Perth: Two men charged over racist graffiti attack
A member of a neo-Nazi group has been charged with racial vilification and criminal damage following a weekend graffiti attack on a Perth synagogue and other buildings, police said Tuesday.
Last night I watched the film "Grey Zone". I will withhold any comments on the film, but it got me thinking about an article written by Daniel Gordis earlier this year. There are few people that write as emotively as Daniel Gordis does. I cannot recommend his articles highly enough. This article was written just after Israel killed Yassin and Rantisi.
It's long, so print it out and save it to read this Shabbos or weekend. Here is the snippet that I was reminded of.
Last Sunday night, Elisheva and I went to a lecture by Aharon Applefeld, one of Israeli's preeminent novelists. Tali and Avi were out, so we left Micha by himself. He was lying on the living room coach, reading some enormous 700+ page book that he was determined to finish, and was fairly oblivious to our imminent departure. We told him that we had our cell phones if he needed us, and he should go to bed by 8:30. He barely looked up, but muttered, "OK." We knew he wouldn't go to bed on time, but we also couldn't exactly complain that a fifth grader wanted to stay up late because he was busy reading a novel.Applefeld told his story. Of an idyllic eight years in a completely assimilated, wealthy, Jewish European home. Of his mother being shot by the Germans. Of him and his father being taken to a slave labor camp. And of his decision to flee the camp, because he knew he wouldn't survive it. And so, at the age of eight and a half, he found himself alone, in the forests of Europe, masquerading as a Christian, struggling to survive. He worked in the home of a prostitute, buying her groceries and cleaning her house, until one of her drunken clients called him a Jew. He fled. He worked for horse thieves, who would have him drop into the stables from the skylight, land in whatever he landed in and then open the door to the stable so they could steal the horses. He told of the nights he slept alone on the forest floor, of the days when
he ate the moss off of trees. At the age of ten.And I thought about Micha, exactly that age now. I wondered. If he were alone in the forest tomorrow, would he know to do that? Would he have the presence of mind to work for a prostitute, for horse thieves? Would he figure out that he could eat moss off of trees if he was starving? I doubted it. Which means we can't let that happen to him.
© "Daniel Gordis (www.danielgordis.org) is Director of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows, and the author, most recently, of If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State (Crown)."
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