Israel With Allan

HER FAVORITE, PINK BEAR

She hugged and kissed her favorite, pink bear,
And took it with her to bed.
She whispered secrets through her long hair,
As he nuzzled right by her head.
When she felt bad she tickled his paw,
And watched him twist and wiggle.
She could see him as no one else saw,
And loved to hear him giggle.

She carried him down the old dirt track,
Stroking and combing his fur.
She pictured that one day she’d climb on his back,
And he would be carrying her.
They’d play hide-and-seek among thick olive trees,
Then climb up a pine, so tall,
From which, like pirates, they’d gaze toward the sea,
And then toward that fence and wall.

But the wall blasted open, into her dream.
She was slapped and jarred awake.
Was it she or her mother who screamed?
And why did her brave father shake?
She grabbed her pink friend as they dragged her away,
And yanked back her head by her hair.
A journalist snapped a shot, later that day,
Of an armless, bloodied pink bear.

READING A LIST
I have been seeing before my eyes lists of names engraved on walls: There is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, with almost 60,000 names of American soldiers who died in that war. There are the volumes of names of murdered Jews on shelves in a circular bell-like chamber in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, with the tiniest smattering of enlarged portraits staring down from the walls. There are thousands of names listed on a wall at Israel’s memorial to the armored corp at Latrun, and thousands of terror victims listed on a wall at the Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. The symbols of the letters making the names are so flat, so bland, so woefully inadequate to give a sense of the world that was encompassed by each individual.

But the list that I and hundreds of others encountered tonight, at a somber ceremony on a damp, chill, windy night, on the beautiful Haas Promenade which overlooks the lit-up Old City, and the Dome of the Rock sitting atop the Temple Mount, seemed very different to me. This shorter list, of 138 names of hostages still held by Hamas exactly one hundred days after they were kidnapped, were read out, slowly, one by one by one. Only their first names were read, along with the traditional Jewish phrasing “son of” or daughter of”, followed by the mother’s name.

For a moment, without even knowing the face that matched each name, I could feel a sense, a hint, a shadow of the fullness of these individuals–presumably still alive–or rather, a sense of the horrors we could not come close to knowing. This one is curled up in hunger, eating wet toilet paper to assuage hunger pangs. That one is in strong reaction to the lack of proper medicine. This young man’s arm is throbbing at the point where it was blown off as he hurled terrorist hand grenades back at them. That one is desperately trying to keep those hungry, probing hands off her.

This one, the son of his mother, and that one, the daughter of her mother: name after name is slowly read , and it is so hard to fill the space behind each name with someone struggling in thin subterranean air, with someone threatened into silence, someone rushed into other tunnels as the IDF forces methodically advance, someone struggling to deflect abuse, desperation and constant fear and longing.

The 10 days of gratitude - www.israelhayom.com 1 Once again, we have arrived at the 10 days of thanks, from Holocaust Remembrance Day to Israeli Independence Day. “Even if our mouths were full of song like the sea and our tongues rejoiced like the rushing waves,” we could not manage to express our thanks for the great privilege of living in ...