It’s beyond ironic. It’s tragic.

Born in 1937, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau was a young child when World War II broke out, and along with his slightly older brother Naftali, survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Liberated from Buchenwald, he was the youngest prisoner there.

Interviewed in the 1997 Academy award-winning documentary The Long Way Home Rabbi Lau still recalled the admonition of his brother, uttered during the last months of their incarnation in 1945 when they feared that they were about to be separated.

Rabbi Lau remembers:

“It was on the last months.  My brother, older than me, came to the fence of my barrack, and told me ‘We don't have parents any more.  The only one you had was me.  But now, they take me away.  We will never meet again.  I don't believe that this hell will end.  I don't see any light in the edge of this tunnel.”

He continued, quoting his brother:

“You are eight, adult enough, to understand what I'm telling you.  I want you to know, that if a miracle will happen, a day will come and you will survive this hell, there is a place in the world named 'Eretz Yisrael'.  Repeat the name and don't forget it.  ‘Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.’  This is our old homeland.  This is the place where they don't kill the Jews.  So if you survive, tell anybody whom you meet that they have to take you to that particular place. Eretz Yisrael.” 

He repeated the name: Eretz Yisrael. The Land of Israel.

Where they don’t kill the Jews!

It is really more than ironic. It is terribly tragic that today, Israel is the one place in the world, more than any other, where they still try to murder Jews.

You see, it didn’t end in Buchenwald.

It’s really quite simple. Like the Nazis before them, the Arab objection is not to anything Israel, or the Jews, have done, or failed to do, but to the very fact that they exist at all.

My own father – a survivor of thirteen concentration camps – was liberated from Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. Three years later, he was part of a nascent Israeli air force. He fought in the War of Independence against a different enemy of the Jewish people. And I remember, quite well, my father telling me when I was still quite young -- even younger than the age of Rabbi Israel Meir Lau when he was in Buchenwald -- that he was still fighting the Nazis. They were simply wearing a different uniform, he declared.

On October 7, 2023, the Nazis murdered Jews again, in the Land of Israel – where they weren’t supposed to kill Jews!

Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.

Image: Picryl