Israel: Land of Return

Arriving Home

It was Yom Kippur,and a young boy named Zev watched the sky at Auschwitz, believing that it might be that Day, that Messiah would come. Only 9 years old he watched fervently for hope, but no hope came. An older Man, a Rabbi, had been trying to keep the child's spirits up in the most dismal of places. In the weeks preceding, he told the young boy that one day his Messiah would come on a 'flying carpet' and that he would take the Jews to live in "Eretz Y'israel", or "the land of Israel "---at that time a land that was still only a distant dream. He told of the Land of Milk and Honey, the Land of the Torah, where the grapes of Eschol grew, where Moses walked, and Abraham, and where the Jews were promised a wonderful home forever. God would send Messiah soon, very soon, because he saw the suffering of the Jews, and he would take them all to a place where they could rest and heal, where there was abundance for everyone. On Yom Kippur the boy watched and watched the Eastern Sky, but no Messiah came, no flying carpet.

The boy was among those who was liberated from the camps and many years later, he told this story. ¹. He was asked if he still believed; he answered with uncertainty, focusing only on the Day when Messiah did not come to the Hellish site of Auschwitz. In a way, though, Messiah did keep His Promise of Return: by 1945 the Jews were liberated from the camps and by 1948 there was a new independent nation returned to the children of Jacob, the Land of Israel. Under the Jews' hands, the land began to grow and prosper according to prophecy: the desert bloomed. Despite two thousand years of dispersion, the Jews were still a people, still a nation, and still chosen. Their return to Israel was of great Biblical importance: many Jews and Christians alike felt then and now that it heralded in at least the doorstep of the final stage in God's Word. The little boy whose faith was tried beyond endurance, now lives in Israel---he was one of the youngest survivors of the schindlerjuden. He lives today in the land where God promised after two milennium that girls and boys would play again in the streets, and where men would live to be very old. (Lamentations).

When Israel returned to the Land in 1948, it was a wondrous but very difficult return. While the victorious powers allowed access to their newfound homeland, they did not make it easy to return. Thousands fled in aliyah* to Israel, often led by the Haganah, an organization of bold and determined young leaders, often women who helped the victims of the Shoah escape Europe and gain passage to Israel. Often, though, upon return, they were met with British warships, which fired on those attempting to land. Those who did make it to the land, had to stay in detention/holding camps, often of makeshift tents or edifices, until they were 'processed ' into their new home. Some had to turn away from their hope, for a time, and some were assimilated into Kibbutzim, a form of communal living where farming and herding are often the major vocation, but where members of thekibbutz are free to come and go. The Return to Israel still continues for Jews around the world, and the land once held partly as myth, partly as promise has become a reality, for a nation disenfranchised of its homeland for 2000 years.