Jewish Disunity in a Triptych

If you're looking for feel-good stories, these are not them. Nevertheless, do not look away from these three tales of Jewish division by Miryam Sivan.

Miryam Sivan

Editor’s Note: This piece by author Miryam Sivan will not make you happy. In fact, it’s about division during a time when Jewish unity is essential. Sivan writes, “It may not be celebratory, but it does reflect some of the deep concerns and pains of many of us living in Israel—the complications within our communities—and these are co-existing with the threats from without, of course. In some ways, these twists and awful tweaks are enormously important to pay attention to since they “weaken” us here. We are tragically divided. This is where my profound fears and worries lie.” I worry about lack of Jewish unity, too. It keeps me up at night because our enemies win when we fight one another. Nevertheless, do not look away from this powerful triptych. — Howard Lovy

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They sleep on mud and rocks. The small canvas tents don’t keep out the cold. The Galilee hilltop doesn’t camouflage them. Dark bread and tea keep them going. This, of course, is the least of their hardships. They are at war and, nearly every day, battle British or Arab fighters. The British are determined to maintain the status quo. The Arabs are determined to hold onto their lands. The Jews want autonomy from both. People kill and are killed, wound and are wounded in this triangle of counter-agendas.

After eight weeks, some of the men—many under eighteen and so technically boys—are given leave to go home. Those returning to Tel Aviv—stinking, strangulating images of death in their minds, physically battle-weary but ready to return in three days’ time, so certain are they of the necessity of the fight—see the cafés are full of people in clean clothes, warming themselves in the winter sun.

My father told me this. He told me he would never get over this sight.

He said, in 1946, six hundred thousand Jews lived in Israel. The Palmach, with the Haganah, had 10,000 fighters; the Irgun, 1,000; Stern, 300. Those were the people who fought. The rest watched. I didn’t just want to watch. I wanted to fight against the English.

I think about him when I go to demonstrations at Kaplan and now at Begin for the hostages and pass cafés and bars full of people. Some take to the streets to try to impact what happens, and some don’t. I am not sure those who don’t are against the goals of those who do. But they assume others will fight the fight. Actually, I don’t know what they assume. I only know I am like my father and respond to the call to action.

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For decades, the Jewish schools in Israel have been sending their seventeen-year-olds to Poland to visit the concentration camps, former ghetto sites, and forests where the Einsatzgruppen and other impromptu groups of soldiers and civilians did their murdering.

I didn’t want my seventeen-year-old to go. I told her there was plenty of work that needed to be done in Israel between the schism-prone ethnic and religious groups. Rather than focus on the past, I argued, deal with the current fissures. I also knew it would be hard for her emotionally. We lost too many in my family for it to be neutral. On occasion, she saw my grandmother, originally from Łódź, cry over photos of her dead sisters and their children who remained in Poland (when the rest of the family moved to Israel in the 1920s). She heard about Masha, the one sister who was already with them in Tel Aviv and, against everyone’s wishes, went back to Łódź in 1938.

But my daughter insisted, and there was only so much I could argue against, considering the entire education system was on “her side.” Off she went to Poland with some of her teachers and one hundred ten classmates.

And I was right. It was very hard for her. She called home crying more than once. And one night, she called hysterical.

“We were in the woods. The guide—she’s really good, Ema—told us around six thousand Jews were brought here. They dug pits. Undressed. Mothers hid children between their legs. Fathers stood in front of naked teenage daughters. Then, they were shot and pushed into the holes they dug. Children still alive were smashed against rocks.”

She cried and cried. Her first time learning about the Holocaust by Bullets. (Two million Jews in Ukraine and Poland were killed in these mass shootings.) I waited for more.

“Then, a girl from another class, you don’t know her, got up and screamed that when we’re in the army, we’re going to kill Arabs. No one’s going to do this to us again.”

Now she was scream-crying.

“I couldn’t believe it and shouted that the point here, the lesson, was the exact opposite. To not kill like this. To not turn people into objects.

“Ema, that bitch, came at me swinging. Shrieking that I was a sick leftist. A traitor. I couldn’t believe it. The boys held her back. Then, the teachers took her away. The guide started talking about the lessons we can learn from being victims of mass murder. She agreed that this experience didn’t give permission to kill, that we had to be better, had to learn how to treat others with basic human dignity, even in conflict.”

My daughter caught her breath and spoke softly.

“I can’t believe a person would think revenge or hate is the right way to respond. We were standing on an unmarked grave of thousands. It was awful.” She paused. “What do you think, Ema?”

“Elie Wiesel said when you dehumanize people, the final result is Auschwitz.”

“So?”

“So I agree with you. It’s very sad and frightening that a person can come away from a place

like that thinking it’s a call to dehumanize and murder.”

“Figured you’d agree with me.”

“Stay away from her for the rest of the trip. She’s probably repeating the hate she hears at home. And she’s violent.”

And I thought about these Poland trips and how they sensitize Jewish teenagers to their history of victimhood, the murdered millions no small matter, but how they also throw oil on the fire months before draft dates. (After a three-year pause—first COVID, then the Polish government insisting on okaying the information Israeli tour guides were disseminating— there’s talk of the visits starting again. According to new Polish law, only Germans perpetuated the Final Solution. Only Germans were violent antisemites. I don’t know what’s changed in their official narrative or why the present government is okay with this. The newspaper articles don’t say.)

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By looking at me, you wouldn’t think I had a grandfather buried in the Hasidic section of Har Hamenuchot by the entrance to Jerusalem. You certainly wouldn’t think I had a grandfather buried in its section for tzadikim. But there he lies, and here I am, his youngest grandchild, devoted to him in life and to his memory in death.

The first time I visited his grave, I was nearly chased out by a man who, by looking at me, didn’t think I belonged anywhere near the graves of the righteous, may God preserve their memory. He appeared as if out of nowhere among the gravestones and shouted at me.

“No place for tourists, for you. Modesty!”

He caught me off guard, so focused was I on finding the grave of my beloved Saba, who had died the year before when I was in New York. Would I now need to explain to this man my entire family’s trajectory—from the inner court of Sadagori Hasids to secular Berliners to right-wing, soldiering Israelis to progressive, liberal New Yorkers who court atheism? At least I was an atheist; I couldn’t speak for the rest of the clan. Actually, my father was agnostic, though he recited kaddish and put on tefillin every day in the year of mourning for his father, whose grave I was now on my way to.

“Get out,” he shouted, and I felt tears rise but didn’t cry. Stopped in my tracks, I first did a clothing inventory: long-sleeved shirt, high collar, loose pants. I was modest. Then I got angry at myself for going defensive, gathered my strength, and thought, Who was he to boss me around? Was his grandfather considered righteous by the community of those who claim to know better, or was mine? They buried him here, not us, his secular family. And my grandfather loved and accepted me in all my secularity (including smoking cigarettes on Shabbat, including wearing whatever I felt like wearing). Who the hell was this stranger to question my belonging?

“Leave me alone or I’ll call the police,” I yelled at him in my best New York menacing tone. “You wouldn’t know religious if you fell over it.”

And I turned and went down a set of stairs to the smaller section set off from the rest of the graves. Their tzaddikim. I found the grave easily enough and sat next to it and cried because I missed my grandfather, because I learned so much about spirit from him, because I was just treated like a trespasser by one of his community (though Saba never lived among the Hasids again after he left Boyen, not in Berlin and not in Tel Aviv, so that says something), and because I was nineteen and, though already familiar with loss, was still very impressed by it.

It has been many years since I visited his grave, though for a long time I did regularly. Because in addition to his grave and his mother’s (in the non-righteous but still Hasidic section of the cemetery), I would also visit the more recent addition to the collection: my father’s grave (in the non-righteous, non-Hasidic section). But now I avoid going.

Because . . . because not that long ago, my uncle, my father’s brother, the elder son of my beloved grandfather, died. He was the quintessence of a non-righteous man. I am ambivalent about being blunt, but I don’t think the point of this story will come across if I’m not. A few character traits then: womanizer, shvitzer, owed everyone lots of money, lived a lavish lifestyle (the complete opposite of his father’s and brother’s honest, modest lives), probably a full-blown narcissist—I mean, he was, but I say probably since I’m not a shrink. Anyway, this uncle bought his way into a grave right next to his cherished father. Literally right next to it, I was told by others who’ve been. Not that I hold much stock in cemeteries and the whole business of the resurrection of the dead. But the easy corruption of the sweet idea that someone can be righteous, spiritually devoted—which I know to be true since my grandfather was (in addition to his human foibles)—is too much for me. I don’t want to see my uncle’s grave sullying my grandfather’s and to know that for the right price anyone can be considered a tzaddik.

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Miryam Sivan is a former New Yorker who has lived in Israel for thirty years. She teaches literature and writing at the University of Haifa and has published scholarly articles on American and Israeli writers, and a book -length study on Cynthia Ozick's fiction. She is also a fiction writer and many of her stories are about the experiences of ex-pats in love, in flux, in the liminal space between cultures, languages, and historical epochs. Sivan is the author of the short fiction collection, SNAFU and Other Stories (2014) and a novel, Make it Concrete (2019), a Finalist in the First Novel Next Generation Indie Book Award. An earlier novel was nominated for the Pushcart Press’s Editor’s Book Award. Her most recent novel, Love Match, is a Romeo and Juliet story linking medieval Andalucia and contemporary Haifa in a love story between an Arab Christian man and an American Jewish woman that plays itself out over the centuries, hoping against the odds for a happy ending. She also wrote 50 of Tel Aviv's Most Intriguing Streets: The Lives Behind the Names.

Five Tiny Delights

• The particular shade of blue sky in Israel.

• Birds in the trees outside my study window.

• Yoga.

• Folding clean laundry.

• The action on my new keyboard.

Five Tiny Jewish Delights

• Living in Israel (not tiny but too essential not to mention).

• Knowing that food labeled parve is by definition vegan.

• Friday afternoon when the shechina enters and the country palpably downshifts.

• Speaking Hebrew on the daily.

• The Vishnitz challah that is now available in hip Tel Aviv markets on Fridays.