Why Jews Still Fight for Home — and What America Owes

I have a photograph of my father-in-law standing alone in a desert, holding a rifle. On the back, in Edna’s handwriting, it says: “Harry Brill, 1948, Israel — in the Army.”

He survived the Holocaust by hiding in the forests of eastern Galicia. In 1947 he boarded the Exodus with 4,515 other Jewish survivors bound for Palestine. The British rammed the ship, forced its passengers off, and sent them back to Germany.

There is another photograph — published in Life magazine — of Harry as a boy pressed against wire netting on a train to the displaced persons camp at Poppendorf. Even after surviving the forests, he was still a refugee.

He made it to Israel eventually. Within months he was standing in that desert with a rifle, fighting for a country that was days old, because five Arab armies invaded the morning after it was born.

That photograph is not history to me. It is family.

That photograph is not history to me. It is family.

And it is a reminder that for Jews, the war for a home did not end in 1945. It did not end in 1948. It has never really ended.

The Jewish people have been fighting for safety since before there was a word for nationhood. They fought Pharaoh. They were conquered by Babylonians and Romans. They were expelled from England, France, and Spain. They survived crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and blood libels. For two thousand years they ended the Passover Seder with the same prayer:

Next year in Jerusalem.

The Holocaust proved, in the most brutal way imaginable, that exile was not safety. Assimilation was not safety. Gratitude from neighbors was not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)