The Death of a Jewish Warrior

Yasha died last Saturday night. I was not there when he died. No-one was there because he had caught Covid last week and had been taken to the Covid ward where he was allowed only two visitors for an hour each day and there were no exceptions to this rule, even for the dying.

Yasha was 95 years old. I wrote about him in a piece I posted a couple of weeks ago: The Jewish warrior I called him. Yasha married my sister Cesia not long after they both had arrived in Australia, two young Holocaust survivors, he handsome as heck and Cesia vivacious and lively and beautiful despite what she had been through.

I described how when I was a child, perhaps eight years old, Yasha, then a young man ready to fight antisemites at the drop of a hat, powerfully built with forearms like tree trunks in my minds’ eye, took me to the banks of the Yarra River near Melbourne’s CBD where each Sunday afternoon, the retailers of conspiracy theories of every kind told their stories, often to jeering crowds. Yasha went there not to listen but to beat up Nazis and in that, he was mostly successful.

Perhaps a week before he died on Saturday, I had come to see him and I had read him the piece I had written about him―at the centre of it was my admiration and love for him but also a sort of fear of violence I always felt when we were heading to the Yarra Banks―and he cried.

He took hold of my arms and dragged me to him and his strength surprised me and he said thank you in a whisper and he kissed my cheeks and his embrace was firm even if his breath was weak and I felt like he was determined to keep on living for as long as possible and that he was still in the thrall of life, as if despite all the inhumanity he had witnessed and been subjected to, life was incomparably better than the alternative. He was not ready to die.

His funeral is today but Cesia who is in an old people’s home and who at 94 is physically in comparatively good shape but who has progressively slipped into a world that is inaccessible, won’t be at the funeral. She too has Covid. 

I wish I could access her world even if only for a few minutes so that I could tell her that Yasha was a hero of the Jews and that so was she and that she had lived a life that encompassed so much of what life could bring and what life was for people like her. What I would not tell her—I think she would know it somehow in her bones anyway—was that in our family, she was the only one still   alive to bear witness to what had happened to the Jews, and she was no longer able to tell her story in any coherent way.

For our family, finally, the Holocaust had slipped into history. For most of my life, it had been a living presence. I was raised by survivors and survivors married into my family and I married someone whose mother had survived Auschwitz.

Now, with Yasha dead and Cesia living somewhere beyond my understanding, the Holocaust, even for me, will slip into history and history—its meaning and its lessons―is always increasingly contested.  Yasha’s dying feels like a painful and a terrible confirmation of the end of something.

For several decades after 1945, the Jews could imagine that given all that had happened to them, perhaps antisemitism was at an end. And for Jews like me, raised in Australia or North America or Britain—and even in most of Europe—it did feel like antisemitism had been consigned to history, to the increasingly distant past. Antisemitism was shameful and unacceptable in the world in which I grew up, in places like Australia and North America and even in much of Europe where the attempted genocide of the Jews had taken place.

I think diaspora Jews like me thought the time of widespread antisemitism and overt Jew hatred would not, could not, ever return. I grew up feeling that Jews in places like Australia were admired. Jews had rebuilt their lives after the horrors they had been through.

They threw themselves into Australian life—in business, in the law, in medicine, in the arts. They loved Australia and Australians and Australia and Australians loved them back. That’s what I felt growing up and I think it was true up to a point and certainly politicians of the right and the left regularly expressed admiration and even love—Bob Hawke for instance loved them—for Australia’s Jews.

That time of admiration and affection for the Jews that we felt would last forever, with antisemitism vanquished except in the metaphorical caves where the neo-Nazis lived, is over. It was ending before the October 7 Hamas massacres and mass kidnappings and the subsequent war against Hamas in Gaza with the tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

October 7 marked the end of the post Holocaust era in which I grew up and in which I had lived most of my life.  And Yasha’s death for me was a vivid reminder that the Holocaust was slipping into history and that antisemitism had not been defeated with the defeat of the Nazis with their Jew hatred which had led them to murder millions of Jews.

Anthony Julius is a professor in the law faculty at University College in London and is the author of Trials of the Diaspora: A history of Anti-Semitism in England. It is a terrific book. Julius recently took part in a symposium organised by the Jewish Review of books. The participants, mostly well-known academics and writers, were asked what had changed for them as Jews post October 7. Julius concluded his piece by writing that October 7 had made it clear to him that he had been wrong about the safety of diaspora Jews. He had come to understand that `the post-war period, in which Jews enjoyed relative security was utterly anomalous.’  This view is widely held in the diaspora. It is widely held in Australia.

I think it is incontrovertible that Jews feel less safe― and are less safe ―than they were before October 7. They feel less admired, and less loved. They feel like they belong to a vulnerable minority. They feel like the notion of powerful Jews manipulating politicians and journalists—a notion that has obsessed the ABC’s John Lyons for a long time—is laughable and disturbing. Such notions about Jews have a long and troubling history.

There is less and less empathy for Jews, especially on the left and because I have been a journalist for most of my life, it is most strikingly true of many journalists. In much of the reporting there was little sustained empathy for the Jews in the reporting of the Hamas massacres on October 7.  And apart from a sort of grudgingly dutiful reporting, there has been little empathy for hundreds of hostages, including old people and children― taken into Gaza by the Hamas invaders of southern Israel.

And at times there has been a shocking hardness on display. A few days after the October 7 massacres, Tom Joyner the ABC's correspondent, labelled reports about babies being beheaded by Hamas as `bullshit,’   a disgraceful comment  from a journalist which for some people, called into question, cast doubt on, everything that the Hamas terrorists had perpetrated―the murder of children in front of their parents, of parents in front of their children, of women raped and burnt after they were murdered among other unspeakable horrors.

I don’t think Yasha, the warrior for the Jews, ever bought the notion that antisemitism had been beaten when the Nazis were defeated, and the world became aware of what had been done to the Jews. He loved life and he loved Australia, and he loved Australians, but he never believed the Jews would ever live in a world in which Jew hatred had been extinguished. What Jews could do, what he did, was go to the banks of the Yarra every Sunday afternoon and beat up the Nazis. And metaphorically at least, even when he was old and his sturdy arms had lost their power, continue to beat up Nazis. His whole long life.