Daniel Lubetzky

Inspiring article…

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Here is a project that seems quite powerful:

…a mesmerizing dialogue between teh children of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the children of the surivors.  Both live out the Holocaust daily, unable to move forward.  Both finally face the past and are empowered to move on.

The trailer video contained here is worth watching.

I’ve always felt the weight on my shoulders from my Dad’s survival of the Dachau concentration camp.  I cannot escape those shadows. It had never crossed my mind that the children of the perpetrators must have similarly been marked and shaped by that experience.  Very poignant, and the trailer seems to confront the issue with depth and introspection.  It includes the story of a marriage between the son of a survivor and the descendant of a major Nazi criminal.

Nice idea for a social enterprise to build a guerrilla marketing campaign on:

OneVoice Glasgow is a purely-volunteer-driven chapter that has risen above the rest of the international support efforts to such degree that it is worthy of attention.  They receive zero funding from OneVoice, yet deliver so much in their community and beyond. If we can decode what has made them so extraordinary, international support for Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution will really take off.  Witness what a few committed volunteers have done:

Paul McCartney, the newest member to join OneVoice’s Honorary Board of Advisors, has recently written to President Barack Obama making him aware of OneVoice. While performing in Tel Aviv last year, Paul’s message was to bring people together via the power of music – a sentiment that is shared by two singers, Noa, an Israeli Jew and Mira Awad, an Israeli Arab, who are members of OneVoice Israel.  They performed a song together for the Eurovision song contest titled There Must Be Another Way.

 “This seems to me like a great idea, the symbolism of two people from both sides coming together to spread their message of peace via music is exciting and inspiring for me. I hope President Obama looks into this organisation and feels that OneVoice could be part of a peaceful solution.”

Link to the story

Noa and Mira Awad, friends and supporters of the OneVoice Movement, are representing Israel in the EuroVision contest.  Here is a glimpse of their inspiring song:

This chilling link from Yad Vashem is worth viewing.  It shows an actual photo album that details the process of dehumanization followed at the Auschwitz Extermination Camp.  Organizational precision has never been so effectively deployed towards such methodic dehumanization.

When Sir Paul McCartney performed a historic concert in Israel earlier this week, he wore the OneVoice symbol on his lapel – as did every member of his band.

How did this come about?

When we learned that McCartney was headed to the Holy Land, our team in OneVoice Europe, led by Sayyeda Salam, took the initiative and reached out to him.  They relied on a few of our Board members and supporters to connect, but it was primarily gumption and determination that got them to him.

Apparently Sir Paul was the most down-to-earth and kindest person, and he loved learning about OneVoice’s mission of empowering ordinary Palestinian and Israeli citizens who reject extremism and absolutism and demand a two-state solution.  OVE arranged for Paul to meet with OneVoice activists in the region.

Anti-Israel groups campaigned aggressively to dissuade McCartney from visiting the Holy Land, and threatened to boycott him if he didn’t boycott Israel. Never mind that McCartney was bringing a message of peace and humanity and that he visited Palestine and respectfully shared a non-political humanitarian message for both Israelis and Palestinians.  “Anti” groups and “cultural boycott” organizations often harm their own people because they make no distinction of the substance of the message or the group involved – rejecting and attacking even those who would work for a two-state-solution.

When McCartney met with our OneVoice Israel activists, he empathized with the challenges they faced exactly a year ago, when extremist groups attacked the OneVoice Summit, a parallel effort of mainstream Palestinian nationalists and separately mainstream Israeli nationalists to mobilize tens of thousands to propel their political representatives to end the occupation and all forms of violence through a comprehensive two state agreement.

McCartney told our activists:

“My father told me that regular people don’t like wars and don’t want conflict. I’m not a politician – I just want to bring a message of peace. In every place I perform I see that people want the same thing.”

Gil Shamy, our Israeli Executive Director, gave him the OneVoice pin.

McCartney was so touched with the vision of our youth leaders that he decided to wear the pin during the concert – and give a pin to everyone in the band who did the same.

At at a press conference later on, McCartney still carried with him the message he and OneVoice had agreed on:

“My little bit is to try to bring people together through music … It seems to me that most of the people are quite moderate and would like a solution. They would like peace like most people in the world … They want the governments to decide quite quickly on two states, on two nations rather than this conflict. They want it to work so they can both be separate and peaceful.” (full story)

Here is a story by UPI.  One on E Entertainment’s website.  One in the UK’s Independent.  And one in the Wall Street Journal.  Pictures show Paul McCartney wearing the OV symbol, including on Ynet.

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When the movie Life is Beautiful came out back in 1997, I felt a gnawing guilt at enjoying the movie so much, when the protagonist, as a concentration camp prisoner, found a way to laugh and make others laugh, amidst dehumanizing circumstances.  Could a sense of humor have a place in such a dark episode in humanity?

After overcoming the tears from the final scene, I called my Dad and asked him whether people actually laughed in a concentration camp. I was surprised to learn that indeed, the jokes his Dad told may have been the only thing that kept him and other inmates at their bunker in Dachau going – finding some crumbs of humanity to feed their frail hearts, to keep them going.  In fact, in a weird way, my Dad felt Life Is Beautiful was among the movies that best captured his experience as a kid protected by his father (my grandfather), who refused to give up his ability to smile even in – or particularly amidst – such adverse moments.

This weekend we saw Counterfeiters, and I wish I had my Dad around to ask him what he thought of the movie.

I wish I could ask him how he related to the poignant dilemmas presented in the movie: to sabotage the Nazis and risk your life AND the life of your inmates or loved ones, or to pursue your survival while adding fuel to an evil enterprise?  The movie does an excellent job at providing a nuanced story that avoids black and white heroism and forces us to grapple with questions about the human spirit, about the struggle of accepting the privileges of a rotten apple when others don’t have even that to eat.

If you rent this fast-paced, excellently acted and directed movie, make sure you listen to the interview with the writer, Adolf Burger, whose book "The Devil’s Workshop" this movie is based on.

Quiet for decades about his ordeal, Burger finally forced himself to look back and tell his story when the "Holocaust Denial" movement rose among neo-Nazi youth.  He even describes some of the techniques he used for forging British notes, which the British government never caught.

From a lunch meeting with my friend Frederic Brenner, the photographer, philosopher and social anthropologist, he shared this powerful quote:

Nous sommes tous de lopins et d une texture si informe et diverse, que chaque pièce, chaque moment fait son jeu. Et se trouve autant de différence de nous a nous mêmes que de nous a autruy.

Michel de Montaigne. Essais

Rough translation: we each have within ourselves so much diversity and texture, so many pieces with their own role to play, that the differences we house within ourselves are greater than those between us and other people.

Frederic, who nobody will accuse of being shy, quiet or boring, just completed a 10-day meditation during which he could not speak or write – no interaction or expression with others, for 10 full days, each day with 11 hours of meditation.  Imagine.

Another insight I enjoyed him sharing was about how the three great monotheistic religions have defined much of our world and ourselves into Dualities – Mind vs. Spirit, You vs. The Other – separating in strict binary constructs things that are often far harder to separate in real life.  In the world we live in, he feels we need to better recognize the ambivalence, paradox, and complexity within each of us, within our narratives, and our traditions.

This is not just arm-chair philosophy. It has very practical applications in the work of co-existence, from OneVoice to fostering Universal Values, and simple Kindness to each other.  If we are trained to recognize ourselves in the other, if we are trained to recognize the other within us, we are far more likely to disavow absolutist visions and work harder towards achieving shared human values.