Remembering

May 2, 2006 - 7:55 AM by Allison

I don’t think you can truly understand Israeli culture until you experience the key two weeks in which the country observes Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then Memorial Day for the soldiers who fell in battle in Israel’s wars, followed by Independence Day.

It is a collective and communal experience that I have a hard time finding a parallel for in American life.

The entire country mourns for generations of young people who lost their lives at terribly young ages – who will forever be age 18, 19 or 20. No generation is untouched. Some of them died in the country’s early wars, without which it wouldn’t exist. The most recent, immediate losses, the soldiers who died over the past 13 years that I have lived here are especially meaningful to me: many of them died rooting out a terrorist who might have easily harmed me or my kids.

Israel has a citizen’s army. The people who die in wars aren’t professional soldiers, many of them had no affection for things military. They were doing what they had to do to protect their country, whether or not they agreed with ever decision their leaders made.

The fallen aren’t distant heroic figures. They are the fathers, sons, or brothers of people you know and interact with every single day. Memorial Day is a way for the entire society around these families to embrace them once a year and send them the message that they are not alone in their suffering. All of us, even if we haven’t suffered their deep personal loss, are at least trying to make an effort to share their burden, to understand what they live with.

On Memorial Day, regular television programming is completely suspended. Instead, in addition to broadcasting the official ceremonies, there are numerous programs about the soldiers and their lives and their families.

I have to confess: I can only bear to watch these kind of programs for about 15 minutes at a time because they are so painful. It’s been this way since I had kids, as the vast majority of them focus on mothers who have lost their sons in war, and it hits much too close to home for me. Last night I gave it a shot and saw a profile of a group of mothers whose sons were all killed in 2003, and are buried in the same row in a military graveyard, and who have bonded while taking care of their son’s graves. You’ve never seen beautiful cemeteries until you’ve seen Israeli military cemeteries. Many families make sure their son’s tombs are covered over with the brightest flowers, decorated with their pictures, little statues of their favorite items like surfboards or guitars. One mother allowed the camera inside her home and showed her son’s room, exactly as he left it three years ago, his clothes and items still where they belongs, his army uniform hanging in the closet. She pointed to a pile of folded clothes on a shelf and said that they hadn’t been laundered when he died and that she will never wash them. Three years later, she says, she can smell them and they still smell like her son.

On Memorial Day, no one is cool, cynical, skeptical or detached. Even the most rebellious kids with tattoos and piercings stand silent in respect for their fallen friends, neighbors, and relatives. It’s an all-encompassing experience like no other. And it shows that underneath the surface of fussing, fighting, and squabbling over politics, religion, race, and ethnicity that makes many people throw up their hands and call Israeli society hopelessly fractured, there is a strong solid core of unity and sense of shared fate that remains firm underneath it all.

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