Bidding Dad Goodbye

Only few days before his demise my father asked me to read before you the last passage from a short piece by one of his favourite authors titled "Shalom Aleichem's Will"

"My last request of those who come, after me and my plea of my children: to guard and protect well the mother, to honour her dotage, to sweeten her bitter life, to heal the crush of her broken heart, not to cry over me, but the opposite - to recall my name out of joy, and above all - to live in peace one and his brother, not to bear hatred to each other, to help your brother at lean time, to remember sometimes the family members, to pity the poor, and in days of favour, to pay my debts, should there be such after me. My children! Let there be honour among you of my Jewish name, for which I worked so much, and the Lord in Heaven may aid you, Amen." By Shalom Aleichem, 1923.

My father, Eli, looked death in the eye many times during his 83 years of life. Merely 13 year old he, along with all of Europe's Jewry was plunged into the darkest chapter of our history as a people, and that of humanity itself: the second world war, and the holocaust of the Jewish people at the hands of the Third Reich and its collaborators. My father was resourceful, and undoubtedly fortunate to survive the Nazi massacre machine, through Lodz Ghetto, concentration camps, among them Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Death Marches and physical and mental torture. He alone remained alive out of a clan of some 120 souls. Not one other survived. Not yet 20 year old he found himself in a Displaced Persons camp in Italy, where he met, befriended and fell in love with the woman who eventually married him, our mother Bluma. Against all odds they challenged death together by trying to sail to Israel against the will of the the British Mandate, in a rust bucket of a ship, in raging seas. After several months in a detention camp in Cyprus father was permitted to go to Israel legally, and mother followed suit soon after. Father enlisted to the Hagana on the very day his feet touched the soil of this land, and as soon as the IDF was established he became a regular soldier. Again he risked his life in several arenas during the War of Independence, and was proud of the scars that decorated his body from wounds he received in battle.
At the latter part of his life dad again found himself struggling to survive. With two open heart operations and other medical problems that time's relentless forward march makes harder and harder to overcome. Throughout this journey dad bore the struggle bravely. It was not in his nature to complain. He joked in the toughest situations and through pain. Even in the last few weeks of his life, when he already realised clearly what his condition was and what the future held for him, he found the mental strength to joke with us and with the medical team at the Meir Hospital, Kefar Saba.
A little like Shalom Aleichem, but I must stress that I saw the passage I have just read after I already knew basically what I wanted to say today, I will remember father not with sadness but with joy. I wish and hope that we as a family, even as a nation will celebrate his life, his triumph over hate and intolerance, the values he and his contemporaries passed on to us individually and collectively as a people. I will remember an honest, modest man, full of love and loved by all who knew him. A man who has passed seven gates of hell and emerged with a smile on his face. Today I say: Goodbye daddy, my hero.