By Noam Spira
Last week the Nachshon fellows visited Har Herzl, Israel’s burial place for many of its leaders and soldiers. Our guide, Aviv Warshawsky, began by explaining that most tours of Har Herzl follow a particular narrative. There are "tours" to visit graves of well known soldiers such as Hannah Szenesh and Yoni Netanyahu; there are "tours" of Lone Soldiers; there are "tours" of female soldies, or of soldiers killed in different wars/ time periods. In hindsight, these were the types of routes I took the two other times I had visited Har Herzl. Aviv made it clear from the beginning that this tour would be different, it would consist of a narrative we never heard, because, as he explained, there are hundreds of others to tell and each are just as important as the next.
Oddly enough, the most significant moment for me that day during the tour was not in the cemetery itself, but at a monument right outside the cemetery. Aviv brought us to a stone structure shaped like an overturn house. Across from it was a piece of that house laid flat on the ground, each stone bearing 1-3 names. Aviv told us that this was a monument for those who survived the holocaust only to be killed in action fighting to protect Israel. Moreover, each of these people were the last member of their families who made it through the Holocaust, their deaths marking the end of their family line.
Aviv spent some time explaining what it meant to be the last one on a family line and all that is lost from a line that ends. He spoke about all the memories and traditions that were lost. “Maybe one family had a tune they would sing on shabbat that now nobody sings, or maybe one family had a special recipe for a dish for the holidays that now nobody cooks.” The list of possible lost traditions went on.
These people had absolutely nothing left to show for after the Holocaust. Nothing but their surviving Jewish life: a testimony to the defeat of the Nazis. They gave the one thing they had left to the Jewish people. They gave their very last possession as a sacrifice for the protection of the State of Israel. They did it for the Jews. They did it for me. I realized that this gives me a responsibly.
How am I going to remember someone who has no one to remember them? How will I remember Yitzchak Levy, Rena Lamberger, or Yaakov Visberd? I do not know much about any of them other than the fact that Yaakov Visberd went by the nickname,“Yankele”. I do know that even after seeing the horrors of what they experienced in Nazi Europe, they had Mesirut HaNefesh, dedication, and the sense of responsibility to the Jewish people. I know what kind of people they were. They were the kinds of people that leaders look up to. That is how I will remember them.
