It’s been a while.
I have a lot to say, although I haven’t found the energy to write.
Not because I don’t wish to share, but rather I have been unable to articulate what exactly has happened.
I continued to prepare for the army with my program and I am now the person whom I dreamed to become...
An Israeli soldier.
Self-actualization.
My dream, years in the making, is finally a reality.
This dream was deferred, but it was guarded, and now it is manifested.
I am a חייל (soldier).
The best is yet to come.
I was officially drafted into the Israel Defense Forces on December 28, 2020.
From my last blog post in late September until then, I improved my Hebrew, learned more about the army, myself, and continued my absorption into Israeli society.
I spent nearly every free weekend hiking this beautiful homeland that השם promised to us.
Romantic waterfalls in the Golan Heights, kosher wine alongside the Kinneret, dry canyons weaving down to the Dead Sea, mountains within the Ramon Crater, and silent escapes somewhere in the Negev Desert.
For a while, it felt like a vacation. In all honesty, the months before drafting were just that.
I was fortunate to travel safely in an era where disease greatly limits our ability to explore.
This great country of ours has the perfect COVID-friendly place. It’s called nature.
If it weren’t for COVID, I probably would have traveled to Europe, gone out to bars, danced at music festivals.
I would have had “fun.”
But what would I have gained? A hangover?
I walked, slept, sweat, and learned in our holy land.
Our holy land.
And I am a better person from it.
Now, as I write this, I no longer have the ability to leave for a camping trip in the desert at my will. I am doing what I came for:
To serve and protect the Land of Israel.
What exactly am I doing?
I am located at a base called Michve Alon, not too far from where I sipped wine a few short months ago.
I will be here for a total of three months. I have completed the mandatory basic training course (02) that all Israeli soldiers, combat or non-combat, must complete.
We learned to shoot an M-16, the responsibilities that come with operating that weapon, discipline, and most important of all, time.
Time is king in the army. Five minutes is five minutes. Down to the exact second. One second late?
Punishment.
For good reason.
This is a Jewish organization, but it is an army after all.
Now, the remainder of my time will be spent learning Hebrew. No matter how fast I can run or how much leadership experience I have, it will not matter if I am unable to speak the language.
In late March/early April I will begin my actual job within the army.
What will that be?
I don’t quite know yet.
But there’s been something I haven’t exactly told everyone at home.
I intend to draft as a combat soldier.
“It’s dangerous!”
“But you already have a degree!”
“Why?”
There are many reasons: to serve as much as I can, to grow as a leader, to physically be there on the ground.
But more than anything, again, it’s because of what happened to those 23,600+ in Kamianets-Podolsky.
To the innocent, to my cousins, and, almost, to my babushka.
I know it’s hard to understand. Sometimes it’s even hard for me to understand.
I hate violence, I hate war. I have honestly never even been in a fistfight.
But what is relentlessly clear to me is my love for this land and my belief in Zionism.
Unfortunately, not many people agree with me, thus, I must protect what I believe in.
I will fight to actualize that “Never Again” means never again.
There’s one story from my babushka that cuts into my soul like a blade every time I recall it.
But I am more confident in my decision to draft combat every time I sit with it.
The Red Army freed Kamianets-Podolsky from the Nazis on March 27, 1944.
My babushka, her mother, brother, and grandmother returned there in early fall.
My babushka said that her mother, Esther, asked her landlord to watch their belongings before leaving for Central Asia. Esther instructed her that if they returned, they would like everything back, and, if not, the landlord could keep it all.
But we did come back!
Esther returned to the home of her landlord once arriving in Kamianets-Podolsky.
My babushka told me about the exchange between her mother and her old landlord:
‘We don’t have anything. Did you save any of my belongings and could you give us something?’
And the women stayed by the...religious icon and she crossed herself and said, ‘G-d’s the witness I don’t have any of your belongings.’...
But that wasn’t exactly true.
They left their apartment and sat on a street curb. They had nowhere else to go. Esther and her mother (my great-great-grandmother) were crying, broken down by the endless hardships. Then their savior came:
And there is a Jewish captain...[and] he sees looking at us that we are Jewish and he looked Jewish to us...so he stopped. He sees Jewish women [crying] and he said, ‘What happened to you? Why are you crying?’ And my mom told him...so he came up. He said, ‘Let’s go with me.’
He got in the house of [the landlord]...and took the revolver out and said, ‘You know those people. They used to live here before the war...’ And he said, ‘Right this moment if you won’t find their stuff and give it to them, I’m gonna kill you.’
And she came up with a few stuff that belonged to us.
This is a story I have heard from my babushka several instances in the past. One time, however, she included information that completely altered my understanding of the event. The landlord’s daughter was Esther’s childhood best friend.
My babushka said:
They were like sisters...They would go places together, share things, share secrets, talk. [Her mother] loved us children...she was like a grandmother to us.
Their former landlord did not return all of their belongings after the Jewish soldier encounter, just a few.
Esther bought a piano before the war, dreaming my babushka would learn to play. The piano was stolen by their landlord.
The landlord told them a lie that the Germans had confiscated it. Other neighbors told Esther:
Don’t believe. No one even stepped in her house, no German.
Their landlord’s daughter, Esther’s childhood best friend, lived in Moscow during and after the war. She came and visited her mother in Kamianets-Podolsky after my family returned there.
Esther saw her leaving Kamianets- Podolsky with more luggage than when she arrived. Esther gathered the authorities and explained the reason for her “friend’s” visit: to liquidate their belongings.
My babushka said:
They opened her luggage and my mom wrote approximately what she had. All the luggage was our stuff.
Their relationship was never the same. They were no longer “like sisters.”
Their landlord eventually moved away to Moscow with her daughter. My family’s possessions did not find her fulfillment.
One day she jumped in front of the Moscow metro and killed herself.
Why? My great-grandmother and her former landlord’s daughter loved each other before the war.
I asked My babushka what changed.
She answered abruptly before I could complete the question:
Greed! Looting...they not the only ones. The whole Ukrainian people are changed. Maybe they didn’t like us before also, but they couldn’t show it.
We have no place to go but the Land of Israel.
When will you understand?
James Baldwin, when once discussing the racial problem in America, perfectly captures the helplessness that I feel when thinking about Kamianets-Podolsky.
I have edited his words to apply to antisemitism.
What you have to look at is what is happening in this country. And what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother…It is not an [antisemitism] problem! It is a problem of whether or not you are willing to look at your life and be responsible for it and then begin to change it...And it is because [they] are unable to face the fact that, in fact, I am flesh of their flesh. Bone of their bone.
Jews, my family, lived alongside non-Jews in Kamianets-Podolsky for generations.
Meaningless.
My great-grandmother’s best friend wouldn’t even show her humanity.
But someone did.
A Jewish combat soldier.
I am forever grateful for this hero.
Now it’s my turn to pay it forward.
23600+, you will not be forgotten.
Love,
Jonny יוני
Base Michve Alon, Israel
January 2021