Tonight, as I dress the Christmas tree in our home on a quiet street in a peaceful city sleeping under a new snow, the news is on the screen as I work. There is a brief shot there of an old woman being interviewed.
They speak of Jews tonight around the world who observe Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. I write “observe,” not celebrate. There is nothing to celebrate tonight at the Nir Oz kibbutz where Yaffa Adar was seized by Hamas.
Yaffa, 85, was taken, the report said, and driven away by gunmen in a golf cart. When she was reunited with relatives at a Tel Aviv hospital, she said in soft halting tones: “I’m OK. I’m here. I survived.”
“I’m OK. I’m here. I survived,” were words spoken down the long alley of history by every Jew who ever took a breath — not just now and here in Israel — but for the over 2 million Jews who survived the dark waves of World War II.
Tonight, as Hanukkah begins, we near the end of a year darkened by attacks on Jewish houses of worship and on the streets of our cities.
Outside a Jewish temple in upstate New York, a 28-year-old man fired two rounds from a shotgun, hours before the start of Hanukkah. That’s only one of the growing number.
The Anti-Defamation League said last week that “since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. increased 388%, according to preliminary data.”
I remember when I was 9 or 10, my mother would lean on the fence in the backyard after collecting laundry from the ropes, talking to Mrs. Klein, who sat on a wood stool leaning over her bannister.
It wasn’t until I came home from the Air Force years later and we drove by the old house and looked at the yard and up to where Mrs. Klein sat, that Mom spoke of it.
“She was so quiet except when the kids down the street or when you kids played ball in the yard. She talked about the war and how she and her late husband got out of Germany before the bad days started. He was a baker, she said, ‘And they broke our windows and beat him.'”
I remember watching my brothers cut her little patch of grass in the yard and run errands for her. Those errands passed to me before we moved.
Listening to Yaffa Adar when she was interviewed on Instagram, I remembered Mrs. Klein and the accent and my Jewish friends in Hollywood and here in Maine.
On Instagram, this was recorded.
“I am now speaking as the grandmother of Tamir Adar,” Yaffa said. “I spent 49 days in that hell. I am begging from all decision-makers, get the kids out, get them all out. It’s not easy, not for them and not for their families, not for anyone. I am asking, begging, bring them home. And I call now from here, I think I can be voice for many more mothers and grandmothers who are asking for the same request. Free the children now. I want to see them now, not when I’ll be in a coffin.”
On this day as we finish decorating the tree and begin the celebration of Jesus’ birth, 136 people (in the country where Jesus was born), Jews are still in captivity at the hands of Hamas.
I want to hear this from all their mouths.
“I’m OK. I’m here. I survived.”
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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