David Cohen

                                                  Memories of Israel (and beyond)

By David Cohen

 On a hot July afternoon in 1971, I found myself standing high on a mountain slope  overlooking a kibbutz in northern Israel.  The homes, the kindergarten, the dining hall, the barns, the fields - all of it - lay in plain view, unobstructed and seemingly within a stone’s throw.  I imagined sending a paper airplane gliding down from my vantage point, confident that the mountain breezes would help propel it all the way to the community lying below...

Such a view would normally inspire the usual appreciation for natural beauty, the sheer magic of being in a place you’ve heard and dreamt about, and finally, after much planning and anticipation,  the joy of being there; absorbing the overwhelming sensations and experiences that make travel to foreign lands so impactful, and - if you’re fortunate, as I was - completely life-changing.

My feelings were a mixture of happiness, excitement, and independence (seven weeks far away from home and family).  But in the background were feelings of awe, and fear, and pride and a muted sense of sadness because, until just four years earlier, the land on which I was standing had been a Syrian Army encampment from which artillery and machine gun attacks had rained down on that idyllic kibbutz below.  I was standing on the Golan Heights, which were captured during the Six-Day War. 

I remember the worry and fear which gripped the Jewish community in my hometown during the weeks leading up to that war; the threats coming from President Nasser of Egypt, the blockading of the entrance to the Red Sea which threatened Israeli commerce (this itself an act of war), the meek response and quick capitulation of the UN when the Egyptians demanded they remove their peacekeeping forces from the Sinai frontier with Israel... 

As an American Jew who had experienced antisemitic attacks - both verbal and physical - I was aware that despite my own encounters with hate, the experiences of those Israelis in the kibbutz below had been far worse until June 1967,  a watershed moment for Jews throughout the world who marveled at another miraculous victory of a young Israeli nation over multiple Arab enemies, this time in less than a week.  For six days, the IDF decimated the air forces, armies and naval forces of their enemies, and on the seventh day, they rested.  A Creation story: the creation of new geopolitical forces in the Mideast, new armistice lines which afforded Israelis a larger buffer zone around their tiny country, but most of all, the creation of an emboldened Israel which showed the world that, once and for all, they were here to stay.  Am Yisrael Chai!  Never Again! 

And Jews all over the world carried themselves with their heads held a little bit higher, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief, and offered prayers of thanks for Israel’s survival.  And we mourned our dead, and cursed the need for us to have to go to war to protect ourselves, but even more so for the need to kill so many others in the process...

In spite of the emotional intensity of these experiences, my almost two months in Israel were an exhilarating adventure combining travel around the entire country from the Golan Heights to the Red Sea and Sinai Peninsula, along with working for a month on kibbutz Givat Chaim Meuchad (near the town of Hadera), where I dug ditches to lay irrigation pipelines, worked in the apple orchards and orange groves, had cleanup duties in the communal dining hall and its kitchen...  After finishing our day’s work around noon (we started at 5:00 AM), we’d shower, have lunch, and sometimes even hitch rides into Jerusalem or Tel Aviv for the rest of the day, returning at night exhausted, happy, and filled with even more memories and experiences:  riding Egged buses, getting thrown out of the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton (my friend and I weren’t dressed to its standards), exploring the Shuk in the Old City and discovering a wonderful northern Italian restaurant there called Gino’s, visiting family friends in Jerusalem and kibbutz Kfar Blum in the Galilee...  These were wonderful counterbalances to the drama and history which surrounded us every day, and which we learned much about from our guides and others we encountered.

I have a personal investment in Israel of sweat (and a little blood, too) I shed in the heat of the kibbutz workday, and tears I shed at Yad Vashem as I gazed at artifacts, pictures and other memorabilia from the Holocaust (which claimed dozens of my own family). 

My memories of Israel are permanently bound to my experiences of being a second-generation American Jew.  The journey of my ancestors from Eastern Europe to the United States (and to South America, Israel, Canada, and elsewhere) is the historical bridge between that tortured, amazing, resilient sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast and my individual responsibility to preserve the memories, history, faith and traditions for which they took such great personal risk to protect for my parents’ and my generations; and to pass it on by example not only to my own children, but to all young Jews I encounter who are the last link in the chain at this time. 

That northern kibbutz,  which literally lay in a  “valley of the shadow of death” until June 1967, embodies the values that give purpose to the way we as Jews approach the rising hatred we see in the world today.  Our history has demonstrated that countless times.  The modern Israeli nation is in our consciousness, but we should also recognize that in spite of its rough exuberance, religious tensions and, at times, awkward policy decisions, the long history it reflects is a time-tested model for us as Jews of every stream of belief (or non-belief) that will assure our ability to confront the challenges we face.  Memories are powerful, and the ones I created during my visit to Israel forty-seven years ago are a powerful component of the person I am today.