun barrels and doves everywhere. But the soldier still stands where he must. The borders have shrunk. The old victories have been exchanged for diplomatic defeats. From the old strongholds come missiles and rockets. And children hide in bomb shelters waiting for the worst to pass. This is the doing of the journalist and the judge, the politician and the actor, the lions of literature who send autographed copies of their books to imprisoned terrorists and the grandchildren of great men who hire themselves on in service to the enemy.…
In a land built on memory, it is possible not to remember, but it is impossible to entirely forget. Memory becomes a desperate burden that some are only too happy to cast off.…
Yet though men may forget, the dust remembers. And the men return to it. For some four thousand years they have done it. And they shall do it yet again. For He who has made men of the dust and made worlds of the dust of stars does not forget. As the stars turn in whirling galaxies and the dust flies across the land, so the people return to the land. And though they forget, they remember again. For the dust is the memory of ages and the children shall always return to the dust of their ancestors.
In the cities, towns and villages—the dead are remembered. Those who died with weapons in their hands and those who just died. Men, women and children. Drops of blood cast to the dust, reborn as flowers on lapels. Reborn as memory.
All go to one place, said King Solomon, all that lives is of the dust, and all returns to the dust. There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his works. And so memorial day precedes the day of independence. That we rejoice in that which those who sleep in the dust have died to protect. The skyscrapers and the orchards, the sheep ranches and the highways, the schools and the synagogues. For they who drained the swamps and built the roads, who held guard over the air and built the cities, may not have lived to see their works. But we rejoice in their works for them. And a new generation rises to watch over their dust and tend the works that they have built. Until the day when He that counts the dust of Jacob shall count them all, and the land shall stir, and in the words of Daniel, they that sleep in dust shall arise, and then rejoice with us.
