How Can Children of the Holocaust Do Such Things? A Jewish Plea

As originally posted at Counter Punch.

How Can Children of the Holocaust Do Such Things?
A Jewish Plea
by Sara Roy

We have nothing to lose except everything.

Albert Camus

During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water — living because it is fed in part by heavenly rain — and momentarily suspended as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and it signifies renewal and possibility.

The day of Jess’s conversion was also the day that Israel began its pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel’s violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my daughter’s acceptance into Judaism and Israel’s actions-between Judaism and Zionism — a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at least, has now been broken.

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