Addressing the moment by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

In the summer of 2016, I flew to Budapest to meet family I spent most of my life not knowing I had. In fact, three of them, Israeli sisters, were only discovered by our genealogical sleuth of a cousin Dóra a couple of weeks before our meeting.

One cousin traveled from England. Dóra and her family came from Finland. Her parents, brother, and sister still lived in Budapest. It was a multi-generational gathering of cousins of various degrees. More than seventy years after the end of the Nazi regime that splintered and shattered our family, we traveled to my father’s hometown in what is now Slovakia. We stood together in front of a wall commemorating the memory of local inhabitants exterminated in the Holocaust, many of them family members. The fact that so many generations of us were there together felt like nothing short of a miracle.

Two of the Israeli sisters still lived in their homeland but one had moved to Berlin a few years earlier because she found the political situation in Israel intolerable. A Jew leaving Israel to move to Germany—the irony of that is both heartbreaking and affirming that meaningful change is possible.

That is a hope I need to hold onto now.

Rabbis for Human Rights sent out a statement today: No person, man, woman, or child should have to live in fear, hide in shelters, or flee to find refuge. Security is not a privilege — it is a fundamental right that every individual is entitled to, simply by virtue of being human. Yet, it is also the thing that has been stolen from all the inhabitants of this land, both Israelis and Palestinians, for far too many years, leaving behind a trail of blood. This cycle must come to an end.

One of the Israeli sisters wrote to me on Facebook this afternoon: I’m not sure if you are exposed to the shocking stories that are happening here. Small children, demented elderly, young people who celebrated at a party, civilians and soldiers were kidnapped and are subjected to violent abuse and rape. Terrorists entered the settlements and carried out a mass slaughter. Children saw their parents murdered before their eyes. Some of the terrorists still roam free. Citizens are besieged in their homes for long hours. These are just some of the horrors that have been revealed, I don’t want to imagine what else we will discover in the coming days. It is unbelievable that this is how the human race behaves in 2023.

I think about the catastrophe of 9/11. Are there complicated reasons for what happened on that day as there are for what is going on now in Israel? Yes. Of course. Does knowing that make the horror of what happened, is happening, any less? No. It doesn’t.

At this moment, there is no way to see a path to the vision articulated by Rabbis for Human Rights or even to know what the next days will bring. As I shed tears and pray for my family and so many others, I am doing my best to keep the hope alive. If, so many generations later, we could gather safely as a family in Central Europe, I have to believe that such a thing is possible in the Middle East. May it not take seventy-five years to achieve it.