Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 21, 2024

I am a retired social worker. I spent most of my career working with Holocaust survivors at a Jewish social service agency. When I arrived for my first day of work, I found a small plastic doll in my mailbox. The doll had a little cloth kerchief on her head. Her eyes were blackened and red nail polish marred her face and limbs. The doll belonged to a client I was about to meet. She wanted me to have it so that I would have some knowledge of her pain.

This doll was just a symbol, of course, of the profound violations this client had suffered in the concentration camps. Had there been a state of Israel in 1940, her life might have had a vastly different trajectory. I probably would never have met this client. I would never have encountered that chilling doll. Never.

To the anti-Israel campus protesters, I would like to say: Be mindful of the words never again when you shout, From the river to the sea. Be mindful of never again when you advocate for an end to Zionism, or when you effectively align with terrorists who exist to obliterate Israel, or when you ignore the complexities of this war, or when you fail to acknowledge a people who need to have a homeland to feel safe in the world.

Risa Segal

Woburn

Read more:

The Holocaust survivor's doll - The Boston Globe

Category: Holocaust
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