Author: Inna Rogatchi

Michael Rogatchi (C). Jewish Melody. 2013.

Yesterday, on Sunday October 22nd 2023, a new season of the Israel Philharmonic, in my opinion, the best orchestra in the world, should have opened, with Mahler Third Symphony. But there was no opening, and no season, nor for the Israeli Philharmonic, nor for any orchestra or theatre all over the country. ‘The cultural halls are dark here’ – we are reading the lines coming from Israel these days. 

But great Israeli musicians cannot be idle. It has been reported ( Dan Yakir for Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disk) that the musicians of the Philharmonic ‘immediately grouped into three to four soloists’ ensembles and are performing in  hospitals and at the hotels hosting the evacuated people”. Dan also mentioned that ‘Meitar Ensemble, Israel’s leading contemporary music team, is playing concerts for lonely elderly citizens’. Indeed, we know that our sighs can turn into melody. It has happened all throughout our history. 

So, instead of a festive opening of a new season, the Israeli Philharmonic gavelast Sunday, October 22, 2023  a very special concert called Salute to Israel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3haMW-gqac  In front of an empty hall. But not exactly empty the hall was. In the way of the trend of our sorrowful days, the seats of the first rows of the Bronfman Auditorium were adorned with 200 photographs of the kidnapped Israelis. The national pride of Israel led by Lahav Shani, nephew of our good friend, distinguished Israeli diplomat Dov Steinberg, played first and foremost to those whose faces the musicians were facing during an hour tribute to the nation. 

Hatikvah is a universal code of unity for any Jew anywhere, and I mean it. I have heard innumerous interpretations of Hatikvah during my life, some of them truly historical events, as played by the same Israeli Philharmonic orchestra led by Leonard Bernstain, or another one interpreted by Zubin Mehta.  These days, we are hearing it a lot, every time stroking the innermost chords of our souls. But this Hatikvah which we heard – and saw, importantly – yesterday, will stay in my heart for good. I loved every single musician who almost  all were playing standing. I loved their faces. It was the case when melody transformed into different way of expression, and sounds were spoken. It was compassion in the purest form of it. 

Lahav Shani, who is a young person, he is  34, gave a mature and touching short speech before the orchestra prepared for Beethoven’s Eroica. He continues the legacy of his great teachers and mentors, including Zubin Mehta, truly well, and in front of our eyes, Lahav emerges into a serious, meaningful figure which represents Israel at its best. 

Eroica on that special evening, at this very special concert, was unique. Mighty but not overwhelmingly, showing all the inner strength of music, musicians and conductor, coherent, in a perfect harmony of everyone in the orchestra, a very special deed of every single musician and all of them together with their very able conductor. Israel Philharmonic is known for its historical  performances. We were privileged to have one more one last Sunday. The spirit of the entire Israel was playing on the stage in the Bronfman Auditorium yesterday. Israel knew it and musicians and their conductor knew it as well. We all who were watching breathlessly world-wide, also knew it. It was a rare, undemonstrative, but extremely deep unity of us all. 

After the final of Eroica, some of the musicians let their emotions go, at last. Some of them hugged each other. They knew how difficult it was for each  and every one of them to play this Salute to Israel in front of empty seats with portraits of two hundreds people held hostage, attached to it. 

The degree of professionalism of this great orchestra is well-known world-wide. The degree of their dignity was shining at its brightest in the dimmed big empty hall on Sunday October 22, 2023 night. Toda Raba, Lahav. Toda Raba, all fantastic musicians of the best orchestra in the world. Toda Raba to all and everyone who has organised this unique hymn of love at the time when it needed acutely.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Crying Heaven. 2023. Hatikvah in White and Blue project.

All these 15 days after the October 7th massacre against peaceful Israeli civilians, I am thinking that we do need to publish all their photos, of all the victims, and their wounded and orphaned families too. Plus all and every photo of all kidnapped hostages. Plus all the photos of those who are still accounted for, there are at least 100+ people. Plus all the photos of the wounded, they all are victims of the  unprecedented terrorist assault. I know that we do have these collages, and it is important and good, very important and very good. I and my husband are personally very grateful to the editors at the Italian TG1, Tele Giornale 1 of RAI I, the country’s main TV news program which broadcasted the entire news magazine of the weekend on October 21st, 2023 in the studio which was all entirely made of such collage of the Israeli victims of the October massacre. It speaks volumes. Grazie cordialmente to everyone who has come with this idea, who executed it and who made it happen. It impacts not only directly visually, it sends the correct, decent message to a huge audience. This should be done in every really decent country worldwide. But so far, we saw it in just one of them. This is not to diminish the efforts of the others, nor to complain. It is just to note that this simple, telling and efficient visual commemoration – and reminding of the victims – can be done in this straightforward and honest way. Just saying. 

We know about the impressive exhibit of these photos in the Tel-Aviv Theatre, as a commemorative installation in an empty hall. The hall has 1000 seats which  was not enough to place portraits of all the victims there. We have now seen a dramatic exhibit of hundreds of empty children trolleys with their photos in each of them, in the garden next to Westminster in London. 

And also, when you put them all together in these existing collages – which is the first impulse of all those people who are making the heart-rendering collages – our ability to perceive each of them individually diminishes. I hope that it would be possible to publish portraits of every single victim of the October 7th massacre, and to tell the story of each and every of them. Each and every. Only in this way, we will make sure that they will survive in our memory. 

Among these stories, which nowadays are surfacing randomly, as families and friends sharing them, is one of Shlomo Ron. Shlomo was 85-year old, and he lived with his wife in kibbutz Nahal Oz all their lives. They loved literature, poetry, music and theatre. And he was quite ill. They also have a loving family, daughters and grandson who all came to visit their parents and grandparents for the end of the High Holidays and Simchat Torah. When the kibbutz was attacked, all of them went down to the security room. After a while, listening to what was going on around, 85-year-old Shlomo went upstairs, leaving his wife, daughters and grandson in the shelter. He had no weapon on him. He was sitting in the house waiting for the beasts to come. They did and saw elderly man sitting in his chair alone. Shlomo was murdered  at point blank range. His family was saved. The end of the story. Intelligent, loving, elderly, quite sick Jewish man who took a bullet to save his loved ones. A hero. One of many. And we ought to remember each and every one of them. Each and everyone. We ought to remember what they looked like, too. Memory is never  faceless. 

I find it useless to argue with anyone who fails to comprehend these simplest things of life and death, victim and perpetrator, decency and cowardness, truth and lie, humanity and barbarity.  By arguing with those who are on another side, we are diminishing the honour of our victims, in my opinion. You cannot teach decency to those who support and promote hate and crimes against humanity, for whatever reason. 

The 85-year-old Shlomo Ron, sick, gentle, quiet Jewish man defended his entire family. Jewish lions can be ageing, and they also can be sick. The heart is what matters. Attacking them self-drugged jackals and snakes can be in a great physical form and armed to the teeth. It does not make them anything else, but mad jackals and snakes. And those who are supporting them, are nobody else but creatures who are fancy of serpentariums. Let them enjoy it. They deserve it.

Michael Rogatchi (C). Psalms Country. 1991.

What people are thinking on Shabbat, Jewish  observing ones? A synagogue. Two weeks can feel like a quite long period of time when they are filled with horror and sorrow, and not much additionally to that. Two weeks which had been felt as two years in October 2023, from October massacre onwards, came to the Shabbat, and many of us who were aware of one more new pogrom, were also thinking about a synagogue. One of the most beautiful and special in the world, most visited, internationally known due to its huge historical importance. Djerba  Synagogue in Tunis. Which is not any more, after a vicious desecration and pogrom which destroyed it completely just two days before this Shabbat. 

Does it need to be mentioned that one of the oldest synagogues on earth was designated as the UNESCO World Heritage Site? Does it need to be reminded how beautiful and special it was? Full of harmony, meaning, brilliant architecture which was the memorial to a human genius itself, its proportions, design, and detail, twice so as it all has been done  – envisaged, planned, and actually done at the times which some experts believe to be as early as 6 century BCE? It is also believed to have some elements even from the First Temple. It is a world heritage treasure, Jewish or not. 

The tomb of one of the major Kabbalists, Rabbi Yosef Ma’Aravi, who himself was the student of the unique Rab Isaac Luriah, is the part of the Djerba Synagogue complex. Or it was, rather. Some parts inside the Synagogue, and the colouring of these parts are literally the same as it is at the Rabbi Luriah Synagogue in Safed. It is an astonishing similarity which speaks a lot to anyone who is interested in the matter. 

El Ghriba Synagogue as Djerba is also known, has been fully restored in the 19th century, and has been the subject of utter destructions before, with arsons and pro-Palestinian graffities at some places of the facade. The Synagogue was seriously damaged twice in recent years, as well. But never before I saw such a devastating pogrom of the lovely, peaceful, beautiful place which is not only very important historically, but  also has brought to Tunis a lot of money and tourists all the time. It was a vile desecration. A feast of evil. Permitted and overseen. A sign of this period of outright hate and violence against anything Jewish. 

Which we have seen also all over London this Shabbat, in the over 100 000 march of hate, with the leading role there of the openly terrorist organisation which no previous, or current governments of the United Kingdom dared to ban – despite the fact that it has been banned in 40 countries. If one is in the mood to laugh, the laugh could become  hysterical. 

Our friends from so many countries are repeating all these days: ‘You do not need to be Jewish. You need to be human’. Sort of a slogan of the day. It is truly weird, and actually is utterly absurd that this kind of basic human behaviour needs to be reminded of. Anywhere. Anytime. Speaking of the places which take for granted that they are civilised places and societies. And there is the subjects of comparison: the main square of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, filled with 1 400 candles in all its space with a giant Israeli flag in the facade of the Rathouse in front of it, lit just in time, with the beginning of Shabbat on October 20th, 2023 – and sea of hate swarming London, on the same Shabbat, on October 21st, 2023. Decency and permitted attack on it, black on white. 

Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Shoah. 1992.

These days of sorrow and horror, for two weeks long and non-stop, I am trying to find some windows of relief, however small ones, to have a quick breath in between non-stop deepening shock. My windows are like that: I am relieved that we have lived the most of our life in the world that had not been this openly and forcibly hateful, with such hideous crimes against humanity and against Jewish people committed with no reason whatsoever, and with unleashed violent hate ever since. 

I am relieved that our parents who were children during the Second World War and the Holocaust are not here to see it. They should not see it again, I think. My aunt died a few weeks ago, and I was very sad about it, as the life-rope with my family has loosened one of its threads. I was deeply sad for days. And now, I am thinking that I am grateful for the timing of her passing, because  I just cannot imagine how painful it would be for her. 

I am relieved that our grandparents who were in their 30s and 40s during the Second World War and the Holocaust, and who lost to the Shoah so many members of their families, did not live to witness this current nightmare again. They would not be able to withstand it, however strong they were, I know. There are limits for what a human being can endure. 

I am relieved that Elie Wiesel, Leonard Cohen  and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks were spared not to see it. I am writing about these towering figures whom we were privileged to know personally, and whom I feel close to. I am relieved that those very fine people, with their very sensitive souls, were spared to see this feast of terror and what has followed it, in so many senses and in so many places world-wide, not to be shaken and traumatised deeply. 

Besides those four small windows of relief, I have none. Two weeks after the worst massacre of Jewish people after the Shoah, there is not a single serious development whatsoever to provide us with a possibility to have a normal breath. This is the reality, on the record. Perhaps, this kind of records would be useful sometimes in the future, as it was essentially important for us, all those who have been studying the Holocaust, real-time chronicles from the end of the 1930s onward. 

Inna Rogatchi (C). Breath of Danger. 2023.

My friend from Germany said about her nephew who recently moved with his Jewish kids and wife from the country back to Ukraine where, being under the direct danger of Russian bombs, they are feeling morally better now than in the middle of Europe, in a bitter irony. “I am glad that they moved back, – my friend says. – It is so dangerous there ( in Ukraine) but at least they are not under constant attacks and danger from within, as Jewish kids are here at the moment”.  She and my other friends and relatives in Germany tell me that “people are very concerned and very frightened” there, that the attacks on Jewish properties are serious, many and growing. 

Like many other of our friends in Germany, she is ‘simply traumatised by the images of Mogen David on the doors of the Jewish houses. Never in my worst dream, I could imagine that I would see anything as graphic and as terrible as this in Germany, of all places”, – she says. As it turned out, so many of us obviously did lack this degree of imagination. 

In Berlin, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the synagogue in down-town. In France, the teacher was murdered by an ISIS terrorist, and just a few days after that hideous attack, the entire school was shut down due to the bomb threat. In Cayenne, a huge knife-yelding another Allakh-Akhbar screaming terrorist attacked the synagogue. In Rome, the very well-known to us Jewish school, also very much in the city centre, full of children including small kids, was completely evacuated due to another bomb-threat. In Stockholm, a huge aggressive crowd ignites hate towards Jewish people day after another. In the centre of Helsinki, a smaller, but not less aggressive crowd simply loudly chants Intifada! non-stop, inciting  and threatening, while some people who just happened to be nearby on their own routine, get visibly shaken and sheepishly trying to pass the hate-spot as fast as possible. The members of Jewish communities everywhere in Europe are receiving security updates every few days informing them at which places certain militant marches are planned – and permitted, too, incredibly – with only strong recommendation: not to be nearby those places. This is absurd. 

While some countries do have decency and common sense of standing up to the terrorists and myriads of their supporters, forbidding such manifestations of hate, many other ones are toothless, weak in the name of democracy, and unwilling to stand up to inciters, loud and dangerous supporters of terrorists, blatant racists and haters of Jews.  How on earth can a normal democratic state permit an incitement march to the Embassy of Israel as it has been done in London and as it also done in Helsinki? But while in London at least, there are many articulated, vocal, open, registered, official, for the record political concerns  and serious, real discussions in the UK Parliament regarding ‘the awful treatment of the UK Jewry’, as it goes in the Westminster records, and as we all saw it, in the Finnish parliament is a total, deafening, unchanged  – and unchallenged –  silence on the matter since the beginning of the October massacre of Jewish people in Israel and following escalating of racist hate of Jews inside the country. The parliament is dead-silent while police routinely permit  many intensifying  anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and  anti-Jewish community of Finland demonstrations, marches and inciting manifestations of racism and hate. This is a surreal situation of mounting danger all over Europe and beyond. 

Israeli Embassies had to be evacuated in many countries, even in Argentina, with its huge Jewish community there, due to imminent danger. 

My British non-Jewish colleague has mentioned from the midst of unprecedented danger to Jews in  the UK: “You do not need to be Jewish to be seriously afraid here”.

I never came across this kind of situation of open, intensifying – and unchallenged, unrestricted danger of physical and any other abuse of Jewish people, and actually, not just Jewish ones, all over the world. 

All this, because of what? Due to what? Were there Jews, Israelies, who slit babies throats on peaceful Shabbat and Saturday morning in October, to name just one method of the October 7th massacre which resulted in over 1 400 ( and counting) viciously murdered mainly civilians, over 200 kidnapped, and over 700 missing? This is not to mention a total barbaric destruction in more than 14 different peaceful places in Israel. Were there Jews, Israelis who cut off vaginas on alive women , the victims of their unspeakable massive rapes? 

Jewish people, as citizens of Israel, as citizens of  very many countries world-wide, fell victims of the hideous assault and screaming crimes against humanity in a terrifying proportion. And, as paradoxically as it gets, this unprecedented massacre triggered, in fact, behind the veil of words of some leaders, certainly, not all of those expected, the growing wave of unprecedented and unjustified danger towards Jewish people and those non-Jewish decent ones who support us openly, world-wide. To say that it is a macabre is to say nothing.

This is the feast of an unopposed nastiness. This is a pre-mega-pogrom situation, created by pro-terrorists settled in Europe and elsewhere against an outraging impotence of the authorities and the police in every given country where Jewish people and those who support us are under ongoing assault. Why? How? What for? Aiming what? All those questions are acutely actual now. Never before – if not to cite the late 1930s in Europe – leadership and authorities of so many countries were not so thoroughly paralysed in front of evil.

In these days of grief and anxiety, anxiety and grief, a very good European female poet wrote a short poem. Calm and chilling at the same time. About the last days of sunny autumn, a quiet pretty town in Germany, a nice smell of cinnamon and coffee from a nearby small caffe where one eagerly gets inside in the frantic strive for metaphorical shelter. And getting inside this idyllic milieu, one stares through the window having just one thought: “They did not bomb these railways ( to the camps) then, too”.  This is what we all are thinking about these days. This is exactly what we all are thinking all days long. 

Inna Rogatchi (C). Freeze. War & Humanity. 2023.

Maniac Lenin has left perhaps one bit of something useful after him, his  formula about  ‘useful idiots’. We are still using it a century after that miserable psychotic has died. Not only due to a successful wording, but mainly because it is so widely applicable.

But now, we are having a modification of that shrewd observation. Humanity progressed to the new category of idiots :hateful ones. All those media hysterics, political hypocrites, intellectual left-wing militants who were running the one before the other, in their breathless, blind hatred against Israel that was accused by such indisputable for them ‘angels’ as Hamas, of mass atrocity against that hospital in Gaza. Which turned out not only to be a blatant Goebbels propaganda lie, but also the hospital turned out to be not a hospital but a small car parking lot nearby. 

CNN, New York Times, vicious BBC, Sky News, all possible Guardians and Independents of all sorts, not to speak of myriad of heavily pro-militant Islamists-does-not-matter-what media outfits all over oh-so-democratic Europe, oh-so-humanistic Australia, and many others supposedly oh-so-civilised corners of this pathetic globe rushed breathlessly, with that Danton-like fevered eyes of zealotry, against Israel, the only Jewish state on this earth, as small as it is, amidst 40 of oh-so-nice and hospitable, so democratic Arab countries. 

I just wonder: if Israel is oh-so-awful, why the h-ck Hamas boss , and many of his buddies, were repeatedly treating his daughter, their other relatives and themselves by oh-so-terrible Israeli doctors? It is another question why on earth it had become possible in the first place. 

What this united in their hysterical blind hatred international media, and many hateful idiots the politicians, including some of European countries’ leaders, such as speaker of the Belgian parliament, and unfortunately many others senior figures demonstrated in this stupidest if not so cruel episode over the gloating the Hamas-fed Goebbels propaganda and attacking Israel absolutely without reason whatsoever did show it is the real attitude of all those circles and individuals to the state of Israel – and the Jews in general, for this matter. And it does matter. It does.

I do not remember the more shameful collective attack against the victim with a huge looming V from the part of the oh-so-civilised world, especially in the face of its media and politicians world-wide. In fact, that shameful and absolutely ungrounded attack was nothing else but the manifest of hate. Primitive, in some cases, subconscious ( I know some of such politicians cases personally, sadly so) anti-Semitism, even instinctive one, which is often the case, as it is known by any researcher of anti-Semitism . What we saw in that shameful attack against Israel, with feverishly repeating Hamas lies, was nothing but barely masked real hatred and pure racism. 

One of our good friends Tomas Sandell who is not Jewish, has come with the following observation: “Why is the gut feeling of so many to automatically believe the terrorists when faced with the terrible news of the Gaza hospital strike? Do people think that the same savages who butchered Israeli civilians just one week ago are suddenly credible news sources that are inclined to tell the truth no matter what?” He knows the answer, of course. What is important here is the articulated publicly point of view. Of a civilised, honest person versus the huge bunch of screaming hateful idiots. 

Another non-Jewish person has entitled his very shrewd, spot-on article in this way: “Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?” Indeed. The article has initiated a vivid discussion among our Jewish friends: “ Have you seen this?” – “Yes, brilliant”. – “Is the author Jewish?” – “No, I don’t think so”. – “But maybe, he is married to a Jewish woman?’” – ‘Don’t know, not sure. – “ Or perhaps he might have some Jewish relatives, even distant ones?”. Nobody knew the family relations of the brave and honest writer. And then one of us popped in with a reflection: “Or, perhaps, he is just a decent person?..”  Nobody knew the answer to that puzzling supposition either.

Puzzling indeed, in these days of a pyrrhic global feast of hateful idiots. And pyrrhic it is because one’s hate always,  sooner or later, but  just always,  turns against a hating subject. Doubly so if he or she is so explicitly idiotic.

Michael Rogatchi (C). Kaddish. Oil on canvas. 1995.

Several of our close friends in Israel are frantically busy these awful days. They are busy with only one thing. Funerals. One after another. Several a day. For several days. I never knew anything like that happening in a close proximity. 

Many people have their close circles hit with savages’ crimes. Once somebody you know has been viciously murdered , your soul rushes your body to the farewell. Our tradition in this respect is deep, thoughtful and exceedingly humane. 

With our people’s history, and its recent history when the Holocaust had become so terrifyingly near to us, to say respectful, meaningful farewell is a must. 

I am worried about some of our friends who have been attending  many funerals frantically , some of them as many as three per day. Our friends are not young. And they are not in the best medical form, to put it mildly. 

But they are determined to spend their days at this daring moment to their very best. And this best , under the circumstances of all-nation in Israel  and global Jewish mourning is to be able to be present physically and to say the Kaddish to as many people as they possibly could. 

I am just thinking of an  unprecedented density of horrifying non-stop funerals of known 1 400 victims of the Hamas terror , and counting, in the souls of those who have made their mission to respect as many souls as possible at their departure. What a trial. And I am so incredibly grateful to those very brave Jewish people who have volunteered with this endlessly sorrowful mission. And I am proud of my people.I always will remember this simple but so very demanding reaction and deeds. 

There are also attentive people who volunteered to do another similar task : to check and to make sure that there are people visiting mourners who are sitting the shiva, a week – long mourning observance according to Jewish tradition. “ Please, there is elderly lady alone evacuated from the  south to Jerusalem who is sitting the shiva for her son. She should not be alone , please visit her. Here is the address”. “ At this address in Tel Aviv, there is a couple who are sitting shiva for their only son. Their Hebrew is not that well. Please visit them and bring something to eat. “ Please make sure to comfort the father who is sitting shiva for his daughter’s family. Address is here. I find it incredible and natural at the same time. There are many people who are actually caring. Who are doing their bit every day during these nightmare-like days, to comfort those in the most need after Israel and Jewish National tragedy. There is love. There is care. There is compassion without slogans. The reality of understated goodness – this is what keeps me going.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Solitude Song I. Hatikvah in White and Blue project. 2023.

One hears a lot of stories these days. Sometimes, they get polarised in one’s head. And one’s world. On Sunday October 15th, 2023, there has been a very decent and good gathering in the Finnish capital, in front of the Finnish parliament ( which still be a dead-silent as an institution, except one small press-release which had to do with Finnish members of the Council of Europe), with about thousand people came to express their solidarity with Israel. As they were leaving the event, those people who were exiting from one of two entrances, were met by stones. Just like during a riot in Eastern Jerusalem or any other place of terrorist attacks, big and small,  in Israel. But in Helsinki? 

 My friend who was there said that there were four or five young men who attacked people and threw stones at them  just next to the Finnish parliament. ‘And the police?”- asked another friend. – ‘Police were at the event, but they were not dispatched at the both entrances, so the one where the attackers were waiting for people to leave the event, was not covered. Police told us not to use that unguarded entrance. But there were very good volunteer guards who took care of everything”, my friend went on. Moreover, the police said that the event was peaceful. Yes, it was, during the demonstration. But after it ended, we were met with stones, and not by one person, but by several of them who were prepared and waiting for us. Police’s lulled ‘all was peaceful’ statement is typical for Finland though”, – concludes my friend.  Never before anything like that happened here in Finland. Was it reported just anywhere? Nope. 

Being under the impression  of the story about the stones thrown in the middle of Finnish capital on peaceful demonstration, I am hearing another story, in which a very experienced forensic doctor, Nurit Bublil, the head of the forensic DNA lab in Israel speaks about their gruesome finding. Everyone can hear it for him or herself, too. It is on X ( Twitter) released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. It is just a few minutes. There you can hear about the Israeli forensic doctors’ findings in their non-stop hideous marathon to identify the victims of the similar types which are throwing stones at people now in Europe, as well. The Israeli forensic specialists are working for ten days now in the rhythms of starting their work at the labs at 7 am and finishing by midnight, coming home by 2 AM, doctor Bublil tells us remarkably trying to be calm. “We need to give our people names to bury them’. These are our doctors’ main tasks these days. 

Novices are not taken to the teams of the Israeli forensic doctors sorting out the findings of the October  7th Massacre. Only very experienced doctors who saw everything. Everything but this, several of them have told us independently. Doctor Bublil tells trying to keep calm, what she finds in the hundreds of samples reaching her lab. “One package was unusually heavy, and we all thought what could it be? We opened. It was a cook-book. Very popular in Israel, which is in so many kitchens, mine included. We all are using this cook-book here. The book was soaked in blood. And I thought: “It could be any of us”. This great doctor also told about other findings. “I opened a small envelope, and there were small nails. Painted in such a nice rosy colour. And another one, in white. Nails only. Nothing else. Nothing”. 

Those nails – and those stones. Those stones – and these nails.  What else is needed to prove the evil of terrorism?

Michael Rogatchi (C). In the Mirror of Holocaust. 1999. Permanent Art Collection. Holocaust Museum. Dnipro, Ukraine.

My close friend is very justly lamenting the necessity of a heavy guard of the Jewish school in the centre of ever-peaceful Helsinki, these days. “ But this school where also non-Jewish students are studying teaches 100% Finnish official school curriculum. Why on earth should this school need an arm guard?!” – she exclaims, rhetorically, knowing perfectly well why and trying to make the point to those who pretend to be blind and deaf. The same goes with the Jewish school in Tallinn, which is known for the top-quality of the education it provides, and thus is very popular with many non-Jewish families in the capital of Estonia to get the best education for their children. It is heavily guarded too, and in a normal, adequate society places of peaceful education of all kinds of kids should not be in need of an arm guard. Crystal-clear. But not the fact of life for us these days. 

Just very recently, a couple of weeks prior to the October massacre in Israel, some of our American friends went genuinely surprised while seeing some guard next to some Jewish schools somewhere in the US. It came as a complete and total surprise to them. I spoke with my friends, and they were genuinely shocked to see it on American soil while they were fully aware of the situation in Europe where many of the Jewish-related sites are guarded for years. And this was yet before the macabre of all-fledged anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli hate which the authorities in too many places world-wide have been unable or unwilling to halt. 

And here is a charming episode from the US itself. Stanford of all places. The university, another school. There, a scum in the guise of a teacher, called all Jewish students in his class to identify themselves by raising their hand. Which they did, I do not know why. Then, he ordered them to get to the corner of the room and to stand there. And they went, I also just cannot get why on earth they stupidly obliged. Then the 46-year old scum who demands to call him a professor, declared that this is ‘what their people are doing to the people in Gaza’. He also taught the class on those separated Jews in the corner on what ‘colonisers’ actually is. He asked everyone of them where from  their family was. For another inexplicable reason, Jewish students answered to that gangster in the Stanford study hall. One of them happened to be from Israel. The gangster was ecstatic. “Yes, yes! You are absolutely a coloniser!” – he screamed. 

He also asked those in the corner, how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Maintaining that macabre dialogue, instead of calling for police, some students replied: “6 million”. – “Yes, 6 million, not enough”, the teacher stated, according to the testimonies of multiple witnesses. 

Yet before the Holocaust went into full-scale, this was the practice of many teachers in many schools in Germany. This is well documented. Now it is happening in the US, in Stanford of all places. Humanity came to its dark age, willingly so. 

The Stanford University authorities did an open inner investigation, due to the public outcry. The scum disguised as a teacher is suspended. Suspended, not fired, and not criminally charged. The University, typically for many universities nowadays, trying to hush-hush this screaming Nazism of our days, in an usual, pathetic way, diminishing his role in the university – ‘he was not a teacher, he was an teaching instructor’ ( in his official papers, one reads ‘professor’), and they deliberately omitted his name. Anonymous teaching instructor, it is nicer this way. His name is known and published, of course. The university looks stupid at the very least. 

And we all are eighty five years back, in a macabre dance of hatred. What has happened then, just a couple of years after German scums were exercising in the sport of placing Jewish kids in the corner? We know what. And why? We know why. Because that vicious, gut hatred was overseen, permitted and it splashed all over, to the ravine of the Babyn Yar, which today moved to Israel’s inner territory. And outside Israel, after the most barbaric crimes against humanity committed, the Jewish schools should be guarded all over Europe and the US, and in the leading American university with no war whatsoever, racist thugs are allowed to put Jewish kids in the corner. This has only meaning, actually. It is a civilisation which is cornered by militant anti-Semitic thugs. 

Inna Rogatchi (C). Creation Visions.

For most of our Jewish friends it was the saddest and the most difficult Shabbat of their lives. We are no exception to this phenomenon. The beginning of the Torah, the first parsha Bereishit, ( Genesis), with which the world’s observing Jewry starts its new year, is a cosmos and the world of itself. So you are trying to get to the bottom of it, as from the first time, because in an essential sense, it is the first time in a new reality, to get a crack on what has gone wrong in the beginning. From the beginning. That humanity is desperately secondary in the world full of human beings. 

We were praying in danger, far from Israel, in many places world-wide, from Paris to New York, and from Helsinki to Berlin. We were guarded, by both the police and the volunteers, the real friends, to whom we are grateful to, each of them. Our close non-Jewish friend in Italy in his mid-1960s spent the whole day on his feet, in his military uniform, with his weapon, guarding the synagogue in Florence. Grazie cordialmente, caro Stefano. And everyone who helped and is helping us all to be and to feel, importantly, secure, all over the world. 

But this is screamingly wrong. The world, human society, have had the Holocaust. Everyone everywhere knows its face. It is utterly wrong and completely unacceptable by any standard of any civilised society to allow violent gatherings of thugs. In Helsinki, they were almost storming the Israeli Embassy, and the same was the case in London, New York, Berlin and many other cities in Germany. In Berlin, they are marking the houses where they think Jewish people are living with stars of David on the entrance doors, en masse.  At least, in Paris, the gathering was not permitted. They went on the street anyway, but in this case, the police had a legitimate right to disperse them. This false appeasement towards the anti-human thugs must be stopped. This is sacrilege, and absolutely wrong signal to its own society, in every case. 

As it always happens, it only starts with Jews. In the front of our eyes, first the Louvre and then the Versaille had to be evacuated and shut down,  on the same day, due to the specific threats of explosions. Is it not telling enough? 

All over the world, many synagogues decided to shut their doors following the police assessment. On Shabbat. No services, no possibility for people to come together and to be together which is very important at a time like this. Does it provide a sense of security? No, it provides a sense of isolation and imminent and permanent danger to the members of Jewish communities worldwide, for days by now and for days to come. And this is not even wrong. This is weak, inefficient, and morally perverted. In a properly functioning civilised society, authorities in charge do not make victims victimised yet further on. This is outrageous. 

Well, we’ve got the message. We’re on our own. As always. We will prevail. We have an experience of it for three thousand and seven hundred years. 

The past Shabbat was the first specific Shabbat known to the Rabbinic authorities as ‘war Shabbat’. It has its own features, including permission to work for specific categories of people. This Shabbat, additionally to everyone on the duty, army, police, rescue and medical staff, a special permission and request to work was issued by our Rabbinic authorities to two categories of people: rabbis and all kinds of the Torah teachers, those who has their personal students who are on the front line, and might be in need to be in touch with their teacher personally at any moment during the Shabbat; and all and every person who is working in the organisations and services providing  psychological support. Their services are needed 24/7 these days both in Israel and all over Jewish diaspora, our Rabbinic authorities concluded. Such was our first Shabbat in this new globally spread Jews-hateful reality.