It Takes a Village

The Tablet ^ | 24 Nov2020 | Michael Oren

[Rummyfan]

Some years ago, my best friend from childhood visited me for the first time in Israel. The son of a French Jewish mother who had moved to America early in World War II, he’d been raised Jewish and hated every aspect of it. Completing our tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, I asked him whether any of his French family had perished in the Holocaust. He didn’t know but agreed to submit the question to the database. The printout he received showed that not only had his grandfather, who had supposedly died of natural causes in Paris, been deported to Auschwitz, but so, too, had an uncle whom my friend never knew existed. From the lobby, he called his mother. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he said, weeping. “Bad enough I had to live with it,” she replied. “Why should you?”

Her response was not unusual for French survivors. For the roughly one-half of French Jews who, in 1940, were not recent immigrants but long-established in the country, the trauma was twofold. Not only had their beloved homeland, the first to emancipate European Jews, betrayed them, but it had done so with unparalleled swiftness—a veritable volte-face. True, this was the France of the Dreyfus trial, of anti-Semitic writers like Edouard Drumont and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and of the ultra-rightist Action Française. But it was also the France of Adolphe Crémieux, Marcel Proust, and Henri Bergson. It was the republic in which, on the eve of WWII, Leon Blum, Pierre Mendes-France, and other Jews could rise to the highest offices.

[Rummyfan]

As the saying goes, Europeans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.

[Seruzawa]

I read a book about the French “resistance” to the Germans in WWII. The resistance wasn’t very extensive. Plus the book documented that French people were more cooperative with the SS and Gestapo in rooting out Jews than even the German people were.

[Spok]

I was at Yad Vashem in February. The memorial has undertaken the Herculean task of documenting every Jew who died in the Halocaust. The children’s memorial will demolish you.

[Bodega]

This just made me cry. I feel literally anguished.

I and my brother had his DNA and my mRNA evaluated for everything we could think of and my mRNA was strongly Ashkenazi Jew and his DNA was Sephardic. So my family is Jewish from both my mother’s and father’s sides. I have always felt a very strong kinship with all Jews I have known and their art, music and writings and I have dearly loved my Jewish friends as a teenager.

Then as an adult I tried to do whatever was necessary to become “Jewish”. I have done this several times. Both the attempt and denial have been strongly done by the Jewish people in charge of such. Finally I gave up and pursued my second interest and that was Buddhism. That has been very successful. Yet I always wonder what it was about me those men thought would make for a “bad” Jew.

I think Jews are conflicted overall...surely they know they are scapegoats out in the world of non-Jews...at least mostly that seems to be the case. I think the scapegoating and disrespecting is disgusting and immature and unholy in every respect.

I would love to know how many people who don’t like Jews have the DNA of the Jews. I bet the number is huge.

I inherited the mRNA from my Mom, of course.
That particular mRNA was from the northeastern area of Europe. Finding my genotype has been difficult because it is very, very rare. I can only imagine a huge pogrom in that area killing them all off with maybe only the infants being taken and raised as Ukranians or whatever.