‘Take a Seat’ / May 17, 2020 by Jennie Milne

Making Israel's terror victims known
(Part One)

‘Please take a seat’ © Jennie Milne 2018

Today I aim to give you a little insight into the documentary project ‘Do You Know My Name?’ a collection of stories gathered in Israel, each with a connection to terrorism.

Why did I choose to cover this theme? what prompted me, a 50-year mum who had spent 27 years in the home, to reach out to bereaved parents in another country, and then travel there to record their pain? How did I arrange to meet them? What was it like after traveling the length and depth of a foreign country learning one devasting story after another, to return to newly appreciated safety in the UK, and attempt to create a project that would engage others?

The subject of Palestinian terrorism towards the Jewish population in Israel is one that has received very little coverage and even less condemnation worldwide. Why is that? … a question that is especially pertinent considering the thousands of lives that have been taken in this way.

To begin to answer these questions in a deserving manner would take a book, certainly not just a blog post, however, I must make a start. I promised each of those who graciously sat through my interviews and relived such raw pain, that I would do all I could to make their stories known. In the 19 months following the trip, my desire to do their stories justice - to provide a platform outside of Israel and the Jewish community, has not waned - in fact over subsequent months their stories have increasingly become intertwined with my own. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of ‘Night’ explained:

‘To listen to a witness is to become a witness’.

‘to listen to a witness is to become a witness’ ~ Elie Wiesel image © Jennie Milne 2018

Foremost I bear a responsibility to be a witness for those who trusted me with the most devastating losses of their lives, to create a space for them to speak through their silent portraits and give voice to their aching accounts. However, I believe my responsibility is not just to them, but to all of us.

In November 2019, 22-year-old Instagrammer Freddie Bentley shared on Breakfast television his view that learning about WW2 is bad for millenials mental health, arguing that ‘learning how many people died is not going to help anyone in the future’ He felt it was ‘too intense’. I was deeply troubled by his view and yet strangely understood his statement. Learning about the violent murder of anyone is shocking, (let alone the millions upon millions who perished during the war). Should we avoid the intensity of the facts to protect our minds?

Above Schechem/ Nablus © Jennie Milne 2018

It is difficult, even unbearable, to hear of another’s suffering, often it is so much easier to pass by on the other side with no responsibility for what we haven’t seen or heard. Why shoulder the burden?There are many justifiable reasons for this, and yet, I believe by seeking to do so we may miss not only the opportunity to help others, but rob ourselves of the blessing imparted by touching a life which has endured the fiercest of fires, yet retains an incredible ability to hope and to love. We need those powerful lessons so hard won by others, and show incredible ignorance if we dont understand their value.

Yes, we need to hear these stories, we must pass them on to our children; firstly because murder of the innocent demands justice. We lose something of our humanity when we bury our heads in the sand because ‘it isn’t happening to us’. ‘Never Again’ are the words so often invoked in relation to the Holocaust- words which should be learned and repeated and lived by until the end of time. Although there can be few, if any of the perpetrators from WW2 left to face earthly justice, we must seek justice for our own generation, on our own watch. We must not pass by on the other side pretending that we dont see. Justice is not only served by the capture and incarceration of the murderer. It must also be seen in protection of and advocacy for the innocent, solidarity against a wicked mindset which seeks and justifies the destruction of one soul - let alone a whole people.

“It is difficult, even unbearable, to hear of another’s suffering, often it is so much easier to pass by on the other side with no responsibility for what we haven’t seen or heard. ”

‘Do You Know My Name?’ was created in response to my unintentional discovery that the Jewish people still faced an age old evil, seeking their destruction; this time in their homeland, created to ensure their safety. I could not pass by. As I casually scrolled through my facebook newsfeed on the last day of June 2016, I was arrested by what I have come to term ‘the dangerous image’. Dangerous because the stark military image of a childs bloodsoaked bedroom was shocking on every level. Dangerous because of the evil let loose in that room which brutally and mercilessly took the life of an innocent 13-year-old Jewish girl. Dangerous because I could not unsee it, could not pass by on the other side, even if I chose to. Dangerous because it called me from the security of my home in Scotland to the very home in Israel where the child, Hallel Yaffa Ariel had been murdered. Knowledge demanded a response.

If we find ourselves drawn - as I was in this instance - our hearts moved, our sleep disturbed beacuse a story has invaded our peace, we must stop and listen. I knew nothing, that day in June, of the true extent of Palestinian terrorism in Israel. All I knew was that a beautiful child had been targetted because of her ethnicity, her parents left grief stricken, her little sisters, devastated and I expected, terrified. My daughter was a similar age and I did not dare imagine how I would have responded should she have suffered a similar fate. I made a connection based on a simple fact. Both Hallel Ariel and my daughter Faith were dancers. Sometimes that is all we need to stop and cross over with what little we may have to offer; it didnt matter that Hallel was an Israeli girl, that we had never met and lived cultures and continents apart.

Rina Ariel looking towards ‘the Vineyard of Hallel’ , planted in memory of her daughter © Jennie Milne 2018

On reflection I suppose you could add in the fact that I had discovered 2 years prior that my grandmother was Jewish, fleeing Poland during WW2, losing countless family in the Holocaust; that the fate of her people was fresh in my mind - or maybe that as a mother I could not imagine Rina Ariel’s grief and I wanted to let her know she was not alone. I wrote to Hallel’s parents, but it proved not to be enough. Hallel’s murder had caught my attention, yet I was to discover that ‘there are no shortage of terror victims in Israel’. Where was the outcry? The more I researched the more convinced I became that someone must comprehensively cover these stories. Eventually, in the absence of all but Guillio Meotti in his 2009 book ‘A New Shoah’ I decided I must do it. *

Ruth Gruber, the outstanding American journalist, photographer, writer, and humanitarian paved the way by stating;

“ You should have dreams, you should have visions. Never let any obstacle stop you. Everyone can look inside his or her soul and decide what he or she can do to make a world at peace, to end this fighting that goes on every day around the world. Look inside your soul and find your tools. I had two tools to fight evil. My camera and my pen”

— Ruth Gruber

To be continued

Finally meeting Rina. Kiryat Arba October 2018 © Jennie Milne

Meet Arnold Roth / May 6, 2020 by Jennie Milne

Yesterday I received a link to the leading story in the Times of Israel; an article describing the murder of 15-year-old Malki Roth in the Sbarro restaurant bombing, Jerusalem on August 9th 2001. A thoroughly comprehensive account, it details the unimaginable pain at her loss and her parent’s years-long fight for the extradition of her unrepentant murderer from Jordan, to the USA. I had to stop halfway through, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer horror and heartache her parents bear.

I was sent the report by Arnold Roth, Malki’s father through Whatsapp. I first met Arnold in Jerusalem in October 2018; he was one of nine individuals I photographed, each with a devastating story regarding the murder of a loved one due to terrorism. Although I wrote up each interview when I came home, gathering their images and stories into a book I entitled ‘Do You Know My Name?’, I have never written in this manner, describing our meeting and the continued impact their loss has made on me.

I felt a connection to Arnold before we even shared breakfast at the Pompidou Bistro, a quiet restaurant in a leafy Jerusalem street.- Arnold's choice of venue. I made my way there alone; the only interview I was able to walk to by myself, and as I did so the words of the prophet Isaiah turned over and over in my mind “Comfort, O Comfort my people, speak tenderly to Jerusalem’. ..meeting with the parent of a murdered child I had learned, carried an aching pain of its own.

We had discovered through the shared emails sent between Israel and Scotland in preparation for this appointment, that we could possibly be related. We shared my grandmother’s surname, Rothenberg; Arnold’s survivor parents had shortened his name to Roth, as a small boy in Melbourne to make life a little easier for him. Our Rothenberg’s, Rotenberg’s, Rottenberg’s (the spelling seems to change depending on the document) found their roots in the same part of Poland - Galicia, part of the former Austro Hungarian Empire. This fact alone, as one retrieving precious relatives in ones and two’s from the utter void which had been my mother’s experience of family, endeared me to him.

Arnold, I discovered, is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, courteous, warm, and very engaging. Between the bites of breakfast which he so kindly ordered, I learned the details of his family search; both his parents had survived the hell of the Holocaust whilst losing many many members of their families. Arnold’s father, born into a family of 17 children was one of only 3 survivors.

His mother, he told me, dreamt of Jerusalem ‘during the many black days of forced labor and unspeakable suffering as a victim of the German oppression that took the lives of her parents and all three of her brothers.’. I learned of the community of survivors he grew up amongst in Melbourne, where no- one had grandparent’s, and the insights into his parent’s past which came during the night whilst overhearing their nightmares.

He shared with me the ebullience of those same survivors, their determination to live life for their children and grandchildren, the lack of hatred expressed towards those under whom they had suffered the incomprehensible, unbearable destruction of all they had known and all those they loved. His words filled every sentence to bursting, reminding me of acclaimed author Daniel Mendelsohn- there was just so much to say, and Arnold has an engaging way of saying it, he is a natural storyteller. I leaned in and listened; glad my phone was recording so that I could return to listen again and again when Jerusalem was far behind me.

MALKI. So much love, so much joy and so much pain wrapped up in the mention of her name. Here was Arnold the father, proudly describing his beautiful, sensitive, caring, little girl, taken so cruelly on the cusp of her future. I learned of Malki’s great love for her younger sister Haya, severely disabled, and in need of continual care. Malki was the devoted, attentive older sister, the champion of those less able at school, determined to help, she built bridges between disabled children and ‘regular’ kids. Malki, who wondered why there were so few photo’s of her taken compared to her siblings, Malki, whose smile shines out from a photograph Arnold found on an undeveloped reel of film years after she was gone. Every word spoken about his daughter was immersed in longing and love. A father’s heart.

That Malki’s should be murdered in Jerusalem, the place of refuge in her grandmother’s desperate dreams, and because she was Jewish, makes an unbearable tale of loss somehow even more profoundly devastating. I wondered how a world that remembers the holocaust, reminding us to ‘never forget’ could fail to care about the children and grandchildren of survivors, who had so valiantly continued living. Six million Jews perished in the Shoah, each with their own name, their heartaches, their achievements, their joys. The numbers are so overwhelming it is impossible to grasp the magnitude of each loss; and yet, we can learn of one or two, or six or seven of those names and recover their humanity.

“Malki, our Rock of Gibraltar. Attentive, listening, always with a smile on her face, always engaged in fun. Fun that stems from empathy. Empathy from wall to wall. She was the most empathetic person I’ve ever met… I want you to know about her life. ”

— Arnold Roth

Malki Roth is numbered amongst thousands murdered in the ‘new Shoah’ - Jewish people murdered in Israel. For decades after WW2, those who wilfully murdered Jews were pursued for justice, and yet today, amongst us, Malki’s murderer, on the FBI most wanted list, a self-confessed and proud child killer is allowed to walk free. How can this be?

I decided to write this today because my heart hurts for a family, who have not only to bear the pain of a life lived without their daughter, who had to face the horror of learning she had been murdered, who have had to carry the knowledge of those details every waking moment, who battle alone- forgotten, for justice for their child and safety for others .. What can we do- what can I do?, I ask myself. I’m not sure I have the answer to that, but one thing I do know. I will stand with them, pray for justice and speak up for Malki. Life is a gift, each one unique. As the parent of another murdered Jewish child expressed so profoundly “Jewish tradition says that in each person is a world. I have lost a whole world.” - Sherri Mandell

https://www.timesofisrael.com/failed-by-israel-malki-roths-parents-hope-us-can-extradite-her-gloating-killer/

Read Arnold and Frimet’s blog, This Ongoing War @ http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/

The Malki Foundation, set up by Arnold and Frimet to help children with disabilities in Malki’s memory: https://kerenmalki.org/

“Jewish tradition says that in each person is a world. I have lost a whole world. ”

— Sherri Mandell