« »

polinapolinapolina:

rightofreturn:

eretzyisrael:

Rachel Posner, wife of Rabbi Dr.Akiva Posner, took this photo from inside the family home on Chanukah 1932. Rabbi Posner was the last Rabbi of the community in Kiel, Germany. The Posner family left Germany in 1933 and arrived in  Mandatory Palestine in 1934.

On the back of the photograph, Rachel Posner wrote: 

“Juda verrecke” 
die Fahne spricht
“Juda lebt ewig”
erwidert das Licht” 

“Death to Judah”
So the flag says
“Judah will live forever”
So the light answers 

Both the photograph and the menorah are featured in the new Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem 

Credits: Posner Family Estate, courtesy of Shulamit Mansbach, Haifa, Israel

A lot of people don’t understand why my ethnicity, my nationality, my religion are important to me. It’s because of images like this. It’s because thousands of years of oppression and abuse occurred.

That’s why Israel exists. Because even though our security can be compromised, even though we are vulnerable, together we are strong. Together we are responsible for our own fate. Millions of people had to die for Israel to exist, and I will never be able to accept that, I will never forget that. I was born because my family was lucky, though so many of their relatives died in Germany, in Holland, in the Ukraine. I was born in Israel because for the first time in a long time, we fought.

Israel can’t afford to lose that spirit.

I talk a lot about how the places I have lived have shaped me. How has Israel shaped me? 

I’m impatient, I’m abrasive, I’m tenacious, and I don’t share well. Most Israelis, whether or not they want to admit it, share these same qualities. We’re not rude, we’re not without compassion, but there is an ingrained understanding in even the smallest child: you’re lucky, don’t give up, don’t ever forget.

God forbid we ever go down, but if we do, we’ll go down fighting.

ilana, isn’t your family like russian? but i totally get what you’re saying. i agree.  

My family, Russian? Funny. 

No Polina, my family is one hundred percent ethnically and culturally Jewish (both Ashkenazi and Sephardic), we are also Jewish according to Halakha (Jewish law that sets forth such things as matrilineal succession). No one in my family is “Russian” and we don’t consider ourselves “Russian”, myself especially because I was born in Israel to a Jewish mother. 

What do you consider being “Russian” and what do you consider Jewish? Because I’ve been raised to believe that a Jew is someone with a Jewish mother or someone that converts, the latter example aside, that means that for thousands of years Jews have been born to Jews, which means that after so many thousands of years we have become ethnically different. Being Jewish has separated many people, such as myself, from being “Russian” or “Spanish” or “German”. 

Both of my parents have “Russian” birth certificates that say that their ethnicity is “Jewish”. My birth certificate too, Israel issued, says nothing of my being Russian, rather that I am an Israeli Jew. So, who is Russian?

As someone whose family was slaughtered in the Holocaust, I take images like this very seriously. You’re right though, you don’t have to be Jewish to understand the gravity of the Holocaust.

Sunday Jan 1 @ 04:57am 99 notes
reblogged from polinapolinapolina
originally posted by eretzyisrael


Source: www1.yadvashem.org