Noelle Canin, who’s helping translate Erella Dunayevsky’s writings for First, had some late-night advice for your editor when I mentioned I’d had trouble sleeping after reading one of Erella’s recent stories…
Benj, never read testimonies before going to sleep. We need softness and love before going to bed. Our world is going to get a lot harder and we need sanctuary as part of and in order to cope. What is happening in Israel gets worse by the day and there are now demonstrations planned where we’re forbidden to hold up pictures of Palestinian children who’ve been killed. Those pictures will get held up.
About Summer Camp
June, 2014
Greetings dear friends,
To Posterity
Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?
(From “An den Nachdommenden” by Bertolt Brecht)
No need to unfold before you the stunts ordered by the Israeli government, the Government of Occupation, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On the twelfth day of this month, three Jewish boys, yeshiva students in the Occupied Territories, were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas members. A most criminal, painful kidnapping. The Israeli reaction was harsh, violent and vengeful, but the Occupation’s stunts and crimes did not begin as a result of this kidnapping, and neither did the collective punishment. This is merely another episode in a painful methodology. Whoever hasn’t yet understood the methodology, now has an opportunity to understand. Moreover – those who haven’t yet understood that peace is not on the mission list nor in any future government vision, now have a chance to open their eyes. A certain kind of journalism speaks about injustice. And if the reader were to add emotional details and ask himself, for example, how a child might feel when woken up in the middle of the night, and not for the first time, by blows on the door of his home, and rifles aimed at his family, and see them detain his father in front of his eyes, without the omission of humiliation and contempt, the reader would begin to have an idea of what is taking place.
Last Thursday, we were asked by friends, family, people who love and know us, to give up our usual visit to the South Hebron Hills this time, due to the risk as a result of recent incidents. We deliberated, asked our friends in the villages, and found that the road was calling to us to go. We drove. We arrived. We visited. An ordinary visit. How much trust and love are needed in order to feel, even on days like these, that what we have in common, more than any other affiliation and partnership, is that we are equal partners in the family of mankind. Nasser, who right now is documenting the incidents in Hebron for “B’Tselem”, told Danny: “I don’t know where I’d be now, without the kind of connection I have with you.”
With all the above, life goes on living (how fortunate). The summer vacation has begun and children on vacation have summer camps. Today, we visited the summer camps at Susia and Umm Al Kheir, which were financed through the Villages Group. This is an opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to our friends, who contributed their money and their hearts, which facilitated the setting up of these camps. The children and counsellors don’t know the donors personally and thank them through us. And over and above it all – even the smile of one child is already worth all the effort and gratitude, and cries out a challenge to injustice and death.
Erella