Bearing Witness

By Lizz Goldstein

Can you hear the prayers of the children, aching for home, for something of their very own?
Empty eyes with no more tears to cry, turning heavenward toward the light. For when darkness
clears I know You’re near, giving loving arms away from harm. [We need a source]

[We need an intro to explain why and with whom–group, individuals–you made this trip]

After my first day in Oswiecim, Poland, I was unsure how to feel. Having spent several
hours at Auschwitz, now very preserved and museum-like, I was shocked that I did not cry at
all that first day. I thought maybe it was due to the historical distance between my present life
and when these atrocities occurred. I assumed that, for a Jew, the Holocaust narrative would feel
close to home, but in Oswiecim I felt sad and disconnected.
After that first day, I did not return to Auschwitz, instead I spent the daylight hours of the
next four days at Auschwitz II–Birkenau. On the third day at Birkenau, the tears finally came–in
the women’s barracks, the first barracks I saw from the inside. The moment I walked in, it all
erupted. Birkenau is a perfectly appropriate place to bear witness for crimes against humanity.

We were told a story about a woman who was punished by being forced to spend the
night outside, naked, in the middle of the winter (she did survive), but inside the barrack there
was a fireplace. I cried for the women whose souls inhabit the space I walked through at that
moment. I was crying for the grandchildren of those women–the grandchildren so traumatized by
the experiences of their forebears. I was crying for everybody everywhere across history whose
identity and livelihood was stripped from them for illegitimate reasons of hatred and fear.

More of such thinking and crying and bearing witness continued as we visited the
children’s barracks, met survivors, visited the crematoriums and ash fields. After a full five days
in Oswiecim, it was time to move on to visit the old cities of Krakow and Warsaw and try to get a
sense of what life might have been like there pre-war. We saw some interesting sights–museums,
monuments, etc.--but I spent the second five days in Poland eager to move on to Vilnius.

My great-grandparents, like many American Jews, came from Vilnius, or Vilna as they
called it. It was once the Jerusalem of Europe, overflowing with Jewish culture and life,
integrated with Lithuanian culture and life. The Jews were generally accepted and embraced in
Vilna, allowed to thrive and prosper there (relatively speaking). By the time I got there, sixty-
nine years after the city rid itself of its Jewish residents, all signs of Jews were gone.

I found the city generally to be far more welcoming, beautiful, and friendly than any of
the Polish cities I visited. Most people seemed eager to express their anger over what the Nazis

did to them, their wish for peace with their past, for a Jewish life again in Vilnius. But as I passed
church after church–every other block had a church from any given decade over the last five
hundred years–I was struck by the realization that the entire country of Lithuania has only two
functional synagogues left. People lined the streets, straining to hear the mass coming out of the
church of the Gates of Dawn, but the Jewish Community Center of Vilnius has to pay ten men to
ensure that there is a minyan at the Choral synagogue every Shabbat.

There was not much memorialized of the former Jewish residents of Vilnius. The old
ghetto is unmarked, the Jewish Museum is about four rooms. After I visited these four rooms, the
curator gave me directions to the “Holocaust exhibit” down the street. It was not a Holocaust
exhibit. It was a museum dedicated to the slaughter of Lithuanian nationals by the Soviet
occupation following the Nazi occupation. Though fascinating, important and equally as
horrifying as any other crime against humanity, it is not the Holocaust. This misunderstanding
was likely due to the language barrier, but to me it felt like a reinforcement of the silence
surrounding the Lithuanian involvement in the murder of our people. If it’s not discussed, if we
group together different atrocities as one, then blame cannot be placed. I fear, if responsibility is
shrugged off and never accepted, then the lessons history has to teach are not fully learned.

Although I experienced a great deal of sadness and anger during my two weeks abroad,
the trip filled me with inspiration to continue to bear witness and to continue to teach others how
to bear witness. And, in this way, maybe the next time we say “Never Again!” it might be true.

777 words

Bearing Witness in retrospect

Can you hear the prayers of the children, aching for home, for something of their very own? Empty eyes with no more tears to cry, turning heavenward toward the light. For when darkness clears I know You’re near, giving loving arms away from harm.

After my first day in Oswiecim, I was unsure how to feel. Having spent several hours at Auschwitz I, now very preserved and museum-like, I was shocked that I did not cry at all that first day. I thought maybe it was due to the distance in history between myself and when these atrocities occurred. I assumed that as a Jew, the Holocaust narrative would feel close to home, but in Oswiecim, I felt sad but disconnected. I thought maybe I should visit Srebenica, an attempt at genocide that I actually remember happening. Maybe that would reach deeper.

After that first day, I did not return to Auschwitz I, instead spent the most of the daylight hours for the four days at Auschwitz II – Birkenau. On the third day in Oswiecim, the second day at Birkenau, the tears finally came. In the women’s barracks, the first barracks I saw from the inside. The moment I walked in, it all erupted in me. And I realized, yes, it would be interesting to see Srebenica and Bear Witness to something I remember, but the distance in history means very little in actuality. Acts of atrocious inhumanity are acts of atrocious inhumanity, and not much has changed in the world in the last seventy years. Birkenau is a perfectly appropriate place to Bear Witness for all the crimes against humanity. We were told a story about a woman who was punished by being forced to spend the night outside, naked, in the middle of the winter (she did survive), but inside the barrack there was a fireplace. Where is the line drawn when monsters are deciding what basic human needs can be afforded to people seen as cockroaches? As I cried for the women whose souls inhabit the space I walked through that moment, I was also crying for the woman of the Argentine Dirty War whose captors fed her a full hot meal to bring her back from the brink of death, only to send her back to the torture chambers afterwards. I was crying for the grandchildren of the women whose souls inhabit the space I walked through; the grandchildren so traumatized by the experiences of their forebears as well as the terror in their own lives that they have felt forced into exposing another group into inhumane circumstances that we as Jews should be all too familiar with. I was crying for the disenfranchised disabled people, sexual minorities, and lower class Americans still kept apart from the “desirables” even in a free country. I was crying for everybody everywhere across history whose identity and livelihood was stripped from them for illegitimate reasons of hatred and fear.

More of such thinking and crying and Bearing Witness continued as we visited the children’s barracks, met survivors, visited the crematoriums and ash fields. After a full five days in Oswiecim, it was time to move on to Krakow and Warsaw to visit the old cities, and try to get a sense of what life might have been like there pre-war. Or even if there had not been a war. I found Poland to be cold and uninviting. I had fun with new friends I met on the retreat, saw some interesting sights (museums, monuments, etc) but spent the second five days in Poland eager to move in to Vilnius.

My great-grandparents, like many American Jews, came from Vilnius, or Vilna as they called it. It was once the Jerusalem of Europe, overflowing with Jewish culture and life, integrated in with Lithuanian culture and life. The Jews were generally accepted and embraced in Vilna, allowed to thrive and prosper there (relatively speaking). By the time I got there, sixty-nine years after the city rid itself of its Jewish residents, all signs of us were gone. I found the city generally to be far more welcoming, beautiful, and friendly than any of the Polish cities I visited, and most people seemed eager to express their anger toward what the Nazis did to them, their wish for peace with their past, for a Jewish life again in Vilnius. But as I passed church after church, every other block had a church from any given decade over the last five hundred years. But the entire country of Lithuania has only two functional synagogues left. People lined the streets, straining to hear the mass coming out of the church of the Gates of Dawn, but the Jewish Community Center of Vilnius has to pay ten men to ensure that there is a minyan at the Choral synagogue every Shabbat. There was not much even memorialized for the former Jewish residents of Vilnius. The old ghetto is unmarked, the Jewish Museum is about four rooms. After I visited these four rooms the curator gave me directions down the street to the “Holocaust exhibit.” It was not a Holocaust exhibit. It was a museum dedicated to the slaughter of Lithuanian nationals by the Soviet occupation following the Nazi occupation. Though fascinating, important, and equally horrifying to any other crime against humanity, it is not the Holocaust. This misunderstanding was likely due to the language barrier, but to me it felt a reinforcement of the silence surrounding the Lithuanian involvement in the murder of our people. If it’s not discussed, if we group together different atrocities as one, then blame cannot be placed. And I’m not looking for someone to blame, really. It’s been seventy years; let’s move on. But my fear is if responsibility is shrugged around and never accepted, than the lessons history has to teach are not fully learned.

After reading all this sadness and anger I experienced during my two weeks abroad, it may sound like I didn’t enjoy the trip. On the contrary, it filled me with such inspiration to continue to Bear Witness. Continue to teach others how to Bear Witness. And in this way maybe the next time we say, “Never Again!” it might be true.

At the request of my father, repostedness

Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz/Birkenau

November 1 - 5, 2010

Read more.
Register.

Tragedy and Healing

"Auschwitz not only represents one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, but perhaps, in the nature of a profound paradox, a potential source of great healing." - from Michael O' Keefe's Raising the Ashes. Click below to watch the Raising the Ashes trailer and learn why people from a variety of faiths and nations have been bearing witness at Auschwitz for over a decade.

"This retreat at Auschwitz offered profound affirmation that when we continue to listen to ourselves and others with an open mind and heart, death and pain of body and spirit, however terrible, can never offer a final answer," explains Jiko McIntosh in a Bearing Witness Blog article. Stay tuned for e-mails next week for more descriptions of the Bearing Witness experience. Would you like to participate? Read more. Register.

Do you want to support bearing witness at Auschwitz, but you are unable to attend this November? We are offering our ten remaining copies of the Raising the Ashes documentary as gifts to people who contribute scholarship money to bring together at Auschwitz young adults from key conflict areas. Your contribution of $500 matched by an equal contribution from the Zen Peacemakers, could, for example, make it possible for a young Palestinian to join a young Jewish Israeli to practice listening and sharing from the heart.

Become full sponsor to a young adult

Learn More:

Read more and/or Register at the Auschwitz Retreat web page. Visit the Auschwitz page of the Bearing Witness Blog to view photos, read accounts of and listen to talks about last June's retreat, as well as to read teachings from Bernie Glassman regarding Bearing Witness at Auschwitz as spiritual practice.

East Side, West Side, Genocide

According to this news article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11450093 the slaughter of Rwandan refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990's could be considered genocide. My first reaction to this was, "Well, duh." My second reaction was, "What good is applying that label to the past violence if we're still ignoring the current violence, or the connections between the two?"

As my first academic year outside of school begins, I am thinking about how to put my education on genocide and human rights to use. I'm teaching 7th graders how to put the "mitzvah" in Bar Mitzvah, I'm going on a Bearing Witness retreat to Auschwitz and Birkenau, followed by my own pilgrimage to Vilnius, and most importantly, I'm working in a deli. In a lot of ways I'm still burnt out from Div III and I'm not sure how to go about saving the world on my own time now. But then I read this article about the Congo and I think, "Man people are so stupid!" and realize that I guess I just need to stay up on this soapbox a little longer and then maybe I won't be alone in this whole world-saving thing.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Christmas with Karadzic

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/10589614.stm

I just read Joe Sacco's The Fixer, Soba, and Christmas with Karadzic, and now Bosnia is putting to rest a newly identified 700-ish victims of the Srebenica massacre. I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that the Serbian president is attending the mass funeral. I guess its a significant gesture of neigbourliness, but if I were any of the family members of the deceased, I would not want him there. I can't believe its fifteen years later and they're still identifying bodies. I wonder whose job that is?

My Div III Evaluation by my wonderful adviser, Stephanie Levin

Elizabeth Goldstein's Division III grew out of the life-changing semester she spent at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a peace-building research and education institute that seeks to prepare future Arab and Jewish leaders to cooperatively solve the Middle East's environmental challenges. Although headquartered in Israel in the Negev, Arava brings together Palestinian, Jordanian, and other Arab students with Israeli Jews and internationals to study and do research on environmental issues under the motto "nature knows no borders." While there, Elizabeth took a full program of environmental studies courses and also participated in a peace-building and leadership seminar (PELS) focused on dialogue among the students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as making deep connections with her diverse colleagues outside of class.

This experience left Elizabeth with a much deeper understanding of how environmental issues -- especially access to water and its use -- are centrally affected by the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. It also led her to consider a significant question: to what extent, if at all, can collaborative environmental work contribute to peace between the two peoples? Her Division III final paper thoughtfully and intelligently speaks to both of these concerns.

Elizabeth's paper addresses these subjects in three chapters. Chapter One provides a history of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over water-sharing, starting with an extremely interesting investigation of the origins and meaning of the phrase "making the desert bloom" that is often associated with the Zionist enterprise of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second chapter opens with a quotation from Arava founder Alon Tal that asks, "Is there a systematic environmental injustice towards Israel's Arab residents?" and proceeds to answer the question with a definitive yes, backed up by carefully marshaled historical and contemporary evidence. Asserting, however, that the future need not replicate the past, this chapter also goes on to survey a number of the more promising environmental initiatives currently underway in the region, ranging from the Palestinian National Renewable Energy Company, which was recently founded by a Palestinian Arava alumnus as the West Bank's first wholly "green" business, to the Israeli-Jordanian- Palestinian transboundary project called the "Red-Dead Conduit" that facilitates water transfer between the Red and Dead Seas, to Friends of the Earth Middle East, a regional NGO that is currently implementing a "Good Water Neighbors" project.

Chapter Three concludes the study with a closer look at the Arava Institute, its students, and their diverse perspectives, based both on Elizabeth's own experiences there and on interviews that she did one year later with approximately 12 students and staff, some Israeli, some Palestinian, and some American and international. This provides a sensitive portrait of both how people were drawn closer by their time together at Arava, and also of where points of disagreement or tension remain. In summing up Elizabeth is drawn back to one of her original questions: can this kind of environmental collaboration lead to peace? While she can't avoid acknowledging that the enormity of the current barriers to both peace and environmental equity leave her at times feeling "weighed down by our self-assigned task of creating peace in the Middle East and ecological stability at the same time," Elizabeth also allows that the human connections formed at Arava have left her with "a newfound patience for the small steps towards our goal."

By focusing on the environmental aspects of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, especially the crucial question of water sharing, Elizabeth enables her reader to see the entire situation from a less familiar perspective that highlights the problems of power imbalance and unequal access to resources. A particular strength of the paper, in addition, is that because Elizabeth brings the historical and political story of Israeli-Palestinian relations together with the human story of the relationships of Arab and Jewish students at Arava, she is able to make insightful observations about how the dynamics of unequal power play out at both the national and the individual level. She points out, for example, that the PELS seminars, in which students were encouraged to discuss their views on the political situation, often devolved into sessions of what Elizabeth calls "competing victimhood," where students on each "side" would invoke their grandparents' experiences in the Holocaust or the Naqba, death by suicide bomber versus death by IDF bullets, Hamas rockets versus Israeli checkpoints, to claim they had suffered the most. While noting the seeming futility of these sessions (and the frequent tears accompanying them), Elizabeth also observes that the Israeli students seem more able to empathize with the Palestinians' pain than vice versa, and considers why this might be. Her answer highlights again "the state of occupation, and the power dynamics" that this creates, suggesting that those in a position of power can afford more easily to listen to the stories of the less powerful, while "the Palestinian students needed... to assert the truth of their hardships over those of the Israelis" in order to claim the basic human rights that are denied them.

Elizabeth skillfully weaves together the paper's different elements -- historical, political, environmental, human -- into a unified text, and draws on a variety of different sources and methods in doing so. Her bibliography ranges from primary sources such as Theodor Herzl's nineteenth century works on Zionism, to recent articles on regional water issues, to important theoretical works, like Homer-Dixon's "Environment, Violence, and Scarcity" or Mamdami's "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" that help provide a context for the work. The interviews Elizabeth conducted, which are provided in their entirety in an Appendix that makes wonderful reading in itself, add tremendously to the richness of whole.

Because Elizabeth initially had a difficult time finding a structure for her project, the committee commends her for her persistence in continuing to struggle to figure out how the pieces of what she was writing fit together. We also note that her final revisions resulted in tremendous progress, taking her draft from a somewhat disjointed sequence of parts to the smooth and integrated final paper that it became. She responded well to our concerns and criticisms, but this was always her own project and she exercised a great deal of independence in framing the material and persuading us of her reasons for doing so in particular ways.

Another strength is the balance that Elizabeth finds in writing about a highly contested subject, sacrificing neither her own clear, unambiguous thesis nor open-minded consideration of multiple perspectives. Avoiding any rhetoric or sloganeering, she makes her points convincingly by thoughtful analysis of the evidence. This piece demonstrates, as the committee knows first-hand from working with her, that Elizabeth is an empathetic, caring, and compassionate individual who is committed to contributing to peace, equity, and increased connection among people.

The committee applauds Elizabeth's accomplishment of this project, which is a fine culmination to her undergraduate studies of environment, peace, and social justice, and looks forward to her future efforts to contribute to a better world.

Conclusions

On January 30^th, 2009, I wrote in my field notes as I sat in the Ramallah home of my Machon Arava roommate, Bissan:

All in all, it’s been a great semester. Despite all the bullshit, the shouting and arguing in PELS, the disorganization of the administration of the Institute, the tension between Machon Arava students and Kibbutz Ketura members, the mutual racism of Zionists and Palestinian nationalists, despite all that, I wouldn’t change my experiences for the world. The studying, the student life, the coexistence, the traveling, the people. I think I’ll miss it here, even though I spent a lot of time this semester complaining that this experience has jaded me. I now fear that people do not want to change. People do not want to listen to each other, even when they are friends. Bureaucracy is strong and difficult to weed through. The great Revolution may never happen, world peace may never happen, and I’ll have to accept that I really can only save the world in small steps, throwing one starfish at a time back in the ocean. But this semester has given me the patience to do that. I guess I’ll just have to add Arava to the list of places I call home.

Now, reflecting back on those words, I see there really is not more to say about my personal experiences. I saw people shouting horrible, racially derogative, emotional things at each other, and saw the same people drinking coffee and smoking nargilah together later that same day. When the war in Gaza broke out at the end of December, I saw an Israeli girl, whose brother was fighting for the IDF somewhere in Gaza, and a Palestinian girl, who had relatives and old family friends living in Gaza, go off and cry together. Because even though they were coming from opposing sides, we had all realized at that point that it was the same pain. The next day, I saw Israeli after Israeli (strangers), come out to our peace vigil and shout in people’s faces. I saw them ask Conservative Jews why they were anti-Semitic, and say nasty racist things to the Palestinians, and threaten to arrest us all (which potentially meant deportation for all non-Israelis). This was at a unified peace vigil, a protest not just to Israel’s most recent actions in Gaza, but also to the Qassams falling on Sderot, and the suicide bombs in Jerusalem, and to the roots of such violence. But people see what they want to see. They saw our signs had Arabic, and they didn’t bother to read the Hebrew, and they just started shouting. After seeing so much pain and so much love from the same people, after the shared tears of 38 people coming from a diversity of backgrounds in race, nationality, education, families, and viewpoints, it is hard not to feel weighed down by our self-assigned task of creating peace in the Middle East and ecological stability at the same time. But seeing that there are 38 people from a diversity of backgrounds in race, nationality, education, families, and viewpoints who are willing to share pain and love and tears in the name of Middle Eastern peace and ecological stability, it is hard not to gain a newfound patience for the small steps towards our goal.

As for the facts on the ground, Israel remains in hegemonic control of water resources in the Occupied Territories. Since the Gaza War, nothing has changed for Gazans, or for the residents of Sderot. Everyone continues to live in fear of constant war and resource depletion. A recent Israeli order requires permits for Palestinians to live in the West Bank. Those who cannot prove they belong there will be sent to Gaza, which is already overcrowded and under fed. Even with the Israeli exploitation of land and water resources in the West Bank, life there is considerably more comfortable. The movement of people into Gaza will only increase the pressures on the natural environment and lead to more tension and violence.

If Alon Tal and Thomas Homer-Dixon are right about disaster bringing social change, I have to wonder how big does the disaster have to be before things will change? How many Palestinians must die? How many Israelis must live in constant fear? How much water must be depleted? How much desert irresponsibly built and farmed upon? How many Peace Now protests will it take for the Israeli government to remove settlements and reroute the Barrier? How many summer days without running water will it take for the Palestinian Authority to make compromises to ease the immediate suffering of their people, perhaps at the cost of immediate justice or pride?

I was hoping to conclude this Division III with optimism. To tell the world that Israel steals water and land from Palestinians and it feeds the broader conflict, but through this neutral starting ground, water sharing plans could be built. Daibes’ vague plan in Water in Palestine on how to begin the mediation process seems easy enough to follow, with step-by-step small scale agreements to build trust on before pursuing bigger peace plans, but since her death last March, it looks like no one else is picking up that torch. It may just be up to the alumni of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies to keep pushing for small transboundary environmental projects and hope that our message is heard far and wide until we are no longer in the minority.