January 30, 2007 5:25

Return to Sender

In a somber Jerusalem twilight, I was taken to a rooftop by an Israeli friend. Everywhere we looked, there were walls --the 2,000 year old walls of the holy city, the high concrete wall running along the hilltops, dividing Arabs from Jews. I couldn't decide whether the intrusive, new wall actually looked futuristic or medieval. "The thing about walls," says my friend,Yehuda Levy-Aldema, "is that they don't last forever."

"What does?"I asked.

"Words. Faith," Yehuda replied. "Come, I'll show you."

Yehuda took me downstairs to the Hechal Shlomo Center for Jewish Heritage. It's a museum of Judaica, next to the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, and Yehuda happens to be its soft-spoken director. He sat me in a large room that was dark and empty. He flicked a switch, and a sound and light show began, colored orbs rushed towards and away from us, and the cosmos opened up with a roar. Then, on one of the walls, an image appeared of a man in his early seventies, speaking Hebrew.

He told of being a boy in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and how, as a 13-year old, he was secretly prepared for his Bar Mitzvah by a rabbi. The Nazis would have killed them had they found out.

What does this old man's story have to do with scenes of the universe rushing by me? I wondered.

The story continued: on the night of his Bar Mitzvah, burlap sacks were hung over the windows so the Nazi guards wouldn't catch sight of the ceremony and execute them all. There was a rap on the window, and the rabbi told the boy, "Go see who it is." The boy peered out cautiously. It was his mother, holding a pair of socks she had knitted for him. She had just enough time to give her son his Bar Mitzvah gift and then sneak back to her section of the death camp. She and others had risked her life to reach the boy with his pair of socks.

The boy never saw his mother again.

After the ceremony, the rabbi gave a miniature Torah to the boy. He had hidden it in rags from the Nazis. "You keep it," the Rabbi told him, "I'll die here, but there is a chance you'll live. Take this Torah with you."

The Rabbi was right. The boy survived, and he didn't. An orphan, the boy came to Israel and brought the palm-sized Torah with him. He rose to become a professor of astro-physics at Tel Aviv University. His name is Yossef Yehoyachin. One of his students was Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, and he knew Yossef's story about the Torah. The astronaut asked if he could take the Torah into space. The professor didn't hesistate, and gave it to him. The professor wondered if that was the reason why the rabbi at Bergen-Belsen had entrusted it to him in the first place

The Israeli astronaut was on the Columbia Space Shuttle that exploded like a star, exactly four years ago. "I tried to calculate how much dust from the Torah might have sprinkled down over Israel," the professor said wistfully.

For my friend Yehuda, who had put together this exhibition (this story is only a small part of it), the upside of the Columbia tragedy was that the Torah had dissolved into the cosmos, into God; And this, Yehuda said, was proof that words and faith were far more indestructible than the labyrinth of walls, built by conquerors past and present, around Jerusalem.
--By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem