Our daughter Rachie called me one night a while ago and asked what I remembered about Israel and the various conflicts that confronted it in the early 1990’s. I love how our children and I can speak freely and often about important issues and she just simply needed some information – since she was a toddler through five years of age during the time she was asking about and just did not remember…. (Silly Rachie!) I then shared various stories of wonderful interactions between Palestinians and Israeli Arabs and Israelis; Jews, Christians and Arabs and so on.
One particularly funny memory was when Rachie and Talie were approaching their fifth birthday and we were in Israel along with Yoella, my eldest daughter at the age of nine. The four of us were walking through the shuk and I realized all of a sudden that Rachie and Talie were not with us but had gone ahead and that we were in the Arab shuk which had reopened recently. I was not worried because in the earliest part of the 90s people did not feel a need to do so generally. Anyway, we kept walking and about ten stalls in Rachie and Talie were playing with two little boys under the watchful eye of their grandfather, who explained to me that he thought we should marry them off to each other. We all had a good laugh. Now this seems implausible today for so many reasons beginning with what type of horrible mother would not keep a careful eye on her young daughters in the Arab shuk, much less go there to begin with…. But such were the times of the early 90s in Israel.
In the meantime, my husband Ken brought the following article from The Forward to my attention within hours of this conversation. It is a revisiting twenty years later of seven children who were the stars of the series “The Children of Jerusalem” produced by the Canadian National Board of Film, about their lives now that two decades have passed. You can see this article here:
http://forward.com/culture/338071/what-ever-became-of-the-children-of-jerusalem/
After reading this article, go to this site to see the actual documentary segments about their lives. I have done so and the three and a half hours you will spend meeting these children will be so worthwhile; I promise.
http://search.tb.ask.com/search/GGmain.jhtml?st=kwd&ptb=23BA20D9-4BD0-455E-80AE-93D2DB702005&n=780c711e&ind=2014081310&p2=^UX^xdm787^YYA^us&searchfor=Beverly+Shaffer%27s+Children+of+Jerusalem
You will meet Ibrahim, Yehuda, Tamar, Gesho, Asya, Yakoub, and Neveen. Through their eyes and walking with them through their streets and garnering insights into their days, we are reminded of the reality of life in the early nineties. Yes, there were concerns but it was a time when parents sent children on buses with their pelephones and they were to call when they arrived at their grandparents. Children (including mine) would wander the Ben Yehuda area all hours of the night on Motzei Shabbat or Thursday nights while their parents (including me) would sit and chat at Atara (remember that?). It was a different time and it was a time when so many people in all of these different groups thought that if we retained our relationships and told people about our friendships and our respect and regard for each other, maybe, just maybe, the threatening storm of divisiveness and fear would not get worse but would be obliterated.
As we know all too well now, this is exactly what did not happen. There are too many conflicts, too much anger and hurt and too many loose cannons amongst our people and all groups in Israel as well as elsewhere that cause this threat to indeed be so much more a matter of concern today, twenty years later. How sad!
This is particularly evident in the sad story of Neveen. To amplify her pain, I just read another chilling article about the Shuafat Refugee Camp in The Jerusalem Report. Too much has indeed gone wrong. While Yaakoub talks about his hopes that when he gets older he will ride his bicycle in the streets and just in circles in his courtyard, we see that things did not improve. Then there are Yehuda and Tamar, both of whom have their own story about their religious journeys that took them away from so much of their childhoods as observant Jews.
There is too much to be sad about and mourn here. Yet, I continue to think of the large numbers of people in all of these groups who are still working together to continue to build important bridges. The growth of the Yad b’Yad schools make me hopeful; the continuing successes of the Galilee Palestinian-Israeli Circus, the sports leagues and so much else I have written about here all allow me to hold onto the hope today that so many in the early 90s had but have sadly lost. There is too much at stake to not work together and to continue to hope that the threat of all that can destroy does not do so.
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