Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Things People Talk About

Things People Talk About

Over Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, I spent time talking to people in a number of social events. Here are some of the things I heard:

A friend who runs a company that produces high-class tools for the creation of other tools ("our equipment is the Rolls-Royce of the field: expensive but the best") told me they've been selling to unfriendly countries such as Indonesia, and in recent weeks they've been approached by a potential client in Pakistan. A second friend who was standing with us told of other Israeli companies who sell to the Arab world, mostly via Jordan and often in Jordanian packaging to hide the Israeli provenance. Someone ought to tell the boycott folks.

A North-American journalist who has been reporting on the MidEast for a generation tells me the lack of a peace process enables all sides to live in practical peace; once negotiations start again they'll have to re-start the violence.

A Canadian who lives in Israel these past 30 years remarks, apropos Obama's plans to regulate American banks: Canada has strict bank regulations and sailed through the recent turmoil mostly unharmed. Israel has strict bank regulations, and sailed through likewise unscathed. America has light bank regulations, and look where they are.

The cutting edge in military technology is robots: drones, jeeps, and science fiction spy tools all operated from afar by highly trained soldiers who can't be harmed by the battlefield conditions. Israel is in the forefront of this technology, alongside the US.

Three if not four people separately remarked on the 20th of April as Hitler's birthday. Two of them are children of Holocaust survivors, so that's where that complex comes from; one came from Russia, and one was a thirty-something from North Africa. Jews are a screwed up bunch.

Volcanoes make humans look very small. Everyone agreed on that one.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Things People Talk About

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Every Man Has a Name

Every Man Has a Name

Not long ago I read an article which made the distinction between songs and poetry: that poetry stands on its own, while a song needs music to have value.

Many shirim are songs, but some are poetry (and I'm not certain where to draw the line). The creations of Zelda are poetry, even though some have become famous shirim, with music.

Zelda was born in what is now Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1914, to a family of important Lubavitcher rabbis; she was a cousin of the last Rebbe. She came to Jerusalem with her parents in 1926, and died here in 1984. There is a touching description of her in Amos Oz' masterpiece A Tale of Love and Darkness (If you still haven't read it, forget all these blogs and read it). Zelda was his teacher, and apparently an influential one; she also lived in the same hard-working neighborhood he grew up in and describes so well. She and her husband never had children.

I don't know when she started writing; her first book of poetry appeared many years after she began, in the 1960s. So I can't tell if she wrote Lechol Ish Yesh Shem, Every Man has a Name, before or after the Shoah. The poem itself never mentions the Holocaust, never even alludes to it, yet sometime in the 1980s it became the single most important Shoah song; perhaps even the emblematic one.

Hebrew original
English translation
Every person has a name
that God gave him
and which his father and mother gave him

Every person has a name
which his height
and the style of his smile gave him
and which his tapestry gave him

Every person has a name
which the mountains gave him
and which his walls gave him.

Every person has a name
which the star signs gave him
and which his neighbours gave him.

Every person has a name
which his sins gave him,
and which his longing gave him.

Every person has a name
which his enemies gave him
and his love gave him.

Every person has a name
which his festivals gave him,
and which his work gave him.

Every person has a name
which the seasons gave him,
and which his blindness gave him.

Every person has a name
which the sea gave him,
and which his death gave him.

Chanan Yovel (born 1946) composed the music and sings it in the first recording; the second recording is by Chava Alberstein; she's a better singer.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Every Man Has a Name

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Banality of Banality of Evil

Banality of Banality of Evil

Norm Geras has a thoughtful post on the ease with which too many folks assume we're all potential genocidaires, and wonders why we're not also commonly assumed to be potential rapists, say.

Norm is a nicer and more moderate chap than I, and much better at English understatement. Me, I'm of the opinion that much of the banality-is-evil chatter is bunk. This opinion of mine is based on years of close investigation of the worst genocidaires of all: the men of Adolf Eichmann's office in the SS. Yes, the very group about whom Hannah Arendt postulated the banality concept while willfully not listening to the proceedings at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. I don't much deal with the matter anymore, but once wrote a book about it which you can read in a variety of languages (see the link somewhere over to the left).

The closest one can reasonably come to a blanket condemnation of man's potential for evil is that it's not easy to know in advance who is capable of it, and who isn't, not ever. That's a far cry from the silliness traded in so mindlessly by the "Anyone might do it" brigades. And also - here I'll unmask how unpolitically correct I really am - cultural conditioning is part of the story. Some cultures more easily allow people to engage in mass murder than others.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Banality of Banality of Evil

Chaim K. RIP

Chaim K. RIP

Chaim K. passed away late Saturday afternoon. He was 87 - not that you'd know it by watching the callers making condolence calls at his Shiva this week, some of whom are quite some years younger than his older grandchildren. "You don't know us", they tell his children, "but we were friends of your father. Such a luminous man!"

Chaim was born in a small Polish town no-one has ever heard of. He was 17 when the Nazis invaded, and his entire immediate family fled East, eventually washing up in what is today Kazakhstan. They spent the war years in what were combination refugee-and-labor camps. His father starved to death, but the rest of them survivied. In later years his sister (who died a few years ago at 91) reminisced that Chaim would combat his hunger by reading whatever he could get his hands on until he fell asllep from exhaustion, thereby managing to do without a meal.

Also in the camps he met his future wife, "she didn't even own a pair of shoes". Chaim was good at cobbling things together, and managed to help her survive the hardships.

After the war they went back to Poland. None of her family had survived; there was no point in trying to rebuild lives in Poland, and by 1948 they were in Israel.

Arriving in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948 the found accommodations with a cousin who lived in Batei Ungarn, near Mea Shearim. The cousin had seven children in two rooms, but since it was crowded anyway, why not take in the newcomers? No long afterward Chaim found an abandoned two-room house on the wrong side of the barbed-wire fences which marked the new border that ran through the city. A block or two from Sheikh Jarrah, if you insist on details. The building was functionally in No-Mans Land between Israel and Jordan, but there was an IDF position on its roof; the troops reached the second floor through a trapdoor from one of the rooms. Still, it was better than the place in Batei Ungarn, so Chaim, his sister and their spouses moved in. No-one ever came to visit them at their house beyond the border, and the troops on the roof occasionally had fire-fights with Jordanian troops, but worse things can happen. Chaim and Miriam had three children there.

In 1960 they moved. Chaim was making a good living as an accountant, and they were able to afford a brand new 2-1/2 room apartment in the Katamon area. When they first moved in the 70-square meter place looked so impossibly spacious that they considered renting one room, or perhaps simply sealing it off for visitors. They remained for the rest of their lives (Miriam died two years ago this week). They had three children, 11 grandchildren, and right now there are 16 great grandchildren, with the 17th expected in two months. The youngest two grandsons, at 19, are hardly older than the oldest of the great grandchildren (17).

20-some years ago, as Chaim should have been about to retire, he was offered the challenge of setting up the financial department in one of the large settlements. He thought about it for a day or two, and took the job, which he held until he was in his late 70s. Even then he retained his position as one of the stalwarts of his synagogue, and as the accountant of a local charity; two days before he died he transferred all the details of the charity to his son. In recent weeks he has no longer been able to participate in his daf yomi study group (9:30 am, the "old codgers' group") so one of the others came to him each day to learn, all the way until the end.

Have I mentioned he was a nice man? Always smiling, often with a Yiddish joke, relating to people as equals. His son is the boss of one of our public utilities. A few weeks ago I met the two of them, the son supporting his father on the way to the synagogue; the father dressed, as usual, in his suit, tie and fedora even though he could walk only with the greatest effort. I pointed to the street we were standing on, where the son's company has been digging these past two months: "Chaim, can you please tell the boss of the company they really ought to fix this street already?!" He beamed and said he'd try.

Yesterday they paved the street and it looks spanking new. "He did it", I told his son. "He got it fixed".

Fifty years in a single neighborhood is quite a while, and alongside the unexpected mourners I told of above, the surviving old-timers are coming to pay their respects. The neighborhood was originally built by rich (mostly Christian) Arabs in the 1920s, when Chaim was a boy in that forgotten Polish town; it was sparsely populated, with large detached houses. In the 40s, as he fought his hunger, lots of important British officers and officials moved in. Once the Arabs and British were gone, it was filled with the Jews who had been deported from the Old City, two miles to the north, after the Jordanians took it over. Then in the 1950s, the mostly empty hillsides were built up with apartment buildings for the large numbers of refugees and immigrants pouring into Israel and living mostly in tents. Only in the 1990s did it begin to change again, so that today there's a large population of wealthy British and French Jews moving away from the rising antisemitism in their countries, and rich Americans not fleeing from anyone - and upper middle class Israelis, too.

Sit in the tiny apartment Chaim died in the other day, however, and you'll be reminded of the people who dominated the area for 40 years. The Lithuanian Holocaust survivor; the Polish one; the two Moroccans, the Iraqi; the man from the Old City whose father and brother-in-law fell in its battle; the 68-year-old Yekke (German Jew) who's father disagreed with Chaim about what sort of synagogue they needed, 50 years ago, so each built his own, and each sometime came to the other's.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

65 Years

65 Years

Auschwitz was liberated by Red Army troops (who didn't know it was there to be liberated until they stumbled upon it) 65 years ago today.

A few twins held by Mengele for his experiments survived as children. Other than them, the youngest survivors were in their mid-teens; most were in their twenties.

Living memory of Auschwitz is to be found, today, only in the minds of octogenarians. Not many of them left, either. The living memory is slipping away.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Yet Another Tenth of Tevet

Yet Another Tenth of Tevet

Yesterday was the Tenth of Tevet, an ancient day of mourning which is still unbearably contemporary. Since the Jewish and Gregorian calenders are not fully aligned, last year this day fell on January 6th, two weeks into the Gaza Operation. It was a grim day, as I described then.

As last year so also this year, our synagogue had one of the old-timers tell how he survived the Holocaust. Concurrently, however, in a different room, there was a commemoration event for Nitai Stern - the same Nitai whose funeral I wrote about last year. His grandfather is a member of our congregation. Before going to the main event I chatted briefly with Reuven, Nitai's father. "Let next year be better for you than the last one".

The Holocaust survivor telling his tale this year was Baruch. Baruch, a simple 85-year-old man, has been the chief gabai at this synagogue for decades. The direct translation of gabai is deacon, but my minimal familiarity with church matters doesn't let me say if the translation works. A gabai such as Baruch, at any rate, is the person who makes the synagogue run, the all-purpose-fellow without whom the congregation would grind to a halt. Not only has he been at it for decades, Baruch manages also never to fight with anyone, a feat which is theoretically impossible. So the hall he was speaking in was packed, with hundreds of people from 8-year-olds to sages in their mid-90s.

Baruch has never told his story in public. As the rabbi explained: "Everyone knows Baruch. Whenever I'd ask him to tell, he'd say 'what for. Everything's alright, and we need to keep on going'". What made this year different was that one of Baruch's granddaughters, a woman in her 20s, refused to accept his stubbornness, sat him down in front of a camera and forced him to talk. People in the field will tell you it's often so: Holocaust survivors who refused to talk for generations open up when their grandchildren demand it. So the evening was based on the film, and Baruch himself sat in the front row, surrounded by his children and grandchildren (the great-grandchildren stayed at home).

It started out a simple tale, in simple language. Baruch really isn't a talker. Much of the tale was punctuated by ever-repeated comments that "well, we had to keep on going". Yet it grew ever more riveting, eventually centering on two events. The first, a death march in April 1945, when 2,000 people left Buchenwald, and two (two) were liberated in May by the Russians. Baruch was half of the one tenth of one percent who survived.

The second event was the battle for Gush Etzion in April-May 1948. Baruch had made his way to Mandatory Palestine, found his way to the Gush, and participated in the bloody battles which resulted in the destruction of the Gush on May 14th 1948, at which point he fell into Jordanian captivity and remained there for 10 months. "When we returned to Jerusalem in March 1949 we were received by Ben Gurion who told us our battle had saved Jerusalem by holding off the Arab Legion for those two weeks. Well, and then it was time to keep on going". So he did. And still does.

We all do, as we have been for millennia, pausing each Tenth of Tevet but then continuing. According to Haaretz, in 2009 the number of new immigrants to Israel was 16,244. It's not a very big number, but it's up from 13,859 last year. Sasa, a left-wing kibbutz a few miles south of the Lebanese border, has inched into first place worldwide in supplying armoured vehicles that can withstand anything the Islamists throw at American troops. I recommend the item behind that link: it has some interesting observations in it.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Good Neighbors

Good Neighbors

I have no words of defense, exoneration or even merely words of explanation which then segue in a back-handed sort of way into justification, for the recent attack on a mosque in Yasuf. Islamists routinely attack mosques and massacre worshipers. Palestinian terrorists regularly use houses of worship, be it the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or mosques in Gaza, as places to hole up in or store weapons. Civilized people don't see houses of worship as military targets unless they really are, and they never desecrate them with the intent to insult. If they do, it's proof they've ceased to be civilized.

No "but"s.

That doesn't mean the responses to such a despicable attack can't be educative.

A delegation of Jewish religious leaders and activists, including some from West Bank settlements, tried to reach the village to express their abhorrence of the attack. But the Israeli Army prevented the group from entering Yasuf for security reasons as enraged villagers proclaimed that the visitors would not be welcome. “The people will not allow it,” said Wasfi Hassan, a local farmer. “It is like killing a man, then going to his funeral.”

No, actually it isn't like that at all. First, because no-one was killed or even injured. Second, because it wasn't the perpetrators who wished to come to Yasuf with new copies of the Koran, it was other Jews, some settlers, some not. The determination to see all Israeli Jews as if they were criminal thugs may be satisfying, but it's neither factually true nor remotely helpful to moving forward.

Mr. Abbushi rejected the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could turn into a religious struggle. “It is a national conflict. We want an independent state, without settlers,” he said. But Palestinian schoolchildren brought to demonstrate in Yasuf on Sunday shouted, “Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud,” evoking a legendary battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the Khaibar oasis, who were forced to surrender.

So who's got it right? The PA governor speaking to the foreign press and telling them what they wish to hear, or the locals, perhaps teachers, priming the school children on what to chant? Even if it's the governor, why does an independent state have to be free of Jews?

In Yasuf, villagers recounted years of problems with settlers in the area, blaming them for a range of ills, including what they said was the poisoning of a spring and the theft of sheep.

Really? The settlers poisoned the spring? How did they manage to do that, pray tell? Given the geological structure of the West Bank, which determines how local springs work, I'll go out on a branch and say such an action cannot be done. Or rather, it probably could, but it would require a large-scale, sustained, industrial-scope effort. This never happened, not at Yasuf and not anywhere else in the area. Sounds to me more like the result of a sustained and society-wide policy by the Palestinians to poison their own minds and those of their children, many of whom have in the meantime grown to become parents, educators, and retired frail and elderly great-grandparents.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to change Israel’s map of national priority areas to include several isolated West Bank settlements, along with large areas populated by Jews and Arabs in the country’s north and south. The plan has been sharply criticized by the Israeli left because of the inclusion of the settlements, which will now be entitled to additional government financing. Many Israelis saw the adjusted map as an attempt by the government to appease the settlers, who are furious about the building halt.

Looks to me more like standard if unseemly politics. The government is about to disburse large sums of money to lots of people, including many Arab Israelis, and they're throwing a sop also to a troublesome constituent. Not nice, but no different from any other democratically elected politicians.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the new map “serves as a blueprint for future settlement expansion.”He continued: “It reveals the extent to which Israel’s ‘settlement moratorium’ is a sham.”

Really, Mr. Erekat? Try us. Go on, call our bluff. Make us a serious offer and see what we do. Or better, simply agree to return to the negotiating table you fled from on September 16th 2008, when yet another Israeli offer to disband most of the settlements was on the table, and see what you can achieve. Come on, face us with a challenge, instead of moaning about how horrific we are. That's what running a country is all about: dealing with reality, not with wishful dreams.

Update: Chief Rabbi Yonah Metsger came to the village to express his solidarity. He was accompanied by the PA governor and dozens of PA body-guards, but the villagers wouldn't let him into the desecrated mosque. Interestingly, he told the villagers that the Jewish memory of the Holocaust "begins with the desecration of synagogues", one reason why such a desecration is such an outrage to Jews. This is an interesting anecdote for those of Israel's many enemies who insist the Holocaust is routinely instrumentalized to justify anti-Palestinian actions.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Lozowick on Cesarani on Eichmann

Lozowick on Cesarani on Eichmann

A reader has left a comment on my recent "Evil isn't Banal" post:

There is a book by David Cesarani,
"Becoming Eichmann, Reviewing the life,
crimes and trial of a desk murderer" which
seems to be very critical of Arendt's approach (I haven't read it yet...it on
my waiting list).

The book is here: Becoming Eichmann

This set off a bell, and I went to the back room, bent down to rummage around at the back of the lowest shelf of the cupboard behind the old piano, and lo and behold: behind a pile of old shoes (most of them left shoes, for some reason) and dusty Lego castles, I found... a review I once wrote about Ceserani's book. Apparently it was published in some German journal, but I did the writing of it in English. So on the spot I decided to redeem it from the lost past, and here it is!

David and I used to be friends; in recent years we've drifted apart what with my moving to a new career. Now that I see the review, however, I wonder if there wasn't more substance to our lost of mutual interest. Sad.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Evil Isn't Banal

Evil Isn't Banal

Ron Rosenbaum (author of, among others, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil), has read some interesting research efforts about Hannah Arendt and her relationship to Heidegger, on the one hand, and the Jews, on the other. Rosenbaum is always worth your time, and this review isn't even particularly long, so I recommend it in its' entirety. My paraphrasing: Arendt preferred Heidigger the Nazi over her fellow Jews, and this warped her understanding of the world. Since she's one of the most influential intellectual figures of the 20th century, and remains important to this very day, this is no small problem.

Wasserstein believes she internalized anti-Semitic literature; I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic). One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

Apropos her Banality of Evil thesis, allow me a wee bit of preening. Back in the mid-1980s, after I had read her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) three or four times and was utterly convinced of its profound truth, I set out to bolster her arguments with a close look at all the documentation Eichmann and his colleagues left. To my great surprise, it turned out the documents resoundingly disproved her thesis, and this eventually formed the conceptual framework for my first book, Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police And The Banality Of Evil (Continuum Guide in the Third Reich). I have no idea if Rosenbaum ever read my book or not, but he summarizes the matter well:

To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.

Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Indeed.

(h/t Goldblog)

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

What Do American Jews Teach Their Children?

What Do American Jews Teach Their Children?

There's a fascinating article on the English-language side of Y-net about a recent piece of research into what American Jewish summer-campers think their Judaism means:

In comparing the participants of three of the major streams of Judaism, he found that those attending Orthodox camps were significantly more likely to select symbols related to Jewish religious practice, to the Holocaust, to Israel and to discrimination, while participants in Conservative camps were most likely to select universal values such as democracy, co-existence, olerance, ecology, humanism and peace. He attributed this to the Conservative Movement's emphasis on universal values within a Jewish context. Participants in Reform camps were more likely to select items related to Jews' accomplishments in the non-Jewish world (such as wealth and success).

This comment, however, was the most fascinating of all (to me):

"Interestingly, those at the Reform camps were also most likely to select
the symbol of Anne Frank, indicating a somewhat difference attitude towards the
Holocaust than that of the Orthodox campers, who were more likely to select
Auschwitz as symbolic of their Jewish identity," said Cohen.

The idea that the Holocaust is central to Jewish identity is much more American than Israeli; the distinction between the Orthodox teenagers and the Reform ones, however, is revealing, if it's really there and not merely a quirk of the research methodology. Auschwitz is central to the murder of the Jews; Anne Frank is a single sort-of-uplifting story (except for it's end, of course, lest we forget). It's like comparing a continent with a beautiful statue on it.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Marek Edelman, RIP

Marek Edelman, RIP

Marek Edelman, one of the top commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, has passed away at the age of 90. Edelman was a member of the Bund movement, a far left movement of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Poland and Russia that was founded in the same year as Zionism (1897) and competed with it ferociously, but was effectively destroyed in the Shoah (it limped on for a while in places like Melbourne Australia, but merely as a shadow of its former self). Part of the story of the Underground in Warsaw was how rival movements came together to face the Nazi foe; Edelman's position in the Underground, which was mostly led by Zionists, was part of this. After the war he remained in Poland, and even after the wave of official antisemitism in 1968, when most of the last few thousands of Jews left Poland, he stayed on.

In 1976, when he was a prominent cardiologist in Lodz, he gave a long interview to a local journalist, Hanna Krall. The English translation is titled Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It's a fascinating read. As you might expect from a hard-bitten Bundist, he had no patience for the Zionist mythologizing of the uprising which had been so important in the 1950s and 1960s. He then went on to live long enough to see most Israeli thought on the subject come closer to his perspective, even while never embracing any of the Bundist elements.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Hamas is Horrified

Hamas is Horrified

Yes, there are things that scare Hamas. The mere rumour, most likely quite unfounded, that the UN may try to teach the children of Gaza that there once was a Holocaust. I don't see why anyone would take such a rumour seriously; it's quite unlike anythng UNRWA might think up; still, the Jew-hating thugs of Hamas were swift to condemn the mere thought.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Yehoshua Bichler, RIP

Yehoshua Bichler, RIP

My friend Yehushua Bichler died earlier this month, age 80.

His friends from his own generation called him Robino, from Robert, but I felt that would be disrespectful of me so I called him by his Israeli name, Yehoshua. I first met him in a graduate seminar about the SS, in the winter of 1982 I think. He was not a particularly good speaker, and he had trouble focusing what he wished to say into concise paragraphs, so when Prof. Yehuda Bauer anounced one week that the following week Yehoshua would take over for as long as he needed, we were puzzled. We remained puzzled for the first 20 minutes of the next class, too, until it dawned on us that Yehoshua was telling a story none of us had ever seen in the history books.

In a nutshell, we all knew that the Nazi murder policy began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, and it was carried out by the infamous Einsatzgruppen, in which there must have been a few thousand men at most. Bichler, however, had uncovered documents that told of SS Brigades no-one had ever noticed, numbering in the tens of thousands, who had also been part of the operation. They were subordinate to a different part of the SS, their logistics were supported by different units, and their existance changed the picture of general complicity in the murder program.

I recognize this isn't that important to most people, but in all the years since I've never again run into a historian who was able single handedly to rework the outlines of the accepted story in such a clear way. Yehoshua was aware of the stir he was creating, but it didn't go to his head. Perhaps the fact that he himself had been at Auschwitz, had watched the death of his father, and had lost 57 (fifty seven) members of his family, tempered his perspective on things.

A few years later I became the head of archives at Yad Vashem; Yehoshua ran the archives at Givat Haviva, a small research center dedicated to the Zionist youth movements. So now we were colleagues. I came to my task with the energy of youth and lots of big ideas; Yehoshua ran a smaller place and knew every file; he also knew many of the people, places, and the events, in a way I never could. We were friends, but in a very unequal way.

If you ever have two or three spare days, you should go to Yad Vashem and watch Yehushua's 8-hour video testimony about Slovakia, and Auschwitz, and death marches. It's a tape of a man in his sixties, with the mein of a confused and uncomprehending boy, unable to understand the story he was telling, or unable to believe it, or make any sense of it. This, from the man who had uncovered an entire branch of the SS.

Offhand, I don't think I ever saw him not smiling, in an unassuming, slightly embarrassed way.

Nucho Eden, may he rest in peace.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations