|
By Sheila Orysiek
 SAN DIEGO—When I was four years old another child with whom I was playing called me a dirty Jew. My response was to run home to wash my face. The negative aspect of this incident is obvious. The other child had been instructed not only what to say but to whom to say it. However, there is another aspect to this which is more positive. By the time I was four I already knew I was indeed a Jew and it is not that identification which bothered me. I was only concerned about the possibility of a dirty face. I never thought to deny that I was a Jew. I didn't see that as a negative aspect of who I was.
My next Jewish identity memory outside of the confines of my home was spending a Sunday morning at the synagogue with a teacher reading us stories from our Jewish history. She started out with the history of the destruction of the Temple - definitely not a positive part of our past with which to begin to instruct young children.
It has often been suggested that as Jews we need to accentuate the positive. One cannot disagree with that premise, but it is also important to maintain a balance with reality - the reality of the past and the present. To ignore or subrogate the past may cause us to have to repeat it. It is important to enjoy and celebrate the benefits with which we have been blessed in enlightened countries such as America. But even here we have to be aware and to teach an awareness of what we cannot safely deny might be around the corner.
We cannot deny or refuse to believe that anti-Semitism exists and seems to be raising its dire head in places where it has thrived in the past - such as Europe. Only if we know our history can we identify the symptoms that appeared before - not once - but many times.
Historically our ancestors have moved between the countries of Christianity and Islam – forsaking one and seeking the other as conditions changed. We cannot deny that there is a rising radicalization within Islam and that the historic waves of Islam that washed up on Europe's shores continues and has even accelerated. As Europeans find their indigenous culture threatened, if history serves as a teacher, they will seek a victim to blame. This time we cannot leave Europe to seek respite in Islamic countries, as our ancestors did before. And, economic hardship which many are at present experiencing often sharpens this need to cast blame.
While we want to accentuate the positive to our young, we do them a disservice if we do that without balancing it with knowledge of the symptoms of rising threat, which could help them to identify oncoming danger. Conversely, we cannot and should not only teach through the lens of the Holocaust or a pogrom or an Expulsion - but we can't ignore that dark history
Go to top of right column
|
|
either. The survival of our young may depend upon their ability to identify and respond to threat.
Our children have to know that if they are told by a government to identify themselves by race or religion on an official form or in a census - a ghetto may not be far in the future. But they can't know this if they don't know what a ghetto really is - not just an economically run down neighborhood, but an urban prison. If our young don’t know the history of the kappo culture - those Jews who thought they could purchase favor at the expense of other Jews - only to find themselves eventually gassed, too - they won’t be able to make a moral decision.
Our earliest history teaches us not to raise up false idols such as President Franklin Roosevelt while Winston Churchill’s friendship was and still is unacknowledged. Friendship from one side of the political spectrum such as Presidents Truman and Clinton is celebrated. But the friendship of others is conveniently ignored because of the side of political spectrum from which they hail: Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. And visceral hatred such as that directed at Governor Sarah Palin is always dangerous.
If our children hear various political figures on the American scene carelessly labeled "another Hitler" they will not understand the seriousness of such labeling unless they know who the real Hitler was. If our children don't know what happened during the Holocaust they won't understand "never again." If they don't know that one can't appease a tyrant - an oppressor - they will think that if a tyrant is appeased he will leave them in peace.
History has to be taught as it happened, not as we wish it happened. We need to aim for balance and while we teach about the Holocaust, also teach about the righteous - the ordinary people who put their lives at risk to help fellow human beings. We can teach about a pogrom in Russia, but balance that with the millions of Jews who came to America and thrived here.
We tend to emphasize those Jews who succeeded through their intellect, but we also need to include those who built with the strength of their arms. We often see pictures of the peddlers’ carts on the streets of the Bronx, but we need to know some of those carts eventually became major department stores.
Too often we see the stereotypical Jew as an elderly man with a beard covered with a tallit and rocking back and forth. But before that, he was young and strong - we seldom get to see pictures of young vital Jewish people. While we teach about the destruction of the Temple, we need to teach about how it was rebuilt. And when we teach about how it was lost a second time, we need to teach how it was successfully internalized and we each became a living temple.
We do need to accentuate the positive in our history, but we dare not ignore the reality of that history - or our young may be forced to relive it.
|
|
