MUNICH REMEMBERED

 In my peripheral role in the UIA here, I turn up to social events. I am inherently anti-social and as I have explained elsewhere in this blog, I have great difficulty with peoples’ faces and names which explains why so many social engagements are just torture for me. (Or else I’m just making excuses.)

Anyway, there is this rather oddly named thing called a ‘Pinning Ceremony’ which involves awarding a gold pin to women who have donated a fair bit to the UIA, and it takes place annually in a private home of a donor, usually a woman who has previously been ‘pinned’, and there is a gathering of about 30 people, including the UIA volunteers, and there is a video shown about the good works of the Women’s Division of the UIA, then there is a speaker, several ladies get their awards, photos are taken,  and a light lunch follows. A nice way to spend 2 hours on a weekday morning, if you don’t have to work.

Last year, they forgot to invite me, a bit embarrassing all round, considering that my husband is the state President, making me the First Lady, hey? Or as I call it, the First Yenta. But this year I got a printed invitation AND a phone call, so how could I not go. And the speaker was supposed to be Greg Sheridan, a journalist whom I admire.

Except it turned out that Greg had to cancel, so the replacement was a speaker who had actually been brought out for Magen David Adom, and graciously agreed to help out when he was finished with the MDA duties.

The speaker was Dan Alon.

I didn’t recognize the name. But after he started speaking and mentioned that he had been a fencer, it struck me like a hammer blow: this man was one of the few who had survived the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

He is a compact, grey-haired, quietly spoken man, and his story is devastatingly powerful. You think that you know about the events on that terrible day, but until you have heard first-person testimony, the horror and the outrage is only theoretical.

Dan couldn’t talk about it for 36 years, until the release of the Spielberg movie, Munich. People called him and asked him questions, and asked him to speak about his experience. It was very hard for him at first, and it was at the second talk he gave, in London, I think, that his wife and children came and heard the story themselves for the first time. He is still traumatized and it is still clearly difficult for him to speak about it, and he describes having difficulty with paranoia and traveling alone among other things.

He has written a book, Munich Memoirs, which I plan to buy, and he talked about the actual day of the attack and his escape along with 4 other athletes.

I won’t tell his story here, because I cannot possibly do it justice. But I will repeat his last story, the last page of his book, where he was invited a few years ago to speak in Berlin. He had been asked to come out by the Chabad rabbi there, whom he knew. At the airport he was met by a tall black man, dressed like a Chabad chassid, and his paranoia kicked in; maybe this was a Hezbollah operative come to kidnap him? But rationality prevailed and he phoned the Chabad Rabbi who reassured him that this man was the real deal, and would be his driver. (Turns out that he was an American ex-basketball player who converted to Judaism and then became a Chabadnik. I’m sure that’s a great story in itself.)

After the speaking engagement was over, the driver was taking him back to the airport when Dan asked him to go past the Brandenburg Gate, which had been a symbol of Nazi power during the Third Reich. Once there, he asked to stop the car, and he got out and danced with the Chabadnik, and he says that he felt as if 6 million Jews and 11 Israeli athletes were dancing with them.

Sometimes a brunch with the ladies can become something else.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that, in the darkest times, at the worst moments, there is hope.

Am Yisrael Chai.

GROWING UP? SO SOON?

Rosh HaShana is coming and I suspect that I might actually be growing up.

Firstly, I knocked on someone’s door, a person whom I found out that I had offended, and I apologized to them face to face, and I didn’t implode. We aren’t friends, we won’t become friends, but I made the apology. I can’t remember doing this in the past, even though we talk about this idea of asking forgiveness from our fellows for any sins we may have committed.

Then, when my husband asked me to call his elderly aunt in New York, and his cousin who just made a wedding, I didn’t do what I usually do, or think what I usually think, which is, ‘Why do I have to phone your aunt and cousin?’ especially since I hate the phoning before Yom Tov thing (and I hate the phone in general, a necessary evil for business). And then when I try to call, whoops, I can’t call, time zone wrong etc. Not this time. I just picked up the phone and made the calls, and everyone was happy and it didn’t tear a hole in the fabric of the universe. So I felt quite grown-up.

About 2 years ago I shocked myself during Yom Kippur services by not feeling the need to riffle through the pages to torture myself with how many more hours and pages of davenning there was to go. I just davenned it, and was pleasantly surprised when I realized we were near the end. I actually got into the whole thing without my brain screaming at me to go out into the fresh air and how much buttering up of G-d can I stand already?? No, it was all quite uplifting and meaningful. Last year, I reverted. But this year, who knows? Mind you, I am 56 years old, so it has taken a little longer than I thought to get to this point.

I still scream at inanimate objects and half believe that they have spirits, usually malevolent, of their own. I don’t think that’s immaturity though, that’s lunacy. But you have to wonder sometimes, don’t you? How things get lost and then turn up after you’ve bought a new one? Or how you know how you put something on your desk and now it’s gone just when you need it? And then it turns up exactly where you knew you left it, when you don’t need it anymore. Doesn’t this happen to everyone? Just me, then. OK, moving right along.

Another thing that has happened is that time has accelerated, so no matter how boring or difficult a situation I find myself in, I know that in a few minutes the hour will be over, in a few days the week will be over- I think about Shabbos already on Monday, and Wednesday is already Erev Shabbos- and in a few months the year will be over etc. Of course, this cuts both ways, because the good things are over too quickly. So ‘this, too, will pass’ is the mantra.

And here we are, Erev Rosh HaShana, and it was only Pesach 3 months ago, I swear. (And it will be Pesach again in 3 months! Good Lord.)

So I wish you all the usual, good health, and a happy, successful New Year. I wish for the same for myself and my family, as well as further opportunities to be all grown-up and responsible, (as long as I have opportunities to be immature too. Too much grown-up stuff is just depressing.) May you not have to riffle through your Machzor, may time pass not too quickly to appreciate the wonder of the world that HaShem has created. May there be peace for Klal Yisroel and for all the world, and may we truly merit the simcha of meeting Moshiach now, because the way the world is right now, I don’t really see what else will save us.

Ksiva veChasima Tova. Signed, sealed, delivered.

A DUTY TO MOURN

September 11 passed this year with nearly nothing in the Australian press. Of course, we are a day ahead, so on the 12^th there was some coverage of the memorial ceremony at Ground Zero, and how no politicians spoke. And there was some comment about how the lead-up to the 10^th anniversary was so fraught and difficult but now, the 11^th, it is more of a relief to have passed the 10 years, and now it’s historic, rather than personal. It’s time to commemorate rather than mourn. And I thought, whoever said this and whoever wrote this, is an idiot.

I remember leaving a wedding hall the night of 9/11 in Melbourne and hearing some rumours of an aeroplane hitting the Twin Towers, and immediately thinking about the small aircraft that hit the Empire State Building some years before; must be some sort of accident. And then listening to the radio in the car on the way home. No, this was no accident. And then turning on the TV and seeing the horror unfold before my eyes. And knowing, even then, that the world had undergone an almost seismic shift, that something had changed profoundly and forever. That America, under the watch of George W Bush, had, not just ‘lost its innocence’, but had undergone an absurdly, horrifically well-organized attack and that nearly 3000 people, mainly civilians, had been murdered in an utterly heinous and evil way. And that the Arabs, the Palestinians, were dancing in the streets and were handing out sweets in celebration. That the Muslim taxi drivers in my own country were jumping for joy. The Great Satan was wounded. Well, reportage on that stuff was quickly suppressed, I guess to avoid hate-motivated race riots in Western cities, but it happened. I remember.

And then started the America haters, you know the ones. The ones who suckle on the teat of freedom of speech and personal and civic liberty and secular democracy of the West, a milieu that allows such creatures to exist, and who then use their powers to incite hatred and loathing for the very institutions that nurture them. Oh, we are so arrogant in the West. Oh, America’s policies in the Middle East. Oh, we had it coming.

No we fucking didn’t. 3000 civilians did not ‘have it coming’ the morning they went to work in the World Trade Center that sunny September day. Or boarded an aeroplane to go visit family, or do business, or whatever they were flying to. The people who say the US ‘had it coming’, are in my mind, not far removed from the ones who say that the Jews ‘had it coming’ after news of whatever atrocity that the Jews have suffered comes to air.

I stood in shul on Rosh HaShana that year weeping during most of the service. Not just for the Jews who were murdered that day, not just for all the human beings who were murdered on their home soil. I wept for the world. I wept for the knowledge that this act had empowered the bastards who know only how to destroy, who, with very little difficulty had initiated a successful strike to the sleeping enemy’s heart, a major first strike in a war which would never end. Suddenly the Jihadis and the Mujahedeen weren’t just some quaint sort of guerrilla wasp, which stings and then is slapped away and then stings again, all on the sidelines; suddenly, they were centre stage, and LOVING it, with the videos and the press releases with the backdrops and the robes, all so telegenic. There would be no stopping them.

Now there would be retaliation, because how could there not be? Should Bush have just sat on his hands after this attack? No. Was it handled properly? Was it wise to have war on 2 fronts, dealing with Iraq on bad intel, and fighting in Afghanistan, the ‘cemetery of empires’, too? I’m thinking no, but I’m no military strategist. Another quagmire, like Vietnam, but dusty; the Russians got their asses kicked, now it’s the Americans’ turn. But you can’t fight a war on an abstraction, a ‘War on Terror’.  War against the Taliban, that’s better; find Bin Laden and kill him, yes, good move.

But is the world now a safer place? No. Would it have been a safer place if Bush had done nothing? Certainly not. It could have been handled better. But the fact is that the West is fighting an implacable enemy who wants to destroy it and annihilate the culture of freedom, choice, secularity, separation of church and state, all the things we take for granted. Basically, what Israel has been putting up with since before statehood and forever.

9/11 was historical; but it is personal too. The attitude of detached remembrance, as if we are talking about the Norman Invasion or The War of the Roses, or Gettysburg, or Gallipoli on Armistice Day, or some thing where a bunch of people got killed, oh ho hum, people get killed all the time in earthquakes and stuff, lol; this attitude is deplorable. 11 years is nothing, it is a moment in time.

I’m glad that politicians didn’t speak at Ground Zero, because it would have probably been thinly-disguised electioneering, but they should have been there. President Obama should have been there.

And G-d bless America; I really mean that, I’m not being ironic. No place is perfect, but there are a lot worse places to live- just ask any asylum seeker or illegal alien. And it’s the only super-power we have, let’s face it. I would rather the Yanks run the show than the Russians or the Chinese. Forget Europe. So G-d bless America.

Lest we forget the 2,977 victims of the 9/11 attacks, the innocent casualties of an ongoing war on our civilization, a war that most didn’t know was happening.

MY FATHER

My father, Chaim Yosef Pakula z”l was born in 1911in Dzialoszyn (Zaloshin), Poland. He once told me that his first memories related toWorld War 1 when, as a young child, he saw dead soldiers lying in the streets.The town was not too far from the German border.

His father died of a strangulatedhernia when he was 11; and so he was apprenticed to a tailor in the nearby big city of Czestochowa, becoming a master tailor at the age of 15. He would race home onhis bicycle every Friday and spend Shabbos with his mother and sisters, andthen return to the master tailor for the week.

When I made a barmitzvah for our eldest son, mywidowed father told me about his own barmitzvah. On his 13^thbirthday, his mother gave him his father’s tefillin and sent him to the shtiebelto find someone to teach him how to ‘leig t’fillin’. And that was that.

His mother, who was my grandfather’s second wife, (and the sister of his first wife who had died in childbirth), remarried, and I havea photo of the stepfather, but not of Yisroel Moshe, the father.

All very confusing stuff, these late 19^thcentury/ early 20^th century European shtetl relationships. It seemshardly anyone married someone and then grew old with them. Women died inchildbirth, there were epidemics, wars, accidents; and cousins married cousinsand the family trees are pretty tangled up.

At around 20 years of age, my father marriedNacha Najman (not a cousin, btw); they had 2 sons. Early 1938, seeing the political situation unfolding,my father came to Australia sponsored by his brother-in-law Cam Goldring, an English Jewwho settled in Newcastle, NSW after marrying Dad’s older sister, Zelda. Theidea was to get papers together and to earn enough money to bring his family;but time ran out and his wife, sons, mother and stepfather were murdered bythe Nazis. 400 years of flourishing Jewish life in the town of Dzialoszyn, where even the non-Jews weren't such big anti-semites as in many other places in Poland, snuffed out in a couple of years.

In 1946 he met and married my mother and they weretogether for 38 years, until my mother died of ovarian cancer. During thistime, my parents worked in the market selling men’s clothing, and they made aliving. Before the markets, there had been a manufacturing business but itfailed partly because a cousin embezzled from the business, and partly becausemy father, a very sweet guy, was not much of a businessman. But my parentsraised and educated 3 children; and then suffered the loss of their second son Julian (Yehuda) in 1973 in the Yom Kippur War.

How does anyone come back from this? Such loss,such struggle, but still he persisted, this whole generation of European Jewspersisted. He was so sweet and gentle, never raising a hand to his children,always making jokes and singing to himself while he made yarmulkas on hisenormous professional sewing machine. I remember him  practicing his Chazones in the quiet of night, as he wasthe Ba’al Tefilla and Ba’al Koyreh of the Brunswick Talmud Torah. He sang apretty mean Kiddush too, and zmiros were a delight. (Oy, listen to me, I am SOOLD.) So sweet, but so tough. He just put all tragedy and loss behind him andcarried on, as most of them did.

My father, lonely for female companionship after 7 years as a widower,married his ex-sister-in-law; yes, his late wife’s brother’s ex-wife. It seemseven out of the shtetl, ‘better the devil you know’ as he put it. It was adisaster. I think he died just to get away from her. Well, she’s gone now too.Nothing more to say about that one.

He was always cheerful and pleasant, with sweetsfor the children in Shul, a cuddle for a baby, always calling every female ‘Sweetheart’ or‘Darling’, even flirting and joking with the nurses who looked after himduring his final illness. (Of course, as a teenager, I never appreciated any ofthis in him; he was just my embarrassing old fogey of a dad, so much older thanthe dads of most other kids.)

Dad passed away peacefully in our home at the ageof 86 on 5^th Elul; coincidentally, the 6^th birthday of myyoungest son, so my son’s birthday is forever linked to my father’s yohrzeit. Talk about bittersweet.

I see my father in my sons. His sweetness in one,his wit in another, his voice in another. His striking blue eyes, fair skin anddark hair are also apparent in some of my children.

It’s been 15 years, but you never forget a parent.May his neshoma have an aliyah. May he have a lichtige Gan-Aden. 

Yossele Pakula, the 16 year old master tailor of Czestochowa.

VALE HAL DAVID

I confess, I was a bit of a poseur in high school and for some years beyond. I tended to the pretentious in many of my professed tastes, including in popular music. While my peers adored the Monkees and the Beatles, I was into Cole Porter. My mum had musical scores for Porter songs, but I stumbled on to him myself when I was looking for sheet music for a song which I though was called ‘Day and Night’ (actually it was ‘Goin’ out of my Head’, by Randazzo and Weinstein, but I thought THAT was written by Burt Bachrach and Hal David. Much confusion.)

Anyway, the person behind the counter at Allens said that there was no such song and sold me ‘Night and Day’ by Cole Porter. So I took it home (and my mother laughed when she saw what I had bought) and started tinkling on the piano (I was 90% self-taught after a disastrous start with a piano teacher at age 8. My mother, an accomplished singer, despaired of me but I had a good ear. Still, I wish I had listened to her and persisted with lessons. And PRACTISED. Listen to me, children! PRACTISE!!)) And I fell in love with Cole Porter, at the age of 13, in 1968. THEN I trawled my mother’s songbooks and fiddled with Begin the Beguine, Under my Skin, I Get a Kick out of You, all that stuff. Which led me to Frank Sinatra. But that was very uncool for a teen then, so I got into the Beatles and the Stones, which I still like.

But I was still thinking of Burt Bacharach’s music.  Even at that age I could see that his stuff was different; changing keys and rhythms, and there was this thing with Dionne Warwick, who sang like silk, and was just made for the Bacharach style. But behind the glamorous Burt and the honey-voiced Dionne was the lyricist, Hal David. You never saw him or heard him, but he was there behind the scenes with his poetry.

‘LA’s just a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car. In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star…weeks turn into years as quick as that…and all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas…’

‘What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia. Then when you do, he won’t even phone ya! I’ll never fall in love again.’

‘I run for the bus, dear…while running I think of us, dear…’

‘Foolish pride, that’s all that I have left, so let me hide the tears and the sadness you gave me when you said goodbye…just walk on by…’’

He passed away last week at the age of 82, which doesn’t sound nearly as old as it used to. I just want to thank him for all the good songs he wrote with Bacharach. And I’ll even say a little prayer for him.