6/28/2024
Being Jewish on World Refugee Day
A Blog Written for KAMA DC and World Refugee Day
When I turned eighteen, my dad got me a gift. He has a propensity for giving unique gifts, gifts that leave you in awe and some that make you scratch your head. In a few months' time, I was to commence on March of the Living (MOTL) with my Jewish youth group, a two week trip that begins at the concentration camps in Poland and culminates in a week-long tour of Israel. Thousands of students from across the globe travel to Poland for this journey, and they all convene at Auschwitz on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) to complete the three kilometer “death march” to the Birkenau concentration camp in silence. This is not a joyous vacation, and my dad’s gift matched the occasion.
My childhood home in Savannah is full of books. It’s the first thing you notice when you enter the foyer, the bookshelf that wraps the walls. Those shelves contain mostly hardcover early editions of seminal works of fiction. Little did I realize that many of the authors on the shelves were Jewish, and for my birthday, my dad compiled a collection of my own of post-Holocaust historical fiction hardcovers, each accompanied by the author's bio or obituary slipped between the pages. Not only was this an incredibly thoughtful gift, but it was a gift that, with the trip to Poland, would shape my interests and beliefs for years to come.
Eight years on, I carry some guilt for having not made it through each of the books (it is typically quite dense and heavy reading), but the words of Jewish authors writing in the midst of losing everything sits heavily, sometimes idle, inside me. Yet, it is a book of tireless movement that I think back to most often, Aharon Appelfeld’s The Iron Tracks. Appelfeld, born in Central Europe, fled a Nazi labor camp as a child and kept his Jewish identity hidden until he ultimately settled in the new Jewish state of Israel. His life reflected that of so many Jewish refugees. In The Iron Tracks, Appelfeld’s protagonist, Erwin Siegelbaum, never settles. Forty years on from being released from a concentration camp, Siegelbaum continues to quietly and meticulously ride the railways of postwar Austria. He collects the artifacts of fellow Jews who perished during the war, partially in an attempt to reclaim what millions have left behind and partially because the collection is his lifeblood. The only thing that drives him further is revenge. He dreams feverishly of finding and killing the Nazi officer who murdered his parents.
‘Exiting Birkenau' shot by me from MOTL
Exodus
With KAMA DC, I recently hosted a storytelling night in conjunction with Mosaic Theatre and their show Mexodus. Mexodus, the brilliant brainchild of Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, is a story about the underground railroad that led south from Texas to Mexico following the annexation of Texas into the United States. If it were not already obvious, Mexodus, like many other stories from American slavery, is bursting with biblical themes. Exodus is arguably the most important book in the Torah, and Passover, in terms of narrative and tradition, anchors the calendar for many Jews.
Before the show began, the actors briefly placed the show in the contemporary global context, alluding to those across the world, in particular Gaza, fighting oppression and seeking freedom like the slaves in Texas. While all in attendance, including myself, found this a fitting precursor, the layers were many. Not only is Exodus an important book for Jews in a biblical sense, but its historical relevance for Jews was proven century after century, pogrom after expulsion, culminating in the events of the Holocaust.
Verdicts
For Jews, Israel is the manifestation of God’s promise in Exodus, but Jews, like Aaron Appelfeld, know better than anybody that this d
eliverance is not clean. Appelfeld talks extensively throughout his life of the scars and suffering that the Holocaust survivors in Israel practice every day to avoid and forget. This piece will fall short in summarizing the history and relations of Israel and Palestine, but I will say this: it feels ugly to be Jewish on World Refugee Day. In The Iron Tracks, vengeance drives Erwin Siegelbaum to embrace violence that he does not truly hold in his heart, but this vengeance also builds within him an insurmountable will. With the closing of the Rafah passing, Gazans are fish in a barrel. Take the time to speak with or read the account of a refugee this week, and most would not wish their journey upon anyone. Just last week, two more ships carrying migrants wrecked off the coast of Italy, and dozens making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean perished. Yet, the conditions that Israel is subjecting Gazans to is making them desperate to undertake their own refugee journey with their only way out being expensive and unreliable Egyptian middlemen.
And even if Israel pulls out tomorrow, there is vengeance that will not be answered for generations. Jews should know, as it is vengeance for the acts of October 7th that has driven the endless months of blind razing. While I think it is dangerous to continuously place Jews and Palestinians in dichotomous comparisons, there is one blatant similarity. Both are incredibly resilient. The Israeli government treats Palestinians like cockroaches but have so quickly forgotten that we were once cockroaches and that we are still brothers in the holiest of terms.
One day I will take my children to Auschwitz and Birkenau and Treblinka. I will say “look, this is what the world thought of people like me and you not that long ago. We’re American but we were German and Polish and Lithuanian and from all the places between and the cracks below. We belonged to places that don’t exist anymore.” Then I will let them come to their own conclusions about the state of things and if they should be angry or sad or feel nothing at all. More than 35,000 people in Gaza have been killed, and I wonder if one day their descendants will visit Gaza City and Khan Younis and tell their children the same thing. Jews lived for generations on end as refugees, and on World Refugee Day, we should be amplifying the voices of the millions of refugees in places like Sudan and Syria instead of wasting energy defending a government that pretends to act in our name as they refuse to grant Palestinians the measly privilege of refugeedom. There is a cycle of inferiority, anger, and resilience that sits at the heart of the Jewish psyche. World Refugee Day has given me an opportunity to ask myself why that is, what it means to have the privilege of a Jewish state, and what those displaced, like my family were for generations, deserve.