Some Refections on Yom HaShoah

Some things to reflect upon this day of Remembrance.

1) Many survivors live here in Israel (approximately 243,000) and sadly so many of them live in poverty. It is estimated that one third of the survivors are desperately in need of financial assistance. How can this be that in the very place they should be the safest and the most cared for, Israeli Holocaust survivors struggle with this kind of insecurity?

Part of it has to do with the cumbersome and elusive nature of Israeli governmental procedures. It is daunting under the best of circumstances to maneuver this system. Additionally, until recently, far too little money was funneled into this very necessary area of government services, although some of that is being corrected.

But there is another hurdle to helping survivors of the Shoah. Many of them are independent and reluctant, even ashamed, to go to the government for help. The survivors aren't always easy to locate, and so in addition to the toll that is taken with memories (whether those memories are locked away or out in the open) there is this added isolation.

Please remember these very important and special people in your thoughts and prayers. If you live in Israel and know some survivors who are not getting the benefits they need and deserve, please contact the office of the prime minister (www.pmo.gov.il), the Jewish Agency or Sherut Leumi (National Service).

JPost published an article about the thousands who still don't receive benefits. Please read it for further information.

2) A very raw issue here in Israel is the separation between Sephardim, Middle Eastern Jews or Mizrahim, and Ashkenazim. During the founding years of the state the treatment of Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jews was so shameful and such a painful part of our history that for the most part, it has been swept under the rug. Things have definitely improved over the years, yet there still remains ill feelings between the groups, and a definite Ashkenazi preference in a state that was developed under western tutelage.

Opening this subject is a Pandora's box, and I have very strong feelings about it...perhaps a later series of postings on this subject can be done.

But in light of our remembrances today of the Holocaust, or Shoah, a piece has come to light which demands our attention. It is not the issue of the mistreatment of Mizrahi Jews, but rather discrimination towards the Sephardim in light of the Holocaust. It is in the very remembrances themselves that partiality has taken place.

JPost writer Stacey Menchel tells the story of Stella Levi in a recent article, entitled "It's time they knew our names". Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz , and a Sephardic Jew of Rhodes, suffered discrimination even in the camps because she was Sephardic. She laments, and many agree, that the Holocaust experience has been told almost exclusively as a European Ashkenazi one, and the Sephardic voice from the Shoah is not heard.

The staggering numbers of European Jewry murdered in the holocaust demands our full attention, yet the losses in the Mediterranean Sephardic communities were even more devasting in terms of percentages of communities destroyed, many communities being totally obliterated.

Yet, just as there were many more of European Jewry killed during the holocaust, so have there been many more survivors from that community as well. Part, but not all, of the problem stems from the fact that there just are not very many Sephardic survivors to tell the story and to develop the infrastructure to gather the information.

That, in itself, is a weak argument for the lack of information about the destruction of the Sephardic communities during the war because why, among ANY institute or organization designed to study and perserve the history of those who suffered, would the Sephardic community be left out of the study and preservation in the first place? Shouldn't the story of what happened to world Jewry during the holocaust be the story of all Jews who perished or survived?

Sadly, and to our great shame, the answer is one of discrimination against a minority within our own family...the Sephardim. So rich in our history, so beautiful in traditions and accomplishments, how is it that this segment of our soul has been marginalized and the memories and information of their suffering in the Shoah go unnoticed?

Stella Levi has been working with the Jewish Museum in Rhodes to develop material on the history of the Rodian Jewish community. But where is the rest of the Jewish world in seeking and assisting and wanting to know, not only about the Jews of Rhodes, but about all the Ladino speaking Mediterranean Sephardim?

We need to do some straightening in our own house this Yom HaShoah as we remember.