In every generation

A few years ago while going through my late grandmother's papers I came across this newspaper clipping from the front page of The Guardian newspaper of June 3 1967 and two letters my uncle wrote from Tel Aviv to his parents in London, while he was volunteering in a hospital.

On June 6th 1967 my uncle wrote:"For the past few days I have been working in a big Tel Aviv hospital 7am till 7pm.Tel Aviv has been very lucky no bombs have fallen. We can hear aircraft and explosions in the distance. Last night we went down twice to the shelters. Tel Aviv still seems to be gay except that buses are few and far between. Jerusalem on the other hand has got it bad: they have sent a lot of ambulances and doctors there from my hospital in Tel Aviv."

There was also a letter postmarked June 12 1967 from my mother, a Hebrew teacher in Boston, to her parents in London about her brother going off to Israel: "Thank Gd there is a ceasefire... Nevertheless volunteers are still needed to help keep the country going and put it back on its feet. I don't know WHY you have to say in almost every letter that you are bad parents. I think that every parent (and every boy) who's son is this week riding around in a car in GG/Hendon and sleeping in his own bed should be ashamed of his character and his upbringing. It was partly the fault of this type that 6,000,000 could die and no credit to them that we have a state of Israel... Of course my brother had to go - his whole existence was that way - besides which he's a man with a conscience. Don't worry."

For weeks the tension had been ratchetting up in the region. Egypt and Syria were massing troops on Israel's borders. Egypt had pressured the UN peacekeeping force to leave the Sinai buffer zone, allowing them to move their army closer to Israel and shut the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, imposing a blockade on Eilat, Israel's only Red Sea port, while Egypt's President Nasser made ever more belligerent statements about promising the destruction of Israel.

All over the world and in Israel itself there was a sense of impending doom. Barely 20 years after the Holocaust there was a very real fear that a similar fate would befall the Jews in Israel, that Israel was about to be crushed by the combined might of the surrounding Arab armies.
My grandparents, who had both lost so much family in the Holocaust, were terrified that they were now going to lose their only son in this war.

Only a few weeks after the war they themselves flew out to Jerusalem to join festive prayers of thanksgiving at the Kotel, the first time in 19 years that Jews were able to visit this sacred site.

A timely reminder that in every generation we have faced an enemy who wishes to erase us, and each time as a people we have met the threat with resilience and determination. These are the first hand stories I grew up with from ordinary, regular people who did what they could to save our people and our homeland.

When Israel's survival was threatened my uncle and many of his friends in the diaspora got up and did what they could to help their brothers and sisters in Israel. They put their lives where their ideals were and got on a flight to Israel, not knowing whether they were flying to their doom.

On June 3 1967 the consensus in the world was that the Arab states, led by Nasser's Egypt, would wipe Israel off the map and slaughter the Jews of Israel. And still my uncle and his friends got on the plane and came out to Israel to help because less than 20 years after the Holocaust every Jew knew that it was up to us, the Jewish people, to try to save ourselves, to act, to do.

One of the first things my uncle said to me after October 7 was to ask when the volunteers from the diaspora were coming, as he and his friends had.

Most of us are these ordinary people. We aren't medical professionals or trained soldiers at the peak of fitness or tech wizards or scientists. There is still so much every one of us can do to save our people and our homeland.