recalls. “Carmei Tzur also has a core of academics, scientists, and teachers, all people who believe in the idea of inhabiting the land while enhancing their Jewish ideals. Shmuel was always sought out by the other inhabitants of the settlement when they needed medical help, even on Shabbat, when they couldn’t take a car to Jerusalem, or the roads were blocked by snow.”
Shmuel was a man of great faith. “When he went to conferences all over the world, my brother always ate kosher, observed Shabbat, and took part in religious services. To those who asked how he was able to be an Orthodox Jew in a secularized world, Shmuel mentioned the extremely difficult dietary laws and the rules of Shabbat. Unlike some religious fanatics, such as the many Muslims who have a fundamentalist view hostile to everyone, Shmuel and Ruthie tolerated other people’s ideas. Their love of neighbor was strong; they considered it their central religious principle. Tolerance was a way of life for Shmuel. His last patient before he died was an Arab woman. She had thanked him, calling him ‘an angel of heaven.’”
Ruthie Gillis is the principal of a religious school in Jerusalem, and her family went through the Holocaust. “Shmuel was a very brilliant man, the first in his class in medicine,” she says. “But at the same time, he was a very humble man; he never said ‘I’m the best.’ He was a man of science, an angel who wanted to take care of every patient. He felt that everyone, Arabs and Jews, had the same dignity.”
In a 1997 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Shmuel said, “We were looking for simplicity, and Carmei Tzur fascinated us.” Ruthie comments, “For us, Israel is everywhere. Shmuel and I thought that as Jews, we had the right to live anywhere, and that if we had left Carmei Tzur, one day they would also have asked us to leave Tel Aviv. We have to protect ourselves. Every morning, I pass the place where my husband was killed. And I know that we will never be able to live completely at ease.” Ruthie has never thought about leaving her village in Gush Etzion, however. “I have to move forward. Every day is a battle, but I could never leave Carmei Tzur. Where would I go? Tel Aviv? Ashkelon? Terror is everywhere here. Shmuel got up every morning to pray; he believed in the Torah and that living in Eretz Yisrael is part of the Jewish faith itself. He was an optimist, and he always said that he had to do everything he could for the good of Israel.”
Ruthie Gillis believes that the conflict with the Palestinians is not a conflict over land. “Anyone who lives here, like me and like many others, sees how many bare hills and valleys there are here. There’s plenty of room for everyone, for us and for them. What is missing is room in their hearts. That’s why the murderers are not fighting to obtain territory. The murderers murder Jews because they are Jews. That is anti-Semitism and racism for its own sake. Their war is against a different identity living alongside them, here in Carmei Tzur, and in Haifa and in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem and in Tiberias—to them there is no difference. They are fighting against the Jew because he is a Jew. The land is a secondary factor in their struggle.”
68.864 Was My Name
The siren begins on a rising note before settling into a mournful steady tone. For two long minutes, the signs of human movement simply stop. Everyone is overwhelmed by the mysterious solidarity of the moment. It is Yom Hashoah, the solemn commemoration of the Holocaust. Drivers get out of their cars to recall the Nazi extermination of six million European Jews.
The same single-tone siren was used as the all-clear signal in the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq threatened to “burn half of Israel.” The specter of chemical warfare was a special nightmare, one that recalled memories of the annihilation in Europe and brought forth feelings of helplessness and fear. To its 4.6 million people, Israel distributed gas masks, syringes of an anti-nerve-gas agent, and powder to absorb vapor droplets on the skin, evoking dark memories for elderly citizens whose families perished in Nazi gas chambers. The fact that Saddam’s missile power was aided by German companies drew a line in Israeli minds from gas masks in Tel Aviv to gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka. “The echoes and reverberations of the past returned,” said Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “Once more we spoke of gas, we spoke of Germany.” Israeli infants had to be put inside a greenhouse-like plastic tent called a mamat, and parents could touch them only through stiff plastic gloves. “Another dictator using gas on the largest Jewish population in the world,” said Theodore Weiss, a survivor of three concentration camps and president of the Holocaust Educational Foundation, in Wilmette, Illinois. At times of crisis, the memories of the Holocaust always surface from the Jewish unconscious, from places where Israel did not even know they were hidden.
For Israel, there is no moment more significant than Yom Hashoah: when the siren sounds, people stop in the streets; they stand at attention after getting out of their cars; they freeze while shopping in the supermarkets, studying in the universities, marching in the army, doing business. It is like a great wall of silence, full of suffering and vitality. All of Israel focuses its devotion on one memory. Some thought goes to the uprisings in the ghettos and in the camps, the pinnacle of Israel’s national spirit.
This is why, when Ilan Ramon died, the country united around his name—because the soft-spoken young man with a humble expression had brought the memory of the Holocaust into outer space. As the first Israeli astronaut, he had carried with him a copy of a drawing that Petr Ginz made in the ghetto of Theresienstadt before he was killed in Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. Ramon was excited about bringing along the drawing by “a boy imprisoned within the walls of the ghetto, walls that could not imprison his spirit. His drawings are the testimony of the triumph of his spirit.” Ilan also brought a Torah scroll and a coin from 69 CE, minted in Jerusalem, with the inscription “Salvation for the people of Israel.” Ramon identified himself as the son of a German Jew who had taken refuge in Israel and a woman who had survived Auschwitz. He had taken into space the memory of the Holocaust, which his mother had escaped, unlike his grandfather and other relatives, and of the struggle for independence, in which his father had participated. Ilan died when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on February 11, 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.
The Torah scroll that Ilan brought into space, the first ever to have gone there, was the one that Joachim Joseph had used to prepare for his bar mitzvah in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Early one Tuesday morning, before the alarm went off, the prisoners put blankets over the windows and lit candles, and Joachim chanted his passage from the Torah, as every Jewish boy has done for centuries. Then Rabbi Simon Dasberg, who had given him the scroll, said to him, “I will not get out of here alive; here, take the scroll, and tell the story.” Joachim gave it to Ilan as “a symbol of the Jewish resistance even in the extermination camps, of the determination to survive.” The Torah scroll, he noted, “came out of the most profound darkness, and Ilan took it into the dazzling light of space.”
Ilan Ramon is buried in Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley, a place where death and malaria once reigned before the Jewish pioneers turned it into one of the most fertile areas in Israel. And beside him is the liberator of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan. The diary entry with his dvar Torah, message from the Torah, has not come down to us. It will remain forever indecipherable. Just as in the legend about the Jewish mystic Baal Shem Tov: He met the Messiah and asked when he would come down to earth. The answer was, “When your message arrives in heaven.”
Several months after the Columbia explosion, a group of Israeli pilots made a highly symbolic flight. Ignoring the protests from the Auschwitz museum, the Israeli jets, piloted by children of Holocaust survivors, flew over the concentration camp that had swallowed up a million Jews. The demonstration was led by Brigadier General Amir Eshel, whose grandmother had been murdered down there in the gas chambers of Birkenau. “We pilots promise to be a shield for the Jewish people and for Israel,” Eshel said. “There was the platform where the selection took place, the railway line, the green fields, an innocent silence.
