After thirty years living in Kever Benjamin village, I know all the people in my street. I used to greet in Hungarian ("Jo reggelt, Uram", Good Morning, Sir") the owner of an old shop, habitually standing at the door when not bended over a low table engraving medals and trophies. This morning the shop was closed with a note announcing that Mr Solomon will be put to rest tomorrow in the New Kever Benjamin cemetery, called "The Garden of Life". Traditionally, Jewish cemeteries are called "The House of the Living". The next door shop is also closed, its owners died some time ago. They were twins, two small - almost midget - Hungarian women, with tattooed numbers in their forearms, of Mengele's twins. There were old and unfriendly, and I never had a conversation with them. Marinel's watchmaking shop under the staircase is also closed. The neighborhood is changing.
8 comments:
Baruch Dayan Ha-emet.
Every day there are fewer left from that generation, those who like my father saw Dr. Mengele do his little finger pointing gesture for the selection (those whom he pointed in the other direction have been dust and ashes for 65 years now, those who have the tattoos on their arms (now tattoos are fashionable). I'm always afraid that when there are no eyewitnesses left the crime will be easier to deny.
Maybe you would be unfriendly too if your childhood was spent in the care of the good Dr. M. I've read some accounts recently written by fellow inmates of my father's little lager and it's even worse than my father told me and that was bad enough. I can only conclude that he must have repressed some of the worst memories to retain his sanity because he was a happy person with a smile on his face always. I remember an interview with one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and he said that "if you could lick my heart it would be as bitter as poison", so embittered had he become at his experience, betrayed by his Polish friends, etc. He even became an alcoholic as few Jews are.
The loss of the watchmaking shop is particularly sad, because I collect mechanical watches. As you known, these were once the norm and they were among the most wonderful machines ever constructed - sometimes hundreds of little gears and levers shrunk to the size of a coin and able to maintain precise time based on the vibration of a spring as fine as a human hair. Now almost everything is quartz which has no more soul than a computer and the old generation is not being replaced by battery changers.
K
PS I thought the customary word for a Jewish cemetery was Bet Olam (or in Ashkenazic, Bes Oylam) - House of the World (or, and this makes more sense, House of Eternity - עוֹלָם also translates as universe/eternity). What name were you thinking of?
K
בית החיים
The House of the Living
tht is how people here refers to the cemetery. The idea is that they did not die, and anyway, they will surely live on Tehyes Hameytim - the day of the resurrection of the dead.
If this or that makes more sense, I leave it up to you.
I did some googling and Bet HaHayim is more commonly (but not exclusively) a Sephardic name for a cemetery. I suppose like many things in Israel, the Sephardic custom was followed rather than the Ashkenazic Bet Olam (or as my parents said, Bes Oylam).
I realize the pioneers wanted to distance themselves from everything goles and Eastern European but I think it was a mistake to discard so much. One of your other commenters mentioned that visiting Israel felt very foreign and not like a "homecoming" at all. If more of my parent's Yiddishkeit had been retained I might have felt more comfortable there and more willing to stay, but as it was I had the same feeling - Israel felt very strange and foreign and not at all like a homecoming.
K
Yes, Israel was founded by fanatics who hated the shtetl, the Yiddish and the Jewish people in Eastern Europe. The idea, from the very beginning, was to create a new Jew, farmer and soldier, who would feed and defend itself. They wanted to be like idealized Russians. What we have is a core of Ashkenazic Jews who have more or less returned to themselves, and a great mass of many different Oriental Jews from the Atlas Mountains to Hadramaut. American Jews are of a different stock, they went through the Emancipation and have little in common with average Israeli. But each one finds its own niche, and you can find "Anglosaxon" communities even in Kever Benjamin, where they have a Reform synagogue and a smiling beardless Rabbi who wears a bizarre (sorry, unusual) multicolored tallit. They even succeeded to elect a Reform female to the local Rabbinical Council. American Jews introduced to Israel the strange concept of grass root democracy. Until then Israelis thought that democracy was something like "democracy" in the German Democratic Republic (remember?).
Follow Up comment: Somebody in Kever Benjamin must be reading this blog, because the sign pictured in the note has been removed yesterday. Soon this street will be unrecognizible.
This is a personal pet peeve of mine, and I'll never say this again, but I hate the term Anglo-Saxon.
Well it is good that you have captured it - Marinel the Sha'an and his sign will live forever or at least until your web page is taken down.
K
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