While I was in England recently, I met an old student.
I don’t think I had seen Karen for around twenty years.
That was long ago. She’s now married and has four children who are grown and married. Karen told me with enormous pride she is soon to become a grandmother, for the sixth time. She also told me that she now lives in Israel. She made aliyah just before October 7.
This led us to discuss the situation facing Jews who have not moved to Israel or America and are still living in Europe.
My old student had a particularly relevant perspective on that topic. She was born and grew up in Berlin, Germany.
Things were not too bad for a Jewish girl in an elementary school in the eighties. Karen’s parents anticipated that would change if she attended a Berlin High School. Instead, they sent her to London.
There she attended a secular Jewish school and was thus protected from the low-level antisemitism that was always present in 1980s Germany.
Karen also discovered her heritage and religion when she arrived in England and soon became a religious Jewish girl.
Her fiercely secular parents were appalled and Karen’s younger brother, whom they had intended to follow her to London, found that door firmly closed by his mother and father.
They were determined to make sure that their son should not end up “brainwashed too.”
Then on 9 November 1989, one of the most historic events in recent memory took place. The Berlin Wall fell. Germany became united once more.
Karen’s brother had been sent to a non-Jewish high school where he suffered real and evil Jew-hatred. He soon discovered that much worse was in store.
The long dormant Nazi heritage, so long buried and hidden in post-war Germany, exploded with a fury. East Germans, never truly “de-Nazified,” saw the collapse of the Soviet Block and the reunification of their country as proof that Germany (and by that they meant Hitler’s Germany) had in fact won WWII!
Karen’s brother had to be evacuated from his school.
Standing on Golders Green Road, an address so synonymous with England’s Jews, Karen shook her head in frustration. Despite the clear lessons of recent Jewish history, many European Jews are as blind to the writing on the wall as Karen’s own grandparents had been.
She looked at me with real sadness in her eyes and declared. “It’s exactly the 1930s all over again yet so many simply can’t or won’t see it.”
Meeting and listening to Karen cast my mind back to a similar conversation. It was one with family members in Johannesburg in 1998.
Four years had gone by since the historic triumph of the first general election which was open to all of South Africa’s citizens of whatever color. Nelson Mandela had been transformed from prisoner to President.
The whole world (including myself) wished the new South Africa every bracha.
Its well-wishers were soon disappointed at what followed. The new Republic quickly copied the example of failed African states across the vast continent.
The earliest and most tangible example of that failure was evident in the breakdown of law and order.
It was the only country in the world that there was no punishment for those who refused to stop at traffic lights (or ‘Robots’ as South Africans call them). To stop at a traffic light was to run the very real risk of a carjacking or worse.
The Successors to Mandela from his ruling African National Congress Party turned this stunningly beautiful country into a byword for corruption and buffoonery.
Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang who was Health Minister from 1999 to 2008 was seen as being responsible for the untimely death of over 300,000 South Africans!
Her nickname was “Dr. Beetroot” for her views on HIV/AIDS treatment.
She believed that the South African AIDS epidemic could be treated with alcoholic beverages, fruits, and vegetables such as garlic, lemon, African potatoes and beetroot. “Shall I repeat garlic, shall I talk about beetroot, shall I talk about lemon… these delay the development of HIV to Aids-defining conditions, and that’s the truth.”
South Africa has the largest number of HIV-infected people in the world. It was her misguided belief that led to her refusing to provide Zidovudine to HIV-positive mothers. That drug had been shown to dramatically reduce the transmission of HIV from a mother to her unborn child.
Today, South Africa under the ANC, is one of Israel’s most implacable enemies on the world stage, something Nelson Mandela would have wept over.
Sitting on the veranda of my relatives’ beautiful apartment in 1998, the conversation turned to “The Crime,” which was then the euphemism for the collapse of law and order and skyrocketing murder rates.
My hosts, Stuart and Gloria mentioned that there had been a murder the week before in their very own apartment block. An elderly Jewish couple had been killed by a burglar who entered their apartment carrying an AK47 assault rifle. This was despite the apartment building being protected by armed security guards 24/7.
My relatives told me that the murderer was one of the security guards.
We sat sipping our tea on their veranda, which overlooked a beautifully maintained garden below. I asked them the obvious question,
“Have you not considered leaving and moving to a safer place like Israel or elsewhere?”
They were retired, wealthy and could easily have afforded to move and start again comfortably in another place.
Stuart and Gloria considered my question for a moment and then replied, “Yes, we have given it some thought.” Then they fell silent again before Gloria pointed to the evening sky and the emerging canopy of stars and said, “But look at that sky! Where will you find a sky like that anywhere else in the world?”
I realized that I could not press them on this topic any further. Instead, I wondered to myself how many German Jews in the 1930s, seeing their world disintegrating around them, might have replied as they sat in the gardens of their Frankfurt or Stuttgart homes, “Yes the situation is bad… but where will you find another city as beautiful as this anywhere else in the world?”
That question has been repeated in countless locations and countless times throughout Jewish history.
As Karen and I discovered in London a few days ago, we are asking it now in England, across Europe and in New York.
Jews certainly must have asked it in a Persian city called Shushan 2,380 years ago.
And as I sit here in my beautiful apartment in Jerusalem, I do not delude myself that I sit in my study in complete safety. After all, my study is also our maamad, our safe-room, and my wife and I have sat or slept here in answer to blaring sirens very many times since we made aliyah nearly one year ago.
It’s exactly the 1930s all over again, wherever we are.
Perhaps we should react to that fact the same way the Jews in Shushan did. We should come together, unite, recommit to Hashem and ask Him… to turn the clock forward to much happier times.