House of Life
The Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem tears your heart open, but for a reason you might not expect.
As a sojourner in The Land, and especially as an American Jew, you’re supposed to go to there; you really should, you’re told; and so, eventually, you go. You make your way up Mount Herzl, and in our case we rode Jerusalem’s gleaming new light rail line to its northern terminus, the trolley car populated on this Friday morning with young people, policemen, old folks, Orthodox yeshiva students staring into prayer books, citizens of Moroccan and Yemini descent, and a few tourists cradling guidebooks. You get off the train and walk on a paved path through carefully tended woods, each tree blessed with its own irrigation hose. You enter the museum’s visitor center and receive your ticket. It’s free, but you’ll pay.
Here’s the surprise. At Yad Vashem, you witness not so much the agony of death, but the beauty of life before death.
Yad Vashem had changed greatly since I last visited as a college student in 1981. A new museum building has opened, essentially a long, wide corridor that takes visitors through the full story of the Holocaust. You can’t turn around; you have to go to the bitter end; the speed of transit, the level of attention, of course, is all yours. (Halfway along, I saw a few people bolt and walk briskly toward the far exit, weaving past clots of humanity and huge crematoria photographs, devotedly not seeing.) Yad Vashem also contains the Hall of Remembrance, the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations, and various memorial gardens and exhibits. A German cattle car – an actual car that had been packed with Jews bound for slaughter – has been placed upon a severed segment of railroad track jutting from a hillside cliff.
Elahna got an audio-guide gizmo with ear buds; I don’t like the bossy things. Then we stepped inside the museum and faced a black-and-white video projected on a giant triangular screen. Here was the world that was, gone now 72 years and counting, remembered in grainy, jumpy and absolutely electric archival footage. Here was the world of Jews in villages, shtetls and ghettos across Europe, the world of merchants and strolling students and concert violinists, of mothers baking kugel and old men leaning over chessboards, of treasured books and brick stoops and candle lighting on Sabbath eve. A girl skated across a pond directly toward me, arms swinging, hands wool-mittened, and then her particles began to fuzz and blink out and she evaporated…we know the rest.
Down the corridor we go, no turning back. I lingered at a boy’s diary laid open behind glass. His name was Abraham Kaplowicz and he was murdered at Auschwitz. He wrote the diary, I believe, in Polish, and here is the translation for one entry: When I grow up…in a bird with an engine I’ll sit myself down. Take off and fly into space, far above the ground. Strange how the lines rhyme in English, slide along in iambic pentameter. And who’s to say that Abraham Kaplowicz wouldn’t have moved to the USA and changed his name to Kaplan, become an astronaut and circled the moon? He might have invented a plane that flaps its wings, swoops and cries like a bird. Or become a poet…in a bird with an engine I’ll sit myself down. No one can rightly say otherwise.
At one point in my journey on the Holocaust Shvil, I stood on the edge of a recreated living room, the kind in any middle-class Jewish home in Germany in the 1930s. The wood furnishings, authentic to the period, spoke of respectability and conformity, and there was nothing very Jewish about the room, about the lace doilies and upright radio and rows of books on the end table. I’d seen that wallpaper in my grandmother’s home. On a viewing screen at the edge of the room, an old man spoke. He had survived a concentration camp, but that wasn’t the point. He recalled his mother who was exterminated in a camp and why she wouldn’t leave Germany in the mid ‘30s even as the Nazis tightened restrictions against Jews, even as their goyish friends deserted them, and then mocked them, and then worse. Things will get better, he remembers her saying on the phone to her sister who had immigrated to Israel. This is our country, Germany, things will come around. They always do. And besides, she said, Israel, it’s too hot. It’s too damn hot there.
I chuckled out loud. It seemed, I’m sorry, funny. And human, too – the certain knowledge of a hot, sticky country outweighing the uncertain possibility of disaster. My laughter in the Holocaust museum didn’t attract hard, censorious looks; in fact, it granted permission and a man in the crowd laughed, gingerly, and the woman next to me smiled, perhaps thinking of someone she knew. For goodness sake, too hot. A desert.
Yad Vashem’s depictions of the world the Nazis destroyed helped answer the question on everyone’s mind. Why didn’t they all leave? Why didn’t they see the slaughter coming? The answer: it’s hard to leave one’s home, and one’s homeland, under any circumstances. And it’s very hard, without the benefit of hindsight, to imagine the unimaginable. Yes, Jews had known persecution, exile, pogroms – but mechanized, institutionalized mass murder? As we moved down the museum’s darkened corridor, the full extent of the dehumanization of the Jews became increasingly clear, but also the deceptiveness practiced by the Nazis as they disguised their true, murderous intentions. Resettlement, they called it, a chance for a new life among your kind. So I guess it’s as simple as this: the Jews didn’t know their fate because they didn’t know their fate. Do you know yours?
The other question, fully embraced by the museum: Once they were sent to ghettos and camps and realized the monstrous evil of the Nazis, why didn’t they fight back? Why did the Jews, as well as Gypsies, political prisoners and homosexuals, go to their deaths so passively? Like, in the cliché, sheep. Yad Vashem gives two answers. One, it shows the gradual, immense oppression that rendered most Holocaust victims physically unable to rebel. Two, it demonstrates that many Jews did, in fact, fight for their lives. They fought in prisoner uprisings – see Joseph Solomon’s sculpture Four Heroines on the grounds of Yad Vashem, depicting Ala, Ester, Regina and Rose, young women who helped blow up a crematorium at Auschwitz. They fought, primarily, as partisans in places such as the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. It was fascinating, too, to comprehend that a half million Jews actually joined the onslaught against Nazi Germany as soldiers in the Russian Army. Two hundred thousand died in combat or as prisoners. Three hundred thousand survived, many immigrating to Israel in the 1990s and, oh, what stories they must carry around.
Elahna pulled out her ear buds. She’d had enough. She walked quickly through the last third of the Holocaust corridor, devoted to grim life and grisly death in the camps, and she emerged into the hot, desert air of Israel. I went more slowly, but found myself numb to the actual horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, ad infinitum. I kept thinking of that skating girl dissolving into photons, of the boy flying into space inside his bird with an engine. Of the lady on the phone with her sister. She just couldn’t imagine life anywhere else. I’ll stay here, at home, thank you very much.
My last stop was the Hall of Names and its dome wallpapered with close-up photographs of victims. In an adjoining office, the names and personal details of three million victims were kept on Pages of Testimony provided by loved ones. Hold on, I said to a guide. Six million died. Yes, he said, but three million names haven’t been recorded. At this, I was shocked. Couldn’t believe it. Three million names missing – this simple fact hit me hard. Somehow, even though I’ve read extensively about World War II, even though I was fascinated and horrified by all things Nazi and genocidal as a teenager and my visit to Israel during college was prompted, in part, by that unhealthy obsession, I had assumed that most of the names were known. The lives were gone, but the names remained. And now, in my 50s, I learned that half of the six million names have gone unrecorded, unspoken.
Yad Vashem, roughly translated, means to point out names. To give them a place – a place to live, if you will. So where are the names? Why can’t they be found? The reasons are mostly logistical. Many of the victims were illiterate. Records were scant and unreliable, especially in Russia. So much was destroyed in the war, both lives and paper. And in the final weeks of the war, the Nazis destroyed their meticulous paperwork about the Holocaust even as they continued the killing. Today one of the enduring goals of Yad Vashem is to find the vanished three million, to write down every last name. A worthy but, alas, impossible task.
We left as the complex was closing and walked, holding hands, on a path up to the tomb of Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist cause. Today Elahna remembers this walk as a green, sunlit rebirth after visiting “that horrible place.” We emerged onto Herzl Road, not far from where we had entered Jerusalem on my last Shvil hiking day. At a macolet we bought little plastic bags of cold, chocolate milk. I ripped mine open and chugged.
@ @ @
Avi’s car, a small but luxurious sedan, pulled to the curb. We slid into the backseat next to his sister, Ruti, who had met me at the airport six weeks ago. “What did you think of Yad Vashem?” she immediately asked. We mumbled things; after all, what can you really say? Impressive, very moving. So sad, wow. Ruti continued in her exceedingly direct way: “Are you glad – is it good you went?” Elahna made no response and I tried a Hebrew phrase, pahot o ’yoter, which means “more or less.” Or “less or more.” Up front, Hadassah turned around to behold her only child; in her eyes, Elahna hung the moon and lit it, too.
Avi pointed out the absurdity of Hal and Elahna visiting Yad Vashem and Har HaMenuchot, the Mountain of Spirits, in the same day. (Implied: what’s wrong with you? Life’s too short – enjoy, live already!) He jockeyed in snarled traffic as we rode to the mountainside cemetery where Rivka – his mother and Hadassah’s sister – had been buried several months ago. This would be Hadassah’s first visit to the grave. The car was chilled to meat-locker levels for the old woman and that only made it worse when we parked and emerged into air baked to 90 degrees. Enveloped in a full-length dress, with Elahna at her elbow, Hadassah used a cane to negotiate a paved downhill path. I fretted about my ball cap; keep it on or take it off?
We milled about the burial site. Ruti placed a bouquet of flowers – something Jews don’t do, I’d been told. Hadassah had me record the dates on the rectangular, coffin-sized gravestone. Avi told us how he’d pulled strings to get the walkway – the one he stood upon – narrowed so Rivka could be buried next to her husband, Moshe, who had passed 20 years earlier. From a stroke, maybe, no one’s sure. The place was jam-packed with dead folk, no doubt about it; a parking garage-like structure extended from a nearby hillside, providing new land for burial. It was a nifty workaround, allowing graves in elevated layers of ground. The rabbis must have had a good debate about that one. Is it ground if it’s not in the ground? The structure reminded me of Yad Vashem’s cattle car exhibit.
We trudged back to the car and so began the epic search for Saba and Savta’s graves. Please excuse my high spirits, but I very much needed to be amused. Hadassah peered at illegible instructions on a scrap of paper. Avi, never lacking in confidence, steered the car along the cemetery’s impossibly narrow paths. Elahna got on the phone with Auntie Miriam who remembered the grave’s address, less or more, and her directions disagreed with Hadassah’s. Much wrangling all around. Ruti told Avi to back up and they quarreled in a storm of Hebrew and then Hadassah yelled “Stop the car, stop the car!” and she popped out with surprising agility, her cane abandoned, and accosted a group of mourners or maybe picnickers. She showed her paper scrap to various folk. Much pointing in every direction.
“Your mother, next she will ask the bathroom attendant,” said Avi. I laughed out loud as Hadassah jetted into a makeshift lavatory.
Eventually, it all sorted out. On a high ridge of the Mountain of Spirits, we parked the car and hunted through a sloping expanse of graves that seemed to emanate their own, glowing light in the afternoon sun. Hadassah stopped every few yards to adjust her broad-brimmed hat. She sipped from the tiny bottle of water she’d brought from Long Island because it fit her hand just right. We were the only living people on the mountainside. There were no trees here, either, nothing green – just acres and acres of rectangular-cut stone. The view was vast and incredible: miles to the west, the Orthodox neighborhood of Har Nof, spread across a hill; miles to the north, the bustling suburb of Mevasseret Zion. And to the east, hills blocked the view of downtown Jerusalem and the Old City and everything soaked into it, and I was glad of that. Enough, already. You know, said Ruti, the Hasidim call this cemetery Beit Chaim. House of Life. She wasn’t sure why, but she liked it. Beit Chaim.
The Hasidim, also known as the Haredim, have their own section of the cemetery. We could see it across a small valley of trees, and their territory seemed even more spare and stony and sun-frozen than where we stood. On a cliff above their graves, graffiti had been scrawled in giant, Hebrew letters. What does it say? I asked. Ruti squinted and read, “Na, Nach, Nachma, Nachman, Me’Uman.” This is a nonsense/profound phrase (you choose) attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and discovered by Rabbi Dov Yisrael Odesser in the famous “Letter from Heaven,” and now I refer you to the many books and articles written on this mystical subject. According to my wife, “Na, Nach…” is the Haredi equivalent of “Kilroy Was Here.”
I had seen Rabbi Odesser’s photo while hiking Shvil Yisrael, hung in falafel shops and pasted on billboards, slapped on car bumpers and the backs of street signs. With a bushy, white beard and sweet smile, he looks like an elderly Walt Whitman or one of those mountaintop gurus in New Yorker cartoons. Usually Rabbi Odesser’s right hand is raised and an enormous thing it is, swollen with arthritis and benevolence. If you’re still interested, proceed to You Tube and witness the wacky Na Nachs, devotees of Rabbi Nachman, as they jump from their roving vans and dance in traffic circles to the throbbing beat of techno-Hasidic music. They’ve got free literature, lots of it.
“Here it is,” yelled Elahna. Her black-clad form stuck out in a choppy sea of stones, each one engraved with a name. No exceptions. No unmarked graves. For each person come and gone, a name and a place for that name. Elahna called out, waving to her mother. Hadassah smiled – that’s my lanushka, that’s my girl! She always had a way of finding things! The resting places of Saba and Savta in the Mountain of Spirits, Jerusalem, happened to be located in section 35, row 315, burial spots 19 and 20. I think that’s it – my notes are garbled. Suffice it to say that everyone, daughter and grandson and granddaughters and tall guy by marriage, converged at the graves of the family elders.
We stood together, sweating, in the House of Life.
@ @ @
The Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem tears your heart open, but for a reason you might not expect.
As a sojourner in The Land, and especially as an American Jew, you’re supposed to go to there; you really should, you’re told; and so, eventually, you go. You make your way up Mount Herzl, and in our case we rode Jerusalem’s gleaming new light rail line to its northern terminus, the trolley car populated on this Friday morning with young people, policemen, old folks, Orthodox yeshiva students staring into prayer books, citizens of Moroccan and Yemini descent, and a few tourists cradling guidebooks. You get off the train and walk on a paved path through carefully tended woods, each tree blessed with its own irrigation hose. You enter the museum’s visitor center and receive your ticket. It’s free, but you’ll pay.
Here’s the surprise. At Yad Vashem, you witness not so much the agony of death, but the beauty of life before death.
Yad Vashem had changed greatly since I last visited as a college student in 1981. A new museum building has opened, essentially a long, wide corridor that takes visitors through the full story of the Holocaust. You can’t turn around; you have to go to the bitter end; the speed of transit, the level of attention, of course, is all yours. (Halfway along, I saw a few people bolt and walk briskly toward the far exit, weaving past clots of humanity and huge crematoria photographs, devotedly not seeing.) Yad Vashem also contains the Hall of Remembrance, the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations, and various memorial gardens and exhibits. A German cattle car – an actual car that had been packed with Jews bound for slaughter – has been placed upon a severed segment of railroad track jutting from a hillside cliff.
Elahna got an audio-guide gizmo with ear buds; I don’t like the bossy things. Then we stepped inside the museum and faced a black-and-white video projected on a giant triangular screen. Here was the world that was, gone now 72 years and counting, remembered in grainy, jumpy and absolutely electric archival footage. Here was the world of Jews in villages, shtetls and ghettos across Europe, the world of merchants and strolling students and concert violinists, of mothers baking kugel and old men leaning over chessboards, of treasured books and brick stoops and candle lighting on Sabbath eve. A girl skated across a pond directly toward me, arms swinging, hands wool-mittened, and then her particles began to fuzz and blink out and she evaporated…we know the rest.
Down the corridor we go, no turning back. I lingered at a boy’s diary laid open behind glass. His name was Abraham Kaplowicz and he was murdered at Auschwitz. He wrote the diary, I believe, in Polish, and here is the translation for one entry: When I grow up…in a bird with an engine I’ll sit myself down. Take off and fly into space, far above the ground. Strange how the lines rhyme in English, slide along in iambic pentameter. And who’s to say that Abraham Kaplowicz wouldn’t have moved to the USA and changed his name to Kaplan, become an astronaut and circled the moon? He might have invented a plane that flaps its wings, swoops and cries like a bird. Or become a poet…in a bird with an engine I’ll sit myself down. No one can rightly say otherwise.
At one point in my journey on the Holocaust Shvil, I stood on the edge of a recreated living room, the kind in any middle-class Jewish home in Germany in the 1930s. The wood furnishings, authentic to the period, spoke of respectability and conformity, and there was nothing very Jewish about the room, about the lace doilies and upright radio and rows of books on the end table. I’d seen that wallpaper in my grandmother’s home. On a viewing screen at the edge of the room, an old man spoke. He had survived a concentration camp, but that wasn’t the point. He recalled his mother who was exterminated in a camp and why she wouldn’t leave Germany in the mid ‘30s even as the Nazis tightened restrictions against Jews, even as their goyish friends deserted them, and then mocked them, and then worse. Things will get better, he remembers her saying on the phone to her sister who had immigrated to Israel. This is our country, Germany, things will come around. They always do. And besides, she said, Israel, it’s too hot. It’s too damn hot there.
I chuckled out loud. It seemed, I’m sorry, funny. And human, too – the certain knowledge of a hot, sticky country outweighing the uncertain possibility of disaster. My laughter in the Holocaust museum didn’t attract hard, censorious looks; in fact, it granted permission and a man in the crowd laughed, gingerly, and the woman next to me smiled, perhaps thinking of someone she knew. For goodness sake, too hot. A desert.
Yad Vashem’s depictions of the world the Nazis destroyed helped answer the question on everyone’s mind. Why didn’t they all leave? Why didn’t they see the slaughter coming? The answer: it’s hard to leave one’s home, and one’s homeland, under any circumstances. And it’s very hard, without the benefit of hindsight, to imagine the unimaginable. Yes, Jews had known persecution, exile, pogroms – but mechanized, institutionalized mass murder? As we moved down the museum’s darkened corridor, the full extent of the dehumanization of the Jews became increasingly clear, but also the deceptiveness practiced by the Nazis as they disguised their true, murderous intentions. Resettlement, they called it, a chance for a new life among your kind. So I guess it’s as simple as this: the Jews didn’t know their fate because they didn’t know their fate. Do you know yours?
The other question, fully embraced by the museum: Once they were sent to ghettos and camps and realized the monstrous evil of the Nazis, why didn’t they fight back? Why did the Jews, as well as Gypsies, political prisoners and homosexuals, go to their deaths so passively? Like, in the cliché, sheep. Yad Vashem gives two answers. One, it shows the gradual, immense oppression that rendered most Holocaust victims physically unable to rebel. Two, it demonstrates that many Jews did, in fact, fight for their lives. They fought in prisoner uprisings – see Joseph Solomon’s sculpture Four Heroines on the grounds of Yad Vashem, depicting Ala, Ester, Regina and Rose, young women who helped blow up a crematorium at Auschwitz. They fought, primarily, as partisans in places such as the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. It was fascinating, too, to comprehend that a half million Jews actually joined the onslaught against Nazi Germany as soldiers in the Russian Army. Two hundred thousand died in combat or as prisoners. Three hundred thousand survived, many immigrating to Israel in the 1990s and, oh, what stories they must carry around.
Elahna pulled out her ear buds. She’d had enough. She walked quickly through the last third of the Holocaust corridor, devoted to grim life and grisly death in the camps, and she emerged into the hot, desert air of Israel. I went more slowly, but found myself numb to the actual horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, ad infinitum. I kept thinking of that skating girl dissolving into photons, of the boy flying into space inside his bird with an engine. Of the lady on the phone with her sister. She just couldn’t imagine life anywhere else. I’ll stay here, at home, thank you very much.
My last stop was the Hall of Names and its dome wallpapered with close-up photographs of victims. In an adjoining office, the names and personal details of three million victims were kept on Pages of Testimony provided by loved ones. Hold on, I said to a guide. Six million died. Yes, he said, but three million names haven’t been recorded. At this, I was shocked. Couldn’t believe it. Three million names missing – this simple fact hit me hard. Somehow, even though I’ve read extensively about World War II, even though I was fascinated and horrified by all things Nazi and genocidal as a teenager and my visit to Israel during college was prompted, in part, by that unhealthy obsession, I had assumed that most of the names were known. The lives were gone, but the names remained. And now, in my 50s, I learned that half of the six million names have gone unrecorded, unspoken.
Yad Vashem, roughly translated, means to point out names. To give them a place – a place to live, if you will. So where are the names? Why can’t they be found? The reasons are mostly logistical. Many of the victims were illiterate. Records were scant and unreliable, especially in Russia. So much was destroyed in the war, both lives and paper. And in the final weeks of the war, the Nazis destroyed their meticulous paperwork about the Holocaust even as they continued the killing. Today one of the enduring goals of Yad Vashem is to find the vanished three million, to write down every last name. A worthy but, alas, impossible task.
We left as the complex was closing and walked, holding hands, on a path up to the tomb of Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist cause. Today Elahna remembers this walk as a green, sunlit rebirth after visiting “that horrible place.” We emerged onto Herzl Road, not far from where we had entered Jerusalem on my last Shvil hiking day. At a macolet we bought little plastic bags of cold, chocolate milk. I ripped mine open and chugged.
@ @ @
Avi’s car, a small but luxurious sedan, pulled to the curb. We slid into the backseat next to his sister, Ruti, who had met me at the airport six weeks ago. “What did you think of Yad Vashem?” she immediately asked. We mumbled things; after all, what can you really say? Impressive, very moving. So sad, wow. Ruti continued in her exceedingly direct way: “Are you glad – is it good you went?” Elahna made no response and I tried a Hebrew phrase, pahot o ’yoter, which means “more or less.” Or “less or more.” Up front, Hadassah turned around to behold her only child; in her eyes, Elahna hung the moon and lit it, too.
Avi pointed out the absurdity of Hal and Elahna visiting Yad Vashem and Har HaMenuchot, the Mountain of Spirits, in the same day. (Implied: what’s wrong with you? Life’s too short – enjoy, live already!) He jockeyed in snarled traffic as we rode to the mountainside cemetery where Rivka – his mother and Hadassah’s sister – had been buried several months ago. This would be Hadassah’s first visit to the grave. The car was chilled to meat-locker levels for the old woman and that only made it worse when we parked and emerged into air baked to 90 degrees. Enveloped in a full-length dress, with Elahna at her elbow, Hadassah used a cane to negotiate a paved downhill path. I fretted about my ball cap; keep it on or take it off?
We milled about the burial site. Ruti placed a bouquet of flowers – something Jews don’t do, I’d been told. Hadassah had me record the dates on the rectangular, coffin-sized gravestone. Avi told us how he’d pulled strings to get the walkway – the one he stood upon – narrowed so Rivka could be buried next to her husband, Moshe, who had passed 20 years earlier. From a stroke, maybe, no one’s sure. The place was jam-packed with dead folk, no doubt about it; a parking garage-like structure extended from a nearby hillside, providing new land for burial. It was a nifty workaround, allowing graves in elevated layers of ground. The rabbis must have had a good debate about that one. Is it ground if it’s not in the ground? The structure reminded me of Yad Vashem’s cattle car exhibit.
We trudged back to the car and so began the epic search for Saba and Savta’s graves. Please excuse my high spirits, but I very much needed to be amused. Hadassah peered at illegible instructions on a scrap of paper. Avi, never lacking in confidence, steered the car along the cemetery’s impossibly narrow paths. Elahna got on the phone with Auntie Miriam who remembered the grave’s address, less or more, and her directions disagreed with Hadassah’s. Much wrangling all around. Ruti told Avi to back up and they quarreled in a storm of Hebrew and then Hadassah yelled “Stop the car, stop the car!” and she popped out with surprising agility, her cane abandoned, and accosted a group of mourners or maybe picnickers. She showed her paper scrap to various folk. Much pointing in every direction.
“Your mother, next she will ask the bathroom attendant,” said Avi. I laughed out loud as Hadassah jetted into a makeshift lavatory.
Eventually, it all sorted out. On a high ridge of the Mountain of Spirits, we parked the car and hunted through a sloping expanse of graves that seemed to emanate their own, glowing light in the afternoon sun. Hadassah stopped every few yards to adjust her broad-brimmed hat. She sipped from the tiny bottle of water she’d brought from Long Island because it fit her hand just right. We were the only living people on the mountainside. There were no trees here, either, nothing green – just acres and acres of rectangular-cut stone. The view was vast and incredible: miles to the west, the Orthodox neighborhood of Har Nof, spread across a hill; miles to the north, the bustling suburb of Mevasseret Zion. And to the east, hills blocked the view of downtown Jerusalem and the Old City and everything soaked into it, and I was glad of that. Enough, already. You know, said Ruti, the Hasidim call this cemetery Beit Chaim. House of Life. She wasn’t sure why, but she liked it. Beit Chaim.
The Hasidim, also known as the Haredim, have their own section of the cemetery. We could see it across a small valley of trees, and their territory seemed even more spare and stony and sun-frozen than where we stood. On a cliff above their graves, graffiti had been scrawled in giant, Hebrew letters. What does it say? I asked. Ruti squinted and read, “Na, Nach, Nachma, Nachman, Me’Uman.” This is a nonsense/profound phrase (you choose) attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and discovered by Rabbi Dov Yisrael Odesser in the famous “Letter from Heaven,” and now I refer you to the many books and articles written on this mystical subject. According to my wife, “Na, Nach…” is the Haredi equivalent of “Kilroy Was Here.”
I had seen Rabbi Odesser’s photo while hiking Shvil Yisrael, hung in falafel shops and pasted on billboards, slapped on car bumpers and the backs of street signs. With a bushy, white beard and sweet smile, he looks like an elderly Walt Whitman or one of those mountaintop gurus in New Yorker cartoons. Usually Rabbi Odesser’s right hand is raised and an enormous thing it is, swollen with arthritis and benevolence. If you’re still interested, proceed to You Tube and witness the wacky Na Nachs, devotees of Rabbi Nachman, as they jump from their roving vans and dance in traffic circles to the throbbing beat of techno-Hasidic music. They’ve got free literature, lots of it.
“Here it is,” yelled Elahna. Her black-clad form stuck out in a choppy sea of stones, each one engraved with a name. No exceptions. No unmarked graves. For each person come and gone, a name and a place for that name. Elahna called out, waving to her mother. Hadassah smiled – that’s my lanushka, that’s my girl! She always had a way of finding things! The resting places of Saba and Savta in the Mountain of Spirits, Jerusalem, happened to be located in section 35, row 315, burial spots 19 and 20. I think that’s it – my notes are garbled. Suffice it to say that everyone, daughter and grandson and granddaughters and tall guy by marriage, converged at the graves of the family elders.
We stood together, sweating, in the House of Life.
@ @ @