Here in Beer Sheva, we don't get this holiday off, so you'll find me tonight at a training session for new volunteers for Project La'ad at Ben-Gurion University, and tomorrow laying the groundwork to expand our program for the benefit of the Holocaust survivors in nearby Kiryat Malachi and recruiting new student volunteers at Achva College.
Last week, my program brought volunteers from across the country to Jerusalem for a tour of Yad Vashem. This was the second of my nine tours of Israel's national Holocaust museum led in Hebrew, and as always, I picked up some new vocab:
נצר / netzer = stem, shoot.
This is a special usage referring to the lone survivor of an entire family. Our tour guide told us that Yad Vashem knows of 114 such last stems of their family tree who fell in Israel's War of Independence.
Our tour guide also emphasized a list of numbers of Jews by country, compiled during the Wannsee Conference and its Final Solution, a.k.a. extermination of Europe's Jewish population. The list included Estonia, with its relatively insignificant population of a few thousand Jews. So now our job as part of Project La'ad is to reach as many of Israel's roughly 230,000 survivors as possible in clarifying their rights, documenting their life stories in Project LeDorot (a joint program with Yad VaShem), and through a friendly visiting program--all without missing a single town, no matter how small its population of survivors.
At the end of the tour, where the main exhibit opens up to the spectacular rolling Jerusalem foothills, with a group of students from Ein Gedi who recently joined Project La'ad.
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Speaking of powerful, Dov Lipman's piece here gives plenty of motivation to continue my dad's convivial attitude in greeting everyone he saw with a smile and a 100% genuine "how are you?".
Here's a really powerful Harvard Business Review piece about honesty and making day-to-day decisions with integrity (thanks to my co-aunt (urbandictionary.com's term for my sister's sister-in-law) Jenny).
Dave Brubeck and sitar legend Ravi Shankar left the world in the same week. In addition to catching Brubeck with Dad, thanks to Michigan's University Musical Society, which brought Shankar to Hill Auditorium (and gave students a crazy discount for good measure), I ended that rough week for the music world feeling extremely grateful to have seen both those, among so many other, legends in concert.
Peace and love from the capital of the Negev!
אריק/Eric
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