New York Times opinion piece from a hostage survivor on rebirth

By Liat Atzili

Ms. Atzili is a high school teacher in Kiryat Gat, Israel, and an educator at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance center.
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In Israel, the Shoah, or Holocaust, has often been spoken of in recent years alongside tekumah, meaning rebirth, after the survivor generation chose to rebuild a nation rather than lose itself to grief and vengeance. Molded by that spirit, Israel became a refuge for Jews in danger the world over, and has healed its relationships with Germany and other nations that perpetrated or enabled the Holocaust.

I work at Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance center, Yad Vashem, where I teach Israeli 12th graders about the Shoah and prepare them for school trips to Poland. As the last remaining members of the survivor generation dwindled among us in recent years, my focus has been on how best to teach students about the Shoah when the eyewitnesses are gone.

While preserving the memory of the horrors and losses the Shoah wrought remains important both for young Israelis and for children around the world, the concept of tekumah is also a central component of Holocaust education. Tekumah provides us with the vital life lesson of how to move on with dignity and purpose after experiencing a tragedy, and it is perhaps the most important gift that the survivors gave us.

On Oct. 7, the Jewish people suffered our greatest tragedy since the Holocaust. That tragedy came to my own home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, which was burned down as I was taken to Gaza as a hostage. I was held in a home with Gazans and Hamas fighters, with no news of the outside world. Terrified, alone and unsure of the fate of my family, I kept myself going for nearly two months, promising myself I wouldn’t miss the graduation ceremony of the class I teach and imagining reuniting with my husband, Aviv, and our three children. I am a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, and I was released after 54 days thanks in large part to the intervention of President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. My children, thankfully, survived — one after terrifying hours in hiding, one by sheer luck of having been elsewhere that day, one who staved off the attackers by holding the door of a safe room closed. But my home of 30 years was burned beyond recognition, and the home of my heart — my husband, Aviv — was among the 1,200 killed by Hamas in Israel on that terrible October day. So immense was the destruction, I found that terrorists had even killed my dog, Revi.

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/opinion/gaza-war-holocaust-shoah.html