Marking 70 years since the establishment of the State of Israel, Yad Vashem opened a new exhibition in May 2018, entitled "They Say There is a Land: Longings for Eretz Israel during the Holocaust." The exhibition tells how Jews yearned for Eretz Israel during and immediately following the Shoah in the years 1933-1948 – from the rise of the Nazi party to power in Germany, through the outbreak of WWII and the destruction of European Jewry, and until the end of the war and the establishment of the State of Israel.
Artworks, artifacts, diaries, letters and testimonies collected over the years at Yad Vashem give expression to the experiences, feelings and yearnings of those who created and bore them, and open a window to their inner world in the shadow of the terrible events. This written and visual documentation also tells the story of the longings for Eretz Israel during the Holocaust.
Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and between the two world wars of the twentieth century – and against the background of the growth of modern nationalism and the Enlightenment movement, secularization and emancipation alongside the intensification of political antisemitism – a fierce struggle in the Jewish world centered on the future of the Jewish people. One of the answers was practical political Zionism, which placed as its goal the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel.
The Zionist movement established a foothold from the first Zionist Congress in 1897 up to the 1930s. Although numerically it was a small movement, and notwithstanding the strong resistance of other streams, its influence was noticeable among wide circles of Jews worldwide.
On the eve of the Holocaust, building continued in Eretz Israel: new settlements were established, and agricultural branches and industrial plants were developed. Varied news reaching the Diaspora from Eretz Israel described the nature of the Land and its landscape; "the New Jew"; and especially the youth that was growing up there. Notwithstanding the limits placed by the British Mandatory authority, there was a noticeable increase in the number of immigrants. Jews readied themselves for Aliya at training farms in the Diaspora, and tried to immigrate to Eretz Israel despite the difficulties, even illegally. Eretz Israel was increasingly perceived as a possible solution for the Jewish people, as a place for building a future home, and as the hoped-for protection from the present harsh reality.
"I see a sign that soon we will meet each other face-to-face in our Land, our Homeland, Eretz Israel,"
wrote ten-year-old Eliezer Rudnik in 1937 in Hebrew in a letter he sent to his aunts who had already immigrated to Eretz Israel. Eliezer and his parents, Aryeh and Sarah Rudnik, the only Jews living in the Ukrainian village of Kosmaczow, were shot in 1942 at a killing pit after the German occupation.
The Shoah completely changed reality. Eretz Israel was never so far away from the Jews as it was during the Holocaust, although their hearts' desires for the Land only strengthened. During this period, Jews experienced the breakdown and destruction of the entire fabric of life for both the individual and the community. They were forced out of life-cycle events and society, and subjected to humiliating and impossible living conditions – and all this before the onset of their physical extermination. Yet diaries, letters and documents documenting the period testify that even during those terrible times, in the midst of the struggle for life that focused on the here and now, Eretz Israel held a firm place in the hearts and thoughts of the Jews.
The Land of Israel and its typical landscapes are seen in the drawings of Jacob Otto Pins, who had immigrated to Eretz Israel from Höxter, Germany. His notebook of drawings was sent to Otto's mother and sister Ilse, who looked after it carefully through all the camps in which they were interned in Riga, Latvia. Rina Schwartz met them in Auschwitz, and was so impressed by the splendid drawings that she asked to keep them for a night. In the morning when she went to return the notebook, Rina discovered that Ilse and her mother had been murdered during the night. Rina kept the notebook throughout her life until she gave it to Yad Vashem. The notebook, now preserved in Yad Vashem's Art Collection, is included in the exhibition.
Also displayed is a letter from Baruch Milch, who wrote a letter to his cousin in Eretz Israel while in hiding in Poland.
"I am writing this letter to you as one who has been condemned to death before my execution, since this is my situation right now… The Jews need freedom… Only in [Mandatory] Palestine will they be granted independence... Do not be silent; work day and night until you achieve this goal."
With the end of the war and liberation, Zionist activity reached the height of its fulfilment, with the She'erit Hapleitah (last remnants of the Jewish people in Europe) grasping Eretz Israel as the practical solution for the rehabilitation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. At the same time, a new "post-catastrophe" Jewish national identity took shape in the Displaced Persons camps in Europe and the detention camps in Cyprus. On the title page of the Talmud tractate created by Rabbis Samuel Abba Snieg and Samuel Jakob Rose in 1946 for Jewish refugees in Germany, an illustration was chosen that depicted a landscape of Eretz Israel with the background of a shining sun framed by two palm trees. The title of the illustration reads: "From slavery to redemption, from darkness to great light."
"They Say There Is a Land" opened on 29 May 2018 in Yad Vashem's Auditorium Exhibitions Hall. It has been temporarily removed to allow for the construction of the new Shoah Heritage Campus.
Survivors Stories Featured in the Exhibition
A number of Holocaust survivors whose stories are displayed in "They Say There Is a Land" were present at the opening of the exhibition.
A member of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, Esther Dublin (née Junia Lieberman) held secret meetings of the movement in her and her mother's small apartment in the Łódź ghetto. She was also active in the Front of Wilderness Generation, and wrote a composition for their wall-mounted newspaper, entitled "Lilith [Nocturnal]."
"Wouldn’t it be great to contemplate a state where… only justice prevails," she wrote. "A country where the [Jewish] people are not subjugated, but imbued with awareness. And so, with common songs, work and dreams about Eretz Israel, we passed the winter."
Moshe Fromin from Rowne, Poland, spent a year at the Cyprus detention camps before finally reaching Eretz Israel in 1948. A number of items from the camps loaned by Fromin to Yad Vashem are displayed in the exhibition, including a Gordonia youth movement pin; a text book for learning Hebrew; and a sculpture of a gun created by Yitzhak Lerner (the real gun saved Lerner's life during the Holocaust).
After surviving Auschwitz and a death march Yaacov (Jacki) Handeli, from Salonika in Greece, immigrated to Eretz Israel after the war with the "Machal" group of volunteers from abroad. He donated to Yad Vashem the iconic photograph of Illegal Jewish immigrants on the deck of the Pan York on the day they arrived in Israel, August 14, 1948 – in which he appears (center, right, wearing a hat).
Elina Karniel (née Landau), one of the "Tehran Children" who arrived in Eretz Israel in 1943, was given an illustrated map of their journey from Warsaw via Siberia, Uzbekistan and Tehran by her older brother Emil for her tenth birthday.
"Only in the camp in Tehran did they start to teach us songs, mostly in Hebrew," recalled Karniel. "Then we started to hear that there was a land of our own, that there we would find rest from all of these wanderings… it was like a fairytale."
Emil was killed during Israel's War of Independence.
“They Say There Is a Land” is supported by Simy and Sadia Cohen (Venezuela) and Philip and Rose Friedman (USA). The exhibition opened on 29 May in Yad Vashem’s Auditorium Exhibitions Hall. The catalogue for the exhibition is available from the Yad Vashem online store.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 86.
