Aykha: From My to All the Dead

Meaningful, perhaps too meaningful: a friend of mine landed today at Ben Gurion Airport on Yom HaShoah, the day of the Hurban, and took a photograph there – arrival and remembrance signs crossing in a single moment. It should be simple, almost self-evident: eighty, eighty-one years have passed since the destruction of European Jewry. The rituals are known, the sirens, the silences, the recitations. And yet, this year, nothing feels self-evident.

Memory does not disappear. That much we know. It does not fade like a photograph left in the sun. But it does change direction. It shifts, it takes on other meanings, other tones, sometimes even other burdens. What was once held as sacred clarity may become a question. What was once unquestionable may begin to tremble.

And something else is striking this year. One listens, one attends, one observes the commemorations – and one notices what is absent. Yiddish, the language in which so many of the murdered lived, loved, argued, prayed, despaired, laughed – this language is hardly heard. It is as if it has been gently set aside, or perhaps silently bypassed. And yet Yiddish lives. It survives, it re-emerges, it re-deploys itself in poems, in whispers, in fragments, in unexpected places. It is not only a relic of destruction; it is a living bearer of memory; it paves the future. To remember the Hurban without hearing, even faintly, the echo of Yiddish is to risk flattening the texture of what was lost – and what, against all expectation, still persists.

For many years, my remembrance had a clear center. It had names, even when the names were lost. It had a number – not an abstract number, but one that I carry in my own flesh: nearly four hundred members of my family deported, gassed, murdered, erased in different ways, across different places. A world extinguished not in metaphor but in fact. I belong to what one might call the last link of that chain. I am, in a very concrete sense, alone in my generation.

My parents knew this. They did not speak of it in grand declarations, but they acted upon it with a certain quiet determination. They insisted that I learn German, that I learn Ukrainian -not as foreign languages, but as necessary instruments. They believed, perhaps with a hope that exceeded their own lifetime, that I would belong to a generation tasked with reconciliation, with rebuilding understanding where everything had been broken. They were not naïve. They knew that such a task could not be completed in one generation. Perhaps not even in two or three. But they placed me within that trajectory. I saw the first Germans coming to visit Israel… then thousands of Ukrainians.

In that sense, memory was never only backward-looking. It was always already oriented toward the future, toward a work not yet accomplished.

There is also another layer, one that structures my days more quietly but no less firmly. It is the recitation of the Kaddish. Not occasionally, not ceremonially, not even a task, but a mitzvah. The Kaddish is not, strictly speaking, a prayer for the dead. It is a magnification of the Divine Name: Yitgadal ve-yitkadash shmeh rabbah. And yet, in its recitation, the dead are carried. Not enclosed, not resolved, but carried into a space where language refuses to collapse into despair.

And yet, even here, something must be said clearly. I have never, in my life, recited for myself alone, nor for “my own – mine” in a narrow sense. The Kaddish I say is not mine. It is said for them – always for them – because they belong to Klal Israel, to the whole congregation, not confined to one family, not limited to one generation, but פון דור צו דור \ fun doyr tsu doyr, from generation to generation. The dead I carry are not only “my dead.” They are entrusted, as it were, to the living voice that remains. And that voice cannot close itself.

For years, I could situate myself within this framework: my dead, their memory, the obligation to remember, the obligation to recite. It was not really a burden, but a sort of confidence in words that call to the Divine Presence.

But this year something has shifted, or perhaps something has broken open.

I find myself unable to remain within the circle of “my/our dead” alone. The very logic of remembrance seems to compel an extension. If memory is true, it cannot be selective in a way that would contradict its own source.

And so, alongside the memory of my family, of the victims of the Shoah (among them people considered as “not clear”, “without nationality” and the Romas and other individuals betrayed or…

There emerge other faces, other names, often unnamed: the victims in Gaza, in Lebanon, in the West Bank. Not as an abstract political or national category, not as a rhetorical gesture, but as human beings – mentshn\מענטשן, in the most elementary and demanding sense of the word.

This is not a comfortable movement. It does not come with clarity or resolution. On the contrary, it introduces a fracture into remembrance itself.

Because it is one thing to remember those who were murdered by others. It is another thing entirely to recognize that, in the present, we may be implicated – directly or indirectly –  in the deaths of others. That the line between victim and agent, between memory and action, is no longer as clear as we would wish.

And at that point, a word arises, almost against one’s will: איכה—aykha.

This word does not stand alone. It echoes another call, earlier, more primordial: אַיֶּכָּה / ayeka – “Where are you?” – the question addressed by God to Adam and Eve after the fall. Not a question of location, but of position, of responsibility, of presence. Where are you, human being, in what has happened? Where do you stand?

Between ayeka and aykha, something unfolds. From the divine question addressed to the human – “Where are you?” – to the human cry addressed to God – “How has it come to this?” The two are inseparable. To ask aykha without hearing ayeka would be to lament without examining oneself. To hear ayeka without daring to utter aykha would be to accept without protest.

And so the question remains, suspended between heaven and earth, times and delays.

How is it that we, who have carried mourning across decades, across generations, who have built our identity in part upon the refusal to forget, find ourselves in a situation where thousands of others – our neighbors, those who are, in a very real sense, our brothers and sisters in humanity – Mitmenschen – , even our fellow Semites – are dying in proximity to us, sometimes by our hand, sometimes in contexts in which we are unavoidably involved?

There is a temptation, of course, to separate things neatly. To say: this belongs to memory, that belongs to politics. This is about the past, that is about the present. But such separations, however necessary they may be at certain levels, do not hold at the level of conscience.

If I recite the Kaddish for my dead, can I exclude from that horizon those who die today? If I speak of human dignity in the face of annihilation, can I restrict that dignity to one group alone? These are not rhetorical questions. They are questions that unsettle the very act of remembrance.

And yet, I do not believe that the answer lies in dissolving all distinctions, in flattening history, or in erasing the specificity of the Shoah. That would be another form of betrayal. The destruction of European Jewry remains singular in its scope, its intent, its execution. It cannot and should not be relativized.

But singularity does not imply isolation. On the contrary, if it teaches anything, it is precisely the weight of human life, the abyss that opens when that life is denied. And if that lesson is real, it cannot remain confined.

At a certain point, memory becomes responsibility – not in the sense of abstract moralism, but as an orientation of being.

I recall, in this context, that for about fifteen years, when I celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Hebrew, I was, in effect, being observed. Not occasionally, but regularly. Someone from the Greek clergy would be present, listening attentively, watching how I served, how I pronounced, how I moved, how I aligned – or failed to align – with what was expected: was I truly “orthodox”? Was I in line with the Eastern Orthodox faith?

It was a form of quiet control, a liturgical inspection. It stopped out of the sudden, not completely though…

The faithful rarely noticed this. The question was not only theological. It was also cultural, even political: was I “orthodox”? Was I sufficiently aligned? Was I perhaps too Jewish, too Hebrew, too Israeli? Or not enough in the expected way?

On one occasion, Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem said to me: “You are definitely not a nationalist – not Jewish in that sense, not Hebrew, not Israeli. You are not a phyletist. You are open to all.”

It was not a simple compliment. It carried within it both a recognition and a distance.

At the time, I simply accepted it. Ditto.

But today, I hear it differently. To be “open to all” is not an abstract virtue. It is a position that exposes one to tension, to scrutiny, to misunderstanding. It means standing in a place where one is never entirely at home, never fully enclosed within a single identity.

It also means that one cannot retreat entirely into the safety of one’s own memory, one’s own suffering.

From my dead – to all the dead – to those dying now.

This movement is not linear, nor is it stable. It is more like a trembling axis around which one tries to remain standing.

And yet – even within this fracture – something else appears, almost discreetly. In Israel, tonight as on other nights, there are places where Jewish and Arab citizens gather together, pray together, speak together, or simply stand in shared silence. One thinks, for example, of “Hand in Hand – יד ביד\يداً بيد“: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, where children, families, teachers – of different languages, backgrounds, and histories – learn to inhabit the same space.

These moments do not resolve the conflict. They do not erase the dead. They do not answer aykha. But they mark, perhaps, a fragile refusal – to let memory become separation alone, to let grief turn exclusively inward.

And perhaps this, too, belongs to remembrance: not only to mourn, not only to question, but to remain capable – however precariously – of standing together.

And perhaps this is where the Kaddish returns, not as a resolution, but as a form that allows one to stand within this tension without collapsing. The words do not mention death. They do not explain suffering. They do not justify history. They magnify the Divine Name in a world where that Name seems, at times, almost absent.

Yitgadal ve-yitkadash shmeh rabbah…

One recites, and in reciting, one carries – not only the past, but the present, and perhaps even the unbearable proximity between them.

There is no conclusion to this. No synthesis that would make everything coherent again.

Only the persistence of memory, and the refusal to let that memory become an enclosure.

And the question that remains – addressed to God, and perhaps returned to us:

Aykha\איכה