Why This Photo Encapsulates the Highs and Lows of Jewish History

It’s a devastating time for the Jewish People, with the ongoing war in Gaza and Lebanon and 101 hostages still captive in Gaza. Many are disheartened and depressed.

That’s why my heart leaped in joy when I saw a picture of my Old City Jerusalem neighbor, Holocaust survivor Rachel Herczl smiling jubilantly, holding in her lap her fifth-generation descendent.

Rachel Herczl holding her great-great grandchild

At just 15 years of age, young Rachel, an only child, was taken to Auschwitz where both of her parents were murdered. And here she is at 95, rejoicing in her great-great grandchild, born in the reborn Jewish state.

But that’s not the whole story. After surviving nine months of forced labor in Birkenau and a Death March through the freezing snow of Poland, Rachel, alone in the world, returned to her village in Hungary. Some 90% of the Jewish residents had been murdered. She knocked on the door of her family’s house, only to be rudely rebuffed by the gentile who had moved in.

The petite 16-year-old made her way to Budapest and enrolled in a school for religious girls. In May, 1948, Rachel heard a newsboy shouting the headline: “JEWISH STATE IS DECLARED.” She immediately applied to go to Israel because, as she explained more than 50 years later: “They were killing us in Europe. I wanted to raise a family in Israel where it was safe to be a Jew.”

Two years later Rachel married Moshe Yitzhak Herczl. Moshe came from a religious Hungarian family of nine children. Only three of them survived the Holocaust. Moshe came to Israel in 1948 in order to fight in the War of Independence. After their marriage, caught up in Ben Gurion’s dream to make the desert bloom, the young couple moved to Tifrach, a tiny settlement in the Negev Desert.

Just married survivors Rachel and Moshe Herczl

Although a brilliant scholar who would later write a book on Christianity and the Holocaust, Moshe was so enthralled with the new land that he gladly worked building roads and plastering houses. Three daughters were born to them: Tova, named after Rachel’s mother; Sarah, named after Moshe’s mother; and Miriam, named after one of Moshe’s five murdered sisters.

Starting their family in Israel, Rachel and Moshe Herczl and their 3 daughters.

In 1961, the Herczls were sent by the government of Israel to South Africa to teach Hebrew and otherwise serve the Jewish community of Cape Town with Moshe’s considerable knowledge of Judaism.

In a religious Zionist youth group in Cape Town, Sarah Herczl met Avner Franklin. They were married in 1977, and the next year came on aliyah to Israel, settling four years later in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Moshe and Rachel Herczl also returned to Israel at that time.

On August 26, 1980, with great elation, Moshe and Rachel celebrated the birth of their first grandchild, a daughter born to Sarah and Avner. Moshe asked that the child not be named after any of the murdered relatives. This was a new generation, far away in time and place from where Jews were killed for being Jews. Sarah and Avner obliged; they named their daughter Michal.

Michal grew up to be an intense, earnest, intelligent, inquisitive, and hard-working girl. She loved music, had a beautiful singing voice, and played the guitar.

On June 19, 2002, 21-year-old Michal was murdered by an Arab suicide bomber who blew himself up at a Jerusalem bus stop. The hope that Jews would be safe from Jew-haters in the Jewish homeland blew up with her.

The image of Rachel Herczl, standing beside the grave of her first grandchild, her arm around the shoulder of her daughter Sarah revealing her tattooed Auschwitz number, is seared into my memory. Can this new picture of her jubilant smile 22 years later erase that image? How do we put them together?

The Long Road

The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, in 2014, plunged Jews worldwide into intense mourning. At the funeral, I saw a giant banner on the back of a bus. It proclaimed in Hebrew: “THE ETERNAL NATION DOES NOT FEAR THE LONG ROAD.” It was like zooming out on a Google map. For me, the motto changed the funeral from an unbearable tragedy to one tragic event in the 3800-year history of the Jewish nation.

The same motto has been plastered on buildings and street corners here in Jerusalem during the current war. It is an answer to the doom and gloom felt by many Jews as this war drags on, with our hostages languishing in Gazan tunnels for 406 days and 905 members of our security forces killed, leaving 318 widows and 650 orphans. The pogrom in Amsterdam and repeated anti-Semitic attacks in America have left Jews worldwide reeling. What will become of us?

The Eternal Nation Does Not Fear the Long Road

There are no prophets today, but in Biblical times the prophets of ancient Israel made far-fetched prophecies. Amid war and destruction, Zechariah proclaimed: “Old men and old women will once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem … and the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing” (8:4-5). I see them every day when I walk in the park next to my Jerusalem home.

Isaiah foretold: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like a lily; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing” (35:1-2). The Negev desert, which covers 60% of Israel, is now an agricultural wonder, producing tons of olives, avocadoes, citrus fruits, cherry tomatoes, and a wide variety of vegetables. Who could have dreamed?

Jeremiah, who witnessed the catastrophic destruction of the first Temple and the exile to Babylonia, prophesized: “Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (23:3-4). The population of Israel includes Jews from almost every country in the world. Israel today has the highest birthrate of any developed country. Wherever I go here, I see couples pushing baby strollers and young children running ahead of them.

Rachel dancing at her great-grandson’s wedding

I write these words looking out of my window at a panorama of the rebuilt Jerusalem, which Jews prayed for daily for 2,000 years. Yes, it has been a long, pock-marked, bloodied road. Where does it lead?

To the fulfillment of Jewish destiny. And to a smiling Holocaust survivor holding her fifth-generation descendent in the Old City of Jerusalem.