Yad Vashem and Har Herzl is never easy. Every time I go there, it’s something different that gets me choked up. When I led the STL community trip in May, it was the personal stories that our Israeli soldiers shared about their friends an family that had lost their lives while defnding their country. This time, it was seeing a doll in the museum that reminded me of a doll that my grandmother was given on the Kinder transport from Germany to Switzerland.
While we were standing on Har Herzl at the grave of Hanah Senesh (one of 37 Jews from Mandatory Palestine parachuted by the British Army into Yugoslavia during World War II to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz), our tour guide said something that really resonated with me, and I still don’t really know how to process. He pointed out was that in Israel, they do not have the Israel Army, they have the Israeli Defense Forces. It is such a small difference in the words, but such an immense difference in the meaning. I imagine that is something that I will definitely be marinating on during Shabbos.
-by Joel Frankel
Har Herzl