A visiting scholar in an Israel at war

On 6^th October 2024 I landed in Israel. I flew on the eve of the first anniversary of 7^th October 2023. For months I had experienced the protests in America as I was previously a fellow at a university in New York and I was there on 7^th October 2023. A year later I began my fellowship at Yad Vashem on the one-year anniversary of the largest loss of Jewish life in one day since the Holocaust. I did not foresee how this trip would change my life in so many ways. It was during my time in a war zone that I made the discovery of my career so far – the Kindertransport lists.

I’d visited Israel before and I’d been to Yad Vashem before but on 7^th October 2024 I began my fellowship on a day of national mourning. I was struck by how a place which remembers the past and the total loss of life generations ago was now a place which was so deeply connected to present day loss. I thought about all the Holocaust survivors who were murdered and displaced on that day. I had seen Shlomo Mansour’s hostage poster on the road leading to Yad Vashem. It would accompany me every day to work.

As I left Yad Vashem later that day, I couldn’t help but feel this embrace of yellow. There was yellow everywhere. Yellow ribbons on car sidemirrors, yellow ribbons on lampposts, and yellow ribbons on bikes. As I made my way back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv where I was living, my friend, Bobby Lax messaged asking me if I’d like to meet him for the anniversary commemorations. One day into my trip and I was standing first outside the Begin Gate of the Kirya Base and then in Hostages Square. I learnt quickly that Israeli society was complex and divided about how to remember, commemorate, protest, and mourn 7^th October and the ongoing war. Bobby is the son of a Kindertransport refugee. That night he took me on a tour of Tel Aviv’s memorials to 7^th October. From then on, I started to meticulously document the memorials and my time in Israel.

Bobby mentioned to me that in Israel you are just two links away from knowing someone who lost someone as the country is so small. He knew people. Even I knew people. Former hostage, Ditza Heiman was the wife of a Kindertransport refugee. A member of her extended family had been in touch with me. I experienced a whirlwind welcome and felt totally overcome with emotions. I had been worried to fly because of the rockets. Now I was standing in tears, thinking about all the lives lost in Israel and beyond. I grieved with and for my friends.

At Yad Vashem I came across an exhibition near to my office about the Jewish community of Rhodes. It was partly because of an experience in Rhodes that I became a Holocaust scholar. In 2006, when in Rhodes on a family holiday, I made friends with an Israeli girl called Daniella or Danielle. She kept asking me if Israel was on the TV back home. I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. Later I learned that there was an armed conflict in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel. I’ve never forgotten her, and during those first few days in Israel the memory of her came back to me. I now knew what she was trying to tell me. How different our childhoods were! A little more than a week after my arrival, I was standing in a stairwell as Hezbollah sent a rocket towards Tel Aviv. I understood what it felt like to run for cover. I’d grown up with stories from my grandma who had been bombed out of her home three times during the Second World War. My nan also spoke about how she had gone to the bomb shelter and then got up to go to work the following morning. As my trip continued, I would be doing just that because I’d be up in the early hours of the morning taking shelter from a missile from Yemen and then getting on a train to go to work.

Two weeks into my fellowship I found the Kindertransport lists. It would be the first time that former Kindertransport refugees and their families would see their lists in over 86 years. I sent Bobby his father’s lists while I was in Jerusalem in my office and he was in a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv. We were just miles away from one another and I would travel back to Tel Aviv later that night. I was sending Bobby a list which symbolized flight and exile, and now here Bobby was dislocated from his everyday life. This was something which, to begin with, was difficult to comprehend. I would finish an incredible research day at Yad Vashem or another archive feeling elated that I could share my findings with Holocaust survivors and their families. Then the next minute the sirens outside and on my phone would sound, and I would be seeking shelter. Living in Israel you are fully aware of the diversity within the country and the suffering within and outside of it. As a researcher I wanted to understand what Holocaust survivors and their families were experiencing now.

Later in my trip I met a second-generation Kind to pass on his mother’s Kindertransport list. The second-generation Kind had been a hostage during the Yom Kippur War. They spoke about their experiences in the 1970s, their mother’s experiences in the 1930s and 1940s, and their empathy with the hostages today. I started to piece together how the Kindertransport was directly connected to the 7^th October.

A few things I discovered include:

1. The wife of a Kind was a hostage.
2. A member of a Kindertransport family was murdered.
3. The Kindertransport memorial in Berlin was vandalized.
4. Calls for Jewish deaths were heard in Liverpool St Station which is the physical marker of the Kinder’s arrival and welcome in Britain.
5. Kinder were evacuated from Kibbutzim.
6. People were evacuated to Kibbutz Lavi which was known as the English Kibbutz. Several Kinder once called it home and several second-generation members still live there. A soldier from the Kibbutz was killed.
7. The Kindertransport anniversary ceremony in Israel was rescheduled.

I became aware of how the Kindertransport has been placed within the context of present-day antisemitism. For example, online I’ve seen images of the Kindertransport memorial in London being used to make the point that the Kinder should not have been rescued because they and their descendants are responsible for the killings of Palestinians today. There has also been criticism that there has not been a Kindertransport for Palestinian children. Yet many seem to be unaware that the Kindertransport to Britain did not take place during a war. The comparison is not appropriate because during the Second World War few children were able to escape and were murdered in the Holocaust.

Months into my trip I’d also met my friend, Dr Boaz Cohen several times. Boaz is a Holocaust scholar. He invited me to a unique experience where I got to spend time with his reserve unit at Yad Vashem. I met people in his unit. They were from all different walks of life. At the top of Mount Herzel where Yad Vashem is located there is a cemetery and memorials to fallen soldiers. Throughout my trip there had been funerals and memorial ceremonies at the military cemetery. This was only meters away from where I was researching. It was very sobering to finish work thinking about whether or not someone was laid to rest there that day.

I spent a lot of my free time in Jaffa/ Yafo. It’s a place I dream of living in. Jaffa has its conflicts like all areas do, but it is a place where cultures interact to create something so delicious, so incredibly lifegiving. I sat in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian restaurants writing up my research. I spoke in-depth with an Arab-Israeli about Palestinian textiles as they’d stopped me in the street to ask me about a top that I was wearing which was a Spanish design. As I shopped in Maskit, an Israeli fashion house, I’d see their mannequin made out of yellow ribbons in the window. Even during lighter moments, the hostages were never far from mind. I loved listening to the Arabic music in the cafes. My grandad was stationed in Egypt with the British Army after the Second World War. I have his photo album from the time. It documents in little black and white photographs life on the Nile. It’s one of my most treasured possessions. I have Jewish friends who sing in Arabic because their families were originally from places like Yemen and Iraq. And over Hannukah and Christmas there were beautiful decorations all around Jaffa. I left with a piece of Jaffa. I met another lifelong friend, Marit Meisler, the daughter of Kindertransport refugee, Frank Meisler who created the famous Kindertransport memorials. The Meislers lived in Jaffa and I got to visit their family home. The Meisler gallery is also there and I bought a hamsa necklace. A necklace designed by a Holocaust survivor, in an area which is so dear to me, with a friend who is such a creative soul. I also visited Masada with my housemates Shayna and Mina. I’d written a university essay on Masada but I hadn’t visited. It’s a place which is synonymous with Jewish resistance. As we were hiking up the mountain a group of Muslim ladies waved to us from the cable car. They were also there to take in the fantastic views.

I’d witnessed so many hostages’ families take to the stage in Hostages Square to give such heartfelt talks about their loved ones. They were not all Jewish. On Bipin Joshi’s birthday the Ambassador of Nepal addressed us. He also shared a video from Bipin’s family which was projected into the Square. We celebrated him but we also grieved that he was not with his family. Israelis in the crowd screamed for all the hostages to be returned over and over again.

I’ll never forget when the Azrieli Towers glowed with the message “we are all waiting for you”. I was in Israel when the hostages started to be released in January 2025. On that day I wrote: ‘I feel like the train is speeding back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem… I’ll be in Hostages Square shortly. Can the girls (Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher) see the sun? We pass the Mount of Olive Cemetery on the way to and from Jerusalem. It has been a Jewish burial location since antiquity. Thousands of people are buried here. We hope the hostages are alive. We pray for their safe return as we have for the past 471 days’.

Weeks later I was filmed by Bobby and his friend, David at Yad Vashem about my discovery of the Kindertransport lists. I left Israel the day after my birthday at the end of January. I left with the most amazing historical finding and a sense of what it was like to live and work in a country which was at war. I was there when the hostages were freed. But I left without all of them being back in their homelands. Around Shabbat Bobby messages me still from Tel Aviv from where we stood together on Saturday evenings. He and my friend, Jesse Sirkin continue to update me with photographs of new memorials. I’m still informed about how the memorials reflect the varying responses to the war. Most of all though I’m reminded of how the memorials breathe the names of the hostages back into the streets. They are not forgotten. Their absence is felt. The memorials are dedicated to keeping their stories alive.