Saturday, October 13, 2007

Hopes For The Future

Rabbi Ellen Lippmann wrote on "kolot chayeinu" web page:
I wonder if there is a divide between Judaism and Israel as it is now. Last year, I helped create a series of workshops for Muslim youth, with a few Jews and Christians participating. At the end, they created a mural about their hopes for the future. On the mural was the Star of David. One of the young men who helped with the project said that a few of the children felt very comfortable acknowledging Judaism through the Star of David, but not the Israeli flag. One of the boys said he sees the flag as an oppressive symbol, but sees the Star of David as a religious symbol that in Islam must be respected and honored, because the Jews are the people of the Book. It's amazing that children can distinguish between the religion, the people, and the political situation, while adults have a hard seeing the difference.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe I have a better time understanding this because I'm a Romanian. Romania has been under *Romanian* opressive regims eversince the turn of the past century, and it all ended approximatively at the turn of this current century. First King Carol, then the Legionars, then the Communists -- whether under monarchy, extreme right, or even extreme left, things just didn't stand very good for us, and thus we were opressed in OUR OWN country by OUR VERY OWN people ...

Forgive me if this might sound harsh, but: I still can't figure out what is worse: being a Romanian Jew killed by the Legionars, ... or being a Romanian murdered by them ... :-(

Then, when the "liberating" Red Army came into the scene and "freed" us from under the fascist yoke, they began torturing and imprisoning even more people, until we didn't have enough [already over-crowded] cells to fit them all in.

Then, at the 1989 Revolution, (when even in Russia and Germany Communism fell without any blood-shed, and Czecho-Slovakia or Hungary had "velvet" revolutions), people however had to die by their thousands in Timisoara and Bucharest.

Are Romanians "anti-Romanian"? Are Romanians "self-loathing"? :-(