The creation of Israel – Causes and Consequences

We keep facing new challenges at the Holocaust Centre. Yesterday a large group of senior students from Marlborough Girls College, Blenheim, came to look at the history topic they are studying, the “The creation of Israel – Cause and consequences”. The New Zealand school curriculum is not prescriptive, the focus is on interpretive skills, the topic is “Causes and Consequences of an important world event”. We keep learning, extending our teaching repertoire. This is a topic we have never been asked about before. Israel is a contentious topic, and in principle we don't want to get involved in political discussions, we don't want to appear to be apologists for the Zionist cause, yet we cannot dodge issues as they come up. My approach was to show the DVD about Sosha Galler, in which she talks about growing up in an assimilated well off comfortable middle class home in pre-war Poland, and after the German occupation witnessing her father being shot, then living in the ghetto, surviving Auschwitz as a fifteen year old girl, returning to her home town after the war to find that almost all her family had been killed, and them moving to Israel, where she joined the army and regained her self-esteem, met her husband and eventually moved to New Zealand. It is a very powerful film. It was as clear an account of the causes of the establishment of Israel as you could get. I then talked about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, where people would talk daily about someone who 'came back' or 'didn't come back'. It required no explanation, one survived, the other was killed or died. Every day, as an eleven or twelve year old I would read in the newspapers about atrocities, some involving people I knew. So when our teacher, Marton Beno, at the Jewish Gimnazium, told us the story of Bar Kochba, the Jewish resistance fighter, who took on the Romans and fought back, his story resonated with us and sucked us into the Zionist movement. I asked Rick, son of two Holocaust survivors in Cleveland to talk about what attracted him to Israel at the age of 16 we didn't have to labour the point, the causes of the establishment of Israel was clear. There were a few questions, one of them about the way Holocaust survivors were accepted in Israel, but there was no discussion. Politics didn't seem relevant.