I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
We Believe in Israel would like to express our sadness at the death of HM Queen Elizabeth II and our condolences to the Royal Family.
We would like to share with you the expressions of condolence and remembrance from Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum, which have been collated by our friends at BICOM:
President Isaac Herzog: “HM Queen Elizabeth II was known far and wide simply as The Queen. Her passing is the end of an era. Together with the Israeli people, I grieve her loss and extend my deepest sympathies to the British people and all nations of the Commonwealth, who have lost their matriarch. Queen Elizabeth was a historic figure: she lived history, she made history, and with her passing she leaves a magnificent, inspirational legacy. As the 11th President of Israel during Her Majesty's long reign, and on behalf of the whole State and people of Israel, I express my condolences to the Royal Family, to the King and the Queen Consort, to the people of the United Kingdom, and to all nations of the Commonwealth.
Throughout her long and momentous reign, the world changed dramatically, while the Queen remained an icon of stable, responsible leadership, and a beacon of morality, humanity and patriotism. In her life and in her service to her people, the Queen embodied a spirit of integrity, duty & ancient tradition. My late mother and father had several audiences with the Queen over the years. Her fond welcome and warm hospitality left a profound impression down the generations.”
Prime Minister Lapid: “On behalf of the Government and people of Israel, I send my condolences to the Royal Family and the people of the United Kingdom on the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She leaves behind an unparalleled legacy of leadership and service. May her memory be for a blessing.”
Leader of the Opposition Benjamin Netanyahu: “My wife Sara and I, along with all the people of Israel, send our condolences to the people of Britain and to the royal family on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. She was a legendary sovereign, a beacon of integrity and a steward of a second Elizabethan age which will be remembered down the centuries. May her memory be blessed.”
Defence Minister Benny Gantz: “I would like to express my sincere condolences to the United Kingdom, and to the loved ones of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen served the international community over 70 years, and under her reign, UK-Israel relations flourished. My thoughts are with the UK today.”
Transportation Minister and leader of the Labour Party Merav Michaeli: “Condolences to the Royal Family and the peoples of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth on the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, a woman larger than life who exemplified leadership and responsibility to her people and to her country.
The unique relationship between the State of Israel and the United Kingdom and the Royal Family's personal connections to our country will continue to strengthen and flourish in the reign of King Charles III.”
Interior Minister and leader of Zionist Spirit Ayelet Shaked: “My heart is with The Royal Family and the entire United Kingdom with the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. I was always inspired by her leadership as a strong historic woman. May she rest in peace and may her memory be a blessing."
Speaker of the Knesset MK Mickey Levy: "On behalf of myself and the Knesset, I extend my sincere condolences to the British people in this difficult time of intense grief over the death of Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the Queen became the most recognisable political figure in the world, a role model for women from all around the globe, and a symbol of endless devotion to the unity of the British nation. The world will greatly miss her.”
Israel's Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely: "Deeply saddened by the death of HM Queen Elizabeth II. As Britain’s longest reigning monarch she was admired around the world as an inspirational & beloved stateswoman. Israel stands with the Royal family and the British people in mourning the loss of The Queen."
I have just accepted Her Majesty The Queen's kind invitation to form a new government.
Let me pay tribute to my predecessor.
Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, the Covid vaccine, and stood up to Russian aggression.
History will see him as a hugely consequential Prime Minister.
I am honoured to take on this responsibility at a vital time for our country.
What makes Britain great is our fundamental belief in freedom, in enterprise, and in fair play.
Our people have shown grit, courage, and determination time and time again.
We now face severe global headwinds caused by Russia’s appalling war in Ukraine and the aftermath of Covid.
Now is the time to tackle the issues that are holding Britain back.
We need to build roads, homes, and broadband faster.
We need more investment and great jobs in every town and city across our country.
We need to reduce the burden on families and help people get on in life.
I know we have what it takes to tackle those challenges.
Of course, it won’t be easy. But we can do it.
We will transform Britain into an aspiration nation with high-paying jobs, safe streets and where everyone everywhere have the opportunities they deserve.
I will take action this day, and action every day, to make it happen.
United with our allies, we will stand up for freedom and democracy around the world – recognising we cannot have security at home without security abroad.
image
As Prime Minister, I will pursue three early priorities.
Firstly, I will get Britain working again.
I have a bold plan to grow the economy through tax cuts and reform.
I will cut taxes to reward hard work and boost business-led growth and investment.
I will drive reform in my mission to get Britain working, building, and growing.
We will get spades in the ground to make sure people are not facing unaffordable energy bills and we will also make sure that we are building hospitals, schools, roads, and broadband.
Secondly, I will deal hands-on with the energy crisis caused by Putin’s war.
I will take action this week to deal with energy bills and to secure our future energy supply.
Thirdly, I will make sure people can get the doctors’ appointments and NHS services they need. We will put our health service on a firm footing.
By delivering on the economy, energy, and the NHS, we will put our nation on the path to long-term success.
We should not be daunted by the challenges we face.
As strong as the storm may be, I know the British people are stronger.
Our country was built by people who get things done.
We have huge reserves of talent, of energy, and of determination.
I am confident that together we can ride out the storm, we can rebuild our economy, and become the modern, brilliant Britain that I know we can be.
This is our vital mission to ensure opportunity and prosperity for all people and future generations. I am determined to deliver. Thank you.
Leader of the Conservative & Unionist Party
If this email has been forwarded to you and you would like to receive updates from us, please click here.
Please make sure you follow us on our social media channels:
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube
View online version
This message was sent to you because your email address is on our subscribers list. If you don’t want to receive any more messages from the Conservatives, click here to unsubscribe. We’ll be sorry to see you go.
Your consent was previously given during an online or offline interaction with the Conservatives. If you feel this is incorrect or would like to comment, please contact our Data Protection team. We do not buy email lists.
Promoted by Alan Mabbutt on behalf of the Conservative Party, both of 4 Matthew Parker Street, London SW1H 9HQ.
The UK gets a new Prime Minister today, Liz Truss. As she previously served as Foreign Secretary and Trade Secretary her positive stance on relations with Israel is already a known quantity and it is reassuring for supporters of Israel that Boris Johnson is being replaced by someone equally pro-Israel.
In her first conference speech as Foreign Secretary, the new PM said Israel was part of a “network of liberty” to resist dictatorships and “malign actors”. She has also said that the UK has “no closer friend and ally” than Israel and called for an “advanced free trade agreement that supports jobs and drives growth” between the two countries.
On UN anti-Israel bias she has said: “UN representatives with a history of antisemitic remarks should have no role in reviewing the activities of Israel.”
She says “We have to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons. That is very, very clear.”
She has pledged to crack down on anti-Israel boycotts, saying “Public bodies should not be engaging in such discriminatory policies which go against the stance of this government and sow needless division”.
There’s an excellent analysis of the new PM’s foreign policy views, particularly regarding the Middle East, in this article for BICOM’s Fathom Journal by Toby Greene: https://fathomjournal.org/liz-trusss-world-view-and-its-implications-for-uk-israel-relations/
And here is an article quoting Israeli PM Yair Lapid saying Truss is a “true friend of Israel”: https://m.jpost.com/international/article-716357/am
Reminder – join our campaign to protest against the sacking of UN official who condemned terror attacks on Israel
Sarah Muscroft served as the head of the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
She was forced to apologise for a tweet she issued on 8 August 2022 that – rightly - condemned the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror organisation for its "indiscriminate rocket fire" into Israel.
Following pushback from pro-Palestinian activists who accused her of being overly deferential to Israel, Muscroft called her original missive "ill informed" and then deleted her Twitter account altogether.
A UN official confirmed that Muscroft was removed from her post as a result of the tweets and will be reassigned elsewhere in the agency.
Nothing Ms Muscroft said was inaccurate.
PIJ is a terror organisation and it was responsible for indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel.
The United Nations Secretary General appears on television and pontificates about paths to peace, yet he presides over organisation that punishes its own staff for speaking the truth about terrorist attacks on Israel.
As the UK is a significant contributor to the United Nations and sits on the UN security council, we want activists to email the Foreign Secretary (copying in the UN) and ask what action she will take to press the UN to rectify this egregious decision.
Please send an email using the IBA website here: https://www.israelbritain.org.uk/reinstate-sarah-muscroft-wb/
Jews of Marrakech and Marrakech is a former imperial city in western Morocco and it is a major economic centre and home to mosques, palaces and gardens. The city is a densely packed, walled medieval city dating to the Amazigh Empires.
Moroccan Jews and Israeli Jewish tourists participate in Simchat Torah festivities at a synagogue in Marrakesh on October 12, 2017. (AFP Photo/Fadel Senna
The name Marrakesh has its origins in the Amazigh language ': amur akush' which means Land of God. Akush is god, and Mur is land. The ancient Medina was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1985 because of the city's impressive architecture and art.Where does Mellah locate n Marrakech? Mellah is located in the southern part of the medina of Marrakech. As you walk through the market you’ll find a wide variety of fresh produce, meats, and seafood and other things and nearby you will also find the Bahia Palace, Badi Palace and the Culinary Arts Museum. In this museum, you’ll find things about Jewish history. Where is Jewish cemetery in Marrakech and how many graves in it? If you just walk 3 minute from the Bahia Palace you’ll find the Miara Jewish Cemetery. It is open every day except Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The only different opening time is on Fridays, in which they open at 8:30 a.m. This is known as the largest Jewish cemetery in Morocco and it is covering over 20,000 graves, with its left corner dedicated to around 6,000 children who died during a typhus epidemic in the 19th century.it is interesting fact is that they still use this Jewish cemetery in Marrakech up until today. It is divided into three distinct sections: men, women, and children.The. Cemetery contains some famous Moroccan rabbis, like Rabbi Abraham Azoulay and Rabbi David Hazan. Most of the mausoleums are located on its perimeter.
How many Jews were there in Marrakech? No one knows accurate number because Jews were Marrakech and it's villages during all Amazigh empires such Almoravid empire, Almohad empire, Marinid empire and the Saadian state and even during Alawite state now. But they say that they were the 70,000 people. Marrakech was home to a lot of Jews and they were Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Europe and local Jews that were living in Morocco before the advent of Islam. How had Jews lived recently in Marrakech? Jews did not feel safe during Amazigh empire Almoravids, ( I said why, in previous article) but things got better for Jews under other Amazigh empires and states and they came back to Marrakesh and built their neighbourhood and established their business as they did in all cities.
But after Jews left Morocco in 60s, 70s and 90s, pretty much all Mellahs in Morocco became a place of garage, and alcoholic addicts and drag dealers but 2020 , they started to repair synagogues, Jewish places and etc. After the creation state of Israel, Zionism started to call for Jews to go back to their true homeland, but some Jews refused to go back especially Moroccan Jews ( it is the same story during Babylonian empire when they captured Jews and took them to modern Iraq, and when the great king of Persian defeated Bablonian army and allowed Jews to go back their homeland but some Jews refused to go back to Judah )Moroccan Government adopted hate policy toward Jews. why? There is a mysteries which I have not understood yet.
The goal was to scare Jews and push them to leave Morocco to Israel. Why and how had Jews left Morocco is a big topic and there are lots of mysteries about it. Even intelligence agencies involved it. Even terror attacks that targeted Jews in Oujda and Casablanca in 60s is questionable and something behind it.
Priti Patel has declared her “unflinching and unequivocal” support for Israel, describing her relationship to the country as “deeply personal” to her.
Speaking at a Conservative Friends of Israel reception on Monday, the Home Secretary also said that she is “quite unapologetic” about the proscription of the Hamas terror group last year, saying that it was “not just the right thing to do, [it was] a moral imperative”.
Priti Patel and Tzipi Hotovely pictured at the CFI parliamentary reception on Monday (Photo: CFI)
Patel praised the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, also in attendance, thanking her for “who you are and what you do” and for the “wider support” that Israel gives to the UK.
Speaking to an audience of 140 CFI supporters, including 50 parliamentarians, Patel spoke of the “shared values” between the UK and Israel, adding that “everything we have seen around the BDS movement is racist”.
She said that the UK and Israel have an “unwavering belief in freedom, democracy and security”, saying that they are “united in speaking out and standing up against racism and antisemitism”.
The Home Secretary expressed her concern that antisemitism has “infiltrated our politics, our political dialogue and discourse”, adding: “It is utterly appalling that antisemitism has been on the increase”.
Priti Patel speech CFI dinner
Priti Patel giving the keynote address to CFI supporters and parliamentarians (Photo: CFI)
Patel also expressed her “sympathies and condolences” to the families of the 19 Israelis murdered in the latest wave of terror attacks.
“We can never tolerate extremism… it absolutely erodes the fundamental rock of security and with that peace and prosperity”, the Home Secretary said, adding that the UK Government “will continue to send out the strongest messages around zero tolerance towards terrorist activities, but also towards the type of activities that are aimed and targeted at hurting the State of Israel, Jewish communities and the people of Israel”.
Israel's Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, address parliamentarians and CFI supporters on Monday (Photo: CFI)
In her speech, Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely praised the Home Secretary for her work on “combating terrorism, fighting all types of extremism and fighting antisemitism”.
The ambassador also thanked CFI for its work, praising CFI Parliamentary Chairman Rt. Hon. The Lord Pickles and Rt. Hon. Stephen Crabb MP and CFI Honorary President Lord Polak CBE for their work on strengthening the UK-Israel bilateral relationship.
Regardless of where you live, or where you are from, remember, Israel is our home. The State of Israel is celebrating with you in our shared victories and accomplishments and is standing shoulder to shoulder with you in difficult times, as well.
Over these last few years, we undoubtedly have been faced with many challenges: terror attacks, acts of antisemitism, wars and instability and a global pandemic. However; even in the wake of this uncertainty, we have come together to face these trials and tribulations, and have come out even stronger.
Throughout the situation in Ukraine, Israel has strived to assist not only our Jewish brothers and sisters but all Ukrainians in need, standing on the frontline providing humanitarian aid and supporting refugees.
In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair.
She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She found a physician’s coat, entered the hospital where the injured man was being treated, and killed both the Nazi and the police officer who had been guarding him.
“Little Wanda With the Braids,” as she was nicknamed on every Gestapo most-wanted list, was one of many young Jewish women who, with supreme cunning and daring, fought the Nazis in Poland. And yet, as I discovered over several years of research on these resisters, their stories have largely been overlooked in the broader history of Jewish resistance in World War II.
In 2007, when I was living in London and grappling with my Jewish identity, I decided to write about strong Jewish women. Hannah Senesh jumped immediately to mind. As I’d learned in fifth grade, Hannah was a young World War II resistance paratrooper. She had left her native Hungary for Palestine in 1939, but later returned to Europe to fight for the the Allied cause; she was caught and was said to have looked her killers directly in their eyes as they shot her.
That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family, flight meant life. I had grown up to be a runner in relationships, careers and countries. But Hannah had returned to fight. I wanted to grasp what had motivated her boldness.
I went to the British Library, looked her up in the catalog and ordered the few books listed under her name. One, I noticed, was unusual, bound in worn blue fabric with gold lettering and yellowing edges — “Freuen in di Ghettos,” Yiddish for “Women in the Ghettos.” I opened it and found 180 sheets of tiny script, all in Yiddish, a language I was fluent in. To my surprise, only a few pages mentioned Hannah Senesh; the rest relayed tales of dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.
All this was a revelation to me. Where I had expected mourning and gloom, I found guns, grenades and espionage. This was a Yiddish thriller, telling the stories of Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and bore the truth about what was happening to the Jews.
I was stunned. I was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors and had earned a doctorate in women’s history. Why had I never heard these stories?
“Freuen” was compiled for Yiddish-speaking American Jews in 1946 in an attempt to share this stunning history as widely as possible. But in the years that followed, these resistance narratives, like many historical contributions made by women, were sidelined or ignored for a variety of political and personal reasons.
Image
Credit...Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro/Photographs by Getty; Alamy
Many women who told their stories in their own communities after the war were met with disbelief; others were accused by relatives of abandoning their families to fight; still others were charged with sleeping their way to safety. Sometimes, family members feared that opening old wounds would tear them apart. And many fighters suffered from survivors’ guilt — they’d “had it easy,” they felt, compared with others — and so in later years they remained mostly silent about their experiences. Several other factors in postwar decades may have contributed to the relative obscurity of this history. In the 1950s, some say, many Jews had trauma fatigue; in the 1960s, the emerging horrors of Auschwitz and other camps became the predominant subject; in the “hippyish” 1970s, stories of violent rebellion were out of fashion; and in the 1980s, a flood of Holocaust books in the United States overshadowed many earlier tyles.
My quest to learn more about these women turned into a dozen years of research across Poland, Israel and North America; in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos. I learned of the scope of Jewish rebellion: More than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. All this alongside daily acts of resilience — smuggling food, writing diaries, telling jokes to relieve fear, hugging a barrack mate to keep her warm. Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts. I learned their names: Tosia Altman, Gusta Davidson, Frumka Plotnicka. Hundreds of others
At the center of “Freuen” was a striking testimonial by a woman identified only as Renia K.; it was composed at the end of the war, when she was just 20 years old. Her writing was descriptive, even witty. “For them,” she wrote of the Nazi officers, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.” I found her file at the Israel State Archives and used the book she published in 1945 and additional testimonies to fill out her story.
Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature, and some 180 Jewish newspapers. After Hitler invaded Renia’s town, Jedrzejow, and locked her family in a ghetto, Renia escaped and fled through fields. She leapt off a moving train when she was recognized, bargained with the police and pretended to be Catholic. She got a job as a housemaid, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services. “I hadn’t even known that I was such a good actor,” Renia reflected in her memoir, “able to impersonate and imitate.”
Helped by a paid Polish smuggler, she joined her older sister in the town of Bedzin. Before the war, Bedzin had been a largely middle-class Jewish community and a hub for Jewish political parties, which had proliferated in response to the question of modern Jewish identity. A vast network of Jewish youth groups was affiliated with these parties. These groups had trained young Jewish men — and women — to feel pride, live collectively, be physically active and question, critique and plan. They trained them in the skills necessary for “staying.”
After Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the youth groups formed militias. When Renia arrived, Bedzin hosted a burgeoning cell of rebellion organized by secular, socialist-leaning Jewish teenagers and young adults. Those who were forced to labor in Nazi uniform factories slipped notes into the boots urging soldiers at the front to drop their weapons. They constructed workshops where they experimented with homemade explosives and designed elaborate underground bunkers. “Haganah!” was their rallying cry: Defense!
Women who were selected for undercover missions were required to look “good,” or passably “Aryan” or Catholic, with light hair, blue or green eyes, good posture and an assured gait. Renia was one of those chosen. Fueled by rage and a deep sense of justice, 18-year-old Renia became an underground operative, “a courier girl.”
I learned that “courier girls” connected the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned. Being caught on the Aryan side meant certain death; despite that, these young women dyed their hair blond, took off their Jewish-identifying armbands, put on fake smiles and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos, bringing Jews information and hope, bulletins and false identification papers, and linking youth resistance groups across the country. They smuggled pistols, bullets and grenades, hiding them in marmalade jars, sacks of potatoes and designer handbags.
Image
Credit...Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro/Photographs by Getty Images; Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Photo Archive.
As women, they were well positioned to do this work: Their brothers were circumcised and risked being found out in a “pants drop” test. Before the war, Jewish girls were more likely than Jewish boys to have studied at Polish public schools (many boys attended Jewish schools and yeshivas). They were, over all, more assimilated than Jewish boys and spoke Polish without the Yiddish accent, making them excellent spies.
They also took enormous risks. Bela Hazan got a job working as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo; she stole their documents and delivered them to Jewish forgers. Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement that lined the ghetto border. She later supported Jews in hiding, secretly bringing them money, medical help and trusted photographers to take their pictures for fake IDs.
Hela Schupper, a beauty who’d studied commerce, dressed up as an affluent Polish woman attending an afternoon of theater, wearing clothes she’d borrowed from a non-Jewish friend’s mother. In 1942 she met a “Mr. X” from the Polish underground on a Warsaw street corner, followed him onto a train and into a safe house, stuffed her fashionable jute handbag, and brought five guns and clips of cartridges to Krakow’s “Fighting Pioneers,” who then bombed a Christmas week gathering at an upscale cafe frequented by Nazi officers, killing at least seven Germans and wounding more.
These women were so unlike me — they were the fight to my flight — and I was becoming increasingly obsessed with them.
Renia ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw. She moved grenades, false passports and cash strapped to her body and hidden in her undergarments and shoes. She transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots. She wore a red flower in her hair to identify her to underground contacts, met up with a black-market arms dealer in a cemetery, and slept in a cellar, wandering the city by day to gather information. She smiled coyly during searches on the train, and befriended one border guard to whom she “confessed” about smuggling food to distract him from the real contraband that was fastened to her torso with belts. “You had to be strong in your comportment, firm,” she wrote in her memoir. “You had to have an iron will.”
In Vilna, Ruzka Korczak found a Finnish pamphlet in a library on how to make bombs — it became the underground’s recipe book. Her comrade Vitka Kempner put a rudimentary explosive under her coat, slipped out of the ghetto, and blew up a German supply train in 1942. The Vilna resistance fled the ghetto to fight in the forests, where both women commanded units. Their comrade Zelda Treger completed 17 trips transporting hundreds of Jews out of ghettos and slave labor camps to the woods. In a different forest, a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery — she was once forced to amputate a soldier’s wounded finger with her teeth. “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle,” Faye said of her wartime adolescence in a documentary film.
Renia, through cunning and luck, managed to fend off prying Nazis and Poles who attempted to turn her in for a reward — until one border guard noticed her fabricated passport stamp. Imprisoned in Gestapo lockups that prided themselves on their medieval torture strategies, Renia was brutally beaten alongside Polish political prisoners. She masterminded an escape, helped by other courier girls who plied the guards with cigarettes and whiskey. Renia was able to slip away, change her clothes and run. Using an underground railroad set up by Jews, she crossed the Tatra Mountains by foot, then reached Hungary hidden in the locomotive of a freight train. The engineer expelled an extra puff of smoke to hide her departure from the engine.
Renia finally arrived in Palestine, where she was invited to lecture about her experience, and she published her memoir in Hebrew in 1945 — one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust. But in her life after the war, she remained mostly silent about it. For many female survivors, silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves. Renia’s family home after the war was not filled with stories of the resistance, but with music, art and tango nights; she was known for her fashionable tastes, and for her sharp sense of humor. Like so many refugees, the resisters wanted to start afresh, to blend into their new worlds.
Some 70 years after the war, I went to speak with Vitka Kempner’s son, Michael Kovner, on the outdoor terrace of a Jerusalem cafe. “She was someone who went toward danger,” he told me. “She didn’t care about the rules. She had true chutzpah.”
Researching these women, I’ve learned that my family’s narrative is not the sole option for confronting large and small dangers in the world. Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times I can stop and fight, or, at least, pause and discuss. Renia and her comrades were brave and powerful and paved the way for the generations that followed — not just the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, but also women like me and my daughters. My children should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and even running toward danger.
When I left the cafe, I found myself on a quiet side road. I looked up and saw the street sign with a name I would have never recognized a few years before: Haviva Reik Street. With Hannah Senesh, Haviva had joined the British Army as a paratrooper, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing Allied servicemen. Strong female legacies were all around us; if only we noticed, if only we knew their stories.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Moroccan Jews and Israeli Jewish tourists participate in Simchat Torah festivities at a synagogue in Marrakesh on October 12, 2017. (AFP Photo/Fadel Senna
