The Blogs: “Earth Conceal not the blood shed on thee!” The Nir-Oz Lion

The Lion is sited to the rear of Kibbutz Nir Oz. It sits on a small hillock staring across the uncultivated fields toward Gaza. 14’ in height, the Lion of Judah, its mouth agape, teeth bared, eyes black with anger and pain, one mighty paw rests upon a dedicatory stanchion.

The Memorial interpretive lion is conceived and funded by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. The Nir Oz Community was key in support of the project.

The Lion is the artistic interpretation of a remarkable fifth-generation Jewish Jerusalem artist, Sam Philipe. JASHP and Philipe have collaborated on more than two dozen projects in Israel, telling Israel’s story when others would not or could not.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists and thousands of Gazan supporters poured into the Kibbutz. With genocidal bloodlust, they attacked the peaceful, largely undefended farming community. They murdered. They raped. Their targets were men, women, young, old, strong, weak, and even infants. Death to the Jews was the only thing that mattered.

The attack was organized, planned, and strategically thought out. Attackers kidnapped living victims. Ghoulishly, others kidnapped the bodies of the recently slaughtered. All returned to Gaza. Incredulous at their profound victory, they were showered with candy and cheers.

They never intended to hold land. They intended to hold hostages.

The Gazans knew the Jews well. Jews value life. Hamas values Palestinian lives as weapons against the Jews. Hostages are much more valuable.

One quarter of the life on Kibbutz Nir Oz was wiped out in minutes.

The dedicatory text on the stanchion is short. It is inadequate. It is full:

“The field is silent. Memory cries out.

Do not forget what happened on October 7, 2023.

‘Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee.”

The last line of the text is from the 1946 memorial built by the Jewish survivors of the notorious Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Jewish Memorial: Bergen-Belsen 50th anniversary of the Camp’s Liberation

The full text on the Belsen Monument is in Hebrew and English:

“Israel and the world shall remember thirty thousand Jews exterminated in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen at the hands of the murderous Nazis. Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee!”

British liberators arrived April 15, 1945, saving the barely living 20,000 starving, Jewish souls in the Camp. That was not what the Nazis had planned. The Nazis had prepared warehouses filled with poisoned white bread to be given to the survivors before they could be liberated.

The Nazi plan… No Jew Will Survive.

The British bulldozed the dead into mass graves as typhus broke out. The Camp was burned. Today, huge, well-kept mounds dot the Belsen Memorial grounds. Stone retaining walls hold the burial mounds in place. Blank words, incomprehensible words, 1,000 dead, 5,000 dead…are carved into the gray stones.

In one of those unknown mounds, my grandmother’s bones cry out, intermingled with others who have no one to say Kaddish for them.

In January 2024, Sam and I knew we wanted to build a Lion of Judah facing Gaza. The fighting was ramping up. We could hear the explosions and small arms nearby as we went from Kibbutz to Kibbutz delivering medical supplies. The where and the when, the pain and the reality were oozing everywhere. No site could be chosen.

Each life that was taken on October 7, or the lives that have been lost in the unwanted War since, is personal to all Jews. Not knowing them does not change the grief for every fallen.

Not all the Hostages have been returned. Living hostages returned with Holocaust survivor-like lifelong trauma. Hostage bodies have been returned, buried in Israel and other lands. Most of the returned hostages are Jewish, but not all. Some walked different paths to God, and some chose not to approach God at all.

The Lion of Nir Oz will have a different meaning to each person who sees it. For some, it will be pain, for others, it will represent revenge against evil. For others, its meaning may not be understood for many years, if ever.

Nir Oz wanted the Lion. We hurried the sculpture along, siting it in August. We believed, naively wanting to believe, the fighting would be over before another October 7 anniversary came upon us. A proper dedication would be arranged. A memorial stone and a terraced area with the names of each Nir Oz Kibbutz soul would be etched for eternity.

The hoped-for dream is still illusory. The dedication of the Nir Oz Lion must wait. No ceremony can be held as long as at least nine Kibbutzniks remain brutalized hostages in Gaza. Perhaps soon they will return. We will have a proper dedication of the Lion of Nir Oz then.

Golda Meir, a past Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in her 1969 oral autobiography,

“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Eem Ezrat Ha’Shem, – With God’s help…

For now, it is for us to remember.

Earth Conceal not the Blood Shed on Thee.

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=281399

Jerry Klinger is the President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation