I’m starting my blog with an unusual post: a short story I wrote in December 2023, only two months after the October 7th attack, which has sat in my desk drawer until now.  The story is Zionist science fiction with a dose of satire.  But it is also an allegory which expresses my sadness, not only at the attack itself, but at much of the world’s reaction to it which demonstrated the enduring, irrational and ever-adaptable nature of antisemitism.  The reaction was proof that Israel’s geographic location is not the cause of the hatred, Jews are.  Wherever the Jewish homeland might have been founded – whether Israel, Uganda, Bavaria or Mars – it would have made no difference.  People would find reasons to condemn the Jewish state, especially when need arose to defend itself.

This Sunday, many New Yorkers will join in a celebration of Israel, both as participants and spectators of the annual Israel Day Parade.  While they may disagree strongly about several things, such as Israel’s government and many of its policies and actions, it is fair to say that everyone in attendance agrees on one thing: Israel is and remains a necessity for Jews across the globe, especially now.

Many people know the work of Herschel Liberman, the lifesaving immunologist and accused genocidaire.  But I will tell you about the man, my grandfather.  He was born in Czestochowa, Poland in 1920, one of those inauspicious years for a Jew to be born in Poland, a terrible ordeal awaiting each bald, pink-cheeked tyke.  At the age of seventeen he went to university to study medicine.  When the Nazis invaded, Hershel was forced out of university and into a ghetto and from there to Auschwitz.  He managed to survive long enough to be marched and whipped west through heavy snows ahead of the Red Army’s advance.  Like in so many photographs that, for a time at least, shocked the world’s conscience, my grandfather was one of those tottering cadavers when the British liberated Bergen-Belsen.  Some have said that his survival was a miracle, but Grandpa always insisted that one survivor among millions of dead was no miracle, just dumb luck.  But to anyone who called him lucky he would softly disagree, saying no one forced to endure such horrors can be lucky.

That was 1945.  Two years later Herschel Liberman hadn’t left the city of Bergen.  Only, by that time the concentration camp had been razed and Herschel lived in the newly constructed camp for displaced persons.  Herschel was displaced.  He was a Polish citizen, but he refused to return there.  Quite frankly, the Poles didn’t want him either.  No one wanted him.  Not the Americans, the French, or the British.  The Argentines, Cubans and Mexicans weren’t keen on taking him.  There was one place Hershel dreamed of going.  A place that drew Herschel’s heart like the North Pole a compass needle.  Palestine.

Each day since he was a boy in cheder, Herschel prayed the words, “May it be your will, God and God of my forefathers, that the Holy Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt speedily in our days.”  Before the war Herschel said the prayer in the abstract, as an obligation of daily ritual, often yawning or lost in daydream.  But, when he muttered his prayers noiselessly each night in the camps, wedged between so many shivering stick-figure men and boys on bunks of splintery boards, he meant it more than he could have previously fathomed until his frail body almost trembled in pained desire.  In Herschel’s dream, however, fulfillment of the prayer wasn’t a physical rebuilding of the Beis Hamikdash in Jerusalem.  The land of Israel, Eretz Yisrael, was the temple, and only with the reassembly of Jews in the land would it be rebuilt.  Only when all his starving, freezing campmates were warming themselves on the ancient, sunbaked stones of Jerusalem would the prayer be realized.  He ached not for a new home; he yearned to return home.

With the war over, Herschel tried to rebuild a normal life, or as normal a life as one could create in the clapboard barracks of a DP camp, with no defined future in sight and hoping each day that just one country would deem him worthy of living among them.  Yet, while nation after nation dawdled, 21-year-old Esther Weintraub did not.  Herself a “lucky one,” from Mannheim, Germany, with not a single family member left alive, she wasn’t one to waste time restarting her life. Herschel was handsome and mannered, with a gentle humor and a mind as brilliant as a diamond. Esther took Herschel’s hand at a dance in the DP camp and never let go.  Grandpa told me he was immediately smitten by the petite brunette with dark eyes and ears that poked out just a little from her long straight hair.  In Esther, Herschel saw not only beauty, warmth and intelligence but the beginnings of some permanence following years of tumult.  Three weeks later they married in the camp dining hall, moved into a bungalow of their own and, ten months later, baby Samuel, my father, was born.

But more than a baby boy was born in 1948.  On May 14th Herschel and Esther, with Sammy on her lap, sat in the dining hall with all the remaining DPs and listened to a staticky Bakelite Volksempfänger radio.  This was the moment Herschel had longed for, the 2000-year-old dream made reality, a Jewish homeland once more.  As soon as he could save enough money, he would book passage for his young family and live there.  But not just anywhere.  Jerusalem!  No matter that the Jews and Arabs had been at each other’s throats for decades and the violence had escalated drastically in the months since the United Nations announced its partition plan.  It was his destiny.

A radio news correspondent spoke in a polished English accent.

“Mr. Ben-Gurion has now risen to his feet.  He is flanked by members of Jewish National Council.  Behind him hangs a large portrait of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland.  Long banners, each with a Star of David, flank the portrait and bands of sunlight flood through a row of windows overhead.  Mr. Ben-Gurion approaches the microphone and holds the papers with his speech in front of him.  Let us listen to history.”

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, defiant returnees, and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of........

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