have been separated from the non-Jews. It is a hunt for the Jews “wherever they may be,” from the outskirts of Paris to the desert of Yemen.
After 2,500 years, the epic of the Yemeni Jews ended in November 2009, when U.S. forces rescued the last Jews from Sana’a, the magnificent city founded by Shem, the son of Noah, not far from the mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest when the flood subsided. One year earlier, a Muslim extremist shot Moshe Yaish Nahari five times with an AK-47 assault rifle as he prepared to take his mother shopping for food to make the Shabbat dinner. The killer called out, “Jew, accept Islam’s message.” Moshe died in his mother’s arms. Five hundred Salafi Muslim extremists chanted “Allahu Akbar wa itbakh al-Yahud,” “Allah is great and death to the Jews.”
If one is to identify a beginning of the massacre of Israeli civilians, one must return to that infamous morning in September 1972, at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village in Munich. Some of the Israeli athletes assassinated by Arafat’s death squads were Holocaust survivors, the fruit of the night of Auschwitz and the wind of Chelmno; the disappearance of European Judaism had left its mark on their faces, together with the miraculous reconstruction in Israel. Others were sabra, born in Israel. Each of their stories calls up weeping and prayer. Today, before leaving for the Olympic Games, every Israeli athlete pays homage at the graves of his compatriots killed in Munich. What could have been more repugnant than the massacre of innocent Jews at the Olympics? But the episode became a great media event to stress the problems of the Palestinians, rather than a serious terrorist attack to be condemned.
On 31 Connollystrasse that day, a squad of eight Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and opened fire with AK-47s, shooting the coach Moshe Weinberg through the cheek. The Black September terrorists demanded the release of many fedayeen imprisoned in Israel in exchange for the hostages. The terrorists had been educated in the West. Like the suicide attackers who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001, “Issa,” the leader of the squad, had studied in Europe, getting an engineering degree in West Germany. The document claiming responsibility for the killing of the “Zionists,” the Jews, was written in perfect English. The terrorists of Black September were not after an exchange or negotiations; they just wanted to kill Jews. They wanted the young representatives of the Israeli people, hosted by the nation that once planned their industrialized extermination. It was a spectacular escalation in the war of the Islamist movement to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. The building that housed the Israeli athletes is located less than ten miles from the Dachau concentration camp. They were the first Jews killed in Germany for being Jewish since 1945.
When the hostages and terrorists were taken on three helicopters to the airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, a Lufthansa airplane was waiting on the runway to take them to Algeria. But when the first terrorist climbed into the cockpit, he realized that the flight crew was not there. German agents opened fire and turned on the floodlights. Two terrorists were struck and killed. Instead of returning fire or surrendering, the surviving terrorists completed their mission, throwing a hand grenade into the helicopter where the nine hostages sat. With the Jews dead and their objective attained, the three surviving Palestinians surrendered. Thirteen years later, on August 30, 1985, the Palestinian leader Abu Daoud would explain the significance of this action to the Tunisian weekly Realité: “The Zionist state is a military entity, and its citizens must be considered as combatants.” From Munich to Tel Aviv, nothing has changed over the past thirty years.
That day in Munich, Islamic terrorism cut short eleven Jewish stories. Every one of them was a member of the great body of Israel. There was Moshe Weinberg, a Jewish son of Israeli liberty, with a winning smile and the joy of living stamped on his face. Amitzur Shapira, the father of four beautiful children, was a teacher in Herzliya. Shaul Ladani, who escaped the massacre in Munich, had been deported at the age of seven to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where his parents were exterminated. He contracted typhoid fever, but was saved and went to live in Israel. There was the great Yosef Romano, a Jew of Libyan origin who before dedicating himself to sports had fought like a lion in the Six-Day War. He was killed just five months after the birth of his third child. As Yosef’s friends would say, “courage was his religion.” The day before he was killed, Romano had said, “This is my last competition; I don’t have enough time for my children.” Yosef was so different from David Berger, a Jew from Cleveland, from one of the many American Jewish families who “make the aliyah” to Israel to discover their “roots.” He was supposed to get married after returning from the Olympics. His father said that David knew the risks he had taken on by moving to Tel Aviv; he was proud of David, the idealist, the pacifist, who felt the injustice of the world, who wrote poetry about the war in Vietnam.
There was Mark Slavin, who kissed the Jewish soil upon his arrival in Israel. He came from Minsk, and had fought against the Communists who imprisoned and silenced thousands of Russian Jews who, like him, wanted to reach Jerusalem. Mark’s grandmother, Griša, said that “he was a true Jew; he had always felt that he was an Israeli, and he was the one who convinced everyone to leave the Soviet Union.” He was made of the same mettle as the famous “Prisoner of Zion” Ida Nudel, who recalled, “I arrived in the land of my dreams not as a refugee looking for just any sort of place under the sun. I am in the land of my people, I am free among my people.” Mark had the calling of a liberator, and helped give a million Soviet Jews, a tribe absorbed and lost behind the Iron Curtain, the opportunity to find their freedom in the land of their fathers. He studied Hebrew in a kibbutz; he wanted to relive the history of the pioneers, and his parents were welcomed by the devout, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Bnei Brak.
Mark Slavin’s story is the story of many thousands of Russian Jews who fought in the prisons and in the squares against Communist obscurantism that kept them from having an identity and reclaiming the right to emigrate to the land of their fathers. They had nothing but their typewriters, which they used to translate the samizdat, or clandestine manifestos, inciting the people to resistance and rebellion. It was the power of the Exodus. They threatened the Kremlin and the greatest totalitarian empire of the twentieth century not with weapons and bullets, but with slogans like “Let our people go” or “Freedom for Israel.” Those dissidents gave a new meaning to the Jewish Passover expression zman heruteinu, “the time of our freedom.” Their Judaism grew in the Soviet prisons, nourished by a fervent underground movement that was undermining the Soviet colossus from within. The refuseniks, the Jewish dissidents, had the special serenity of those who know they are in the right.
In Munich, there was Ze’ev Friedman, who was born in Siberia, and whose father was deported to a labor camp on the Vistula. He spoke a wonderful mixture of Yiddish and Russian. His mother lost everyone in Treblinka, the extermination camp that in a few months obliterated hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe. The first Jews from Warsaw arrived at Treblinka—that place with the strange and beautiful name, surrounded by conifer forests and little ponds—on the ninth day of the month of Av, the same day on which the Temple was destroyed. The Jews of Treblinka were “trunks endowed with legs,” slaves of a new species of men. The “Jews of death” took care of the corpses of their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters, pulling them out of the gas chambers by the legs, removing their gold teeth, cutting their hair, and throwing them into the open-air incinerators.
Ze’ev Friedman, who grew up with these stories, had distinguished himself in action against the fedayeen in Metula, a city on the Lebanese border. His father appeared on television asking for Ze’ev to be released, and recounting the fate that his family had already met. Upon learning of his son’s death, he said that if Israel did not respond to the massacre, “Hitler will have won from the grave.” Hannah and Shlomo were the only two survivors of the family. Ze’ev would have been the last male. Germany—like all of Europe—was indifferent to the silent martyrdom of Ze’ev Friedman.
Another martyr of Munich was Kehat Schorr, who arrived in Israel from Romania in 1963, where he had fought against
