Reflections on solidarity in the wake of loss and destruction
When Jesse approached me about speaking on the theme of repair during this evening’s service, I thought of the dilemma: wondering how should we, how should I, work on repair in a circumstance that seems at times to be beyond repair’s powers. With this in mind, I’d like to talk about the importance of small acts of repair in the face of savagery and viciousness, a kind of political grammar of repair in our dark times. Jesse’s query led me to remember a group of Polish Catholics and their actions in Communist Poland, soon after an antisemitic campaign in Poland in 1968. They were young members of the Club of Catholic Intellectuals, a liberal Catholic club operating with the begrudging tolerance of both the ruling Communist Party and the Church Hierarchy.
These young Catholics, in the late 1970s, worked week after week to restore a small section of Warsaw’s main Jewish cemetery, reserved for community notables. When I first visited it in 1973, the cemetery looked like a war zone. There were signs of wildfires. Gravestones were overturned. Precious marble was stolen. Slowly but surely the entire cemetery was becoming a forest. It was a free zone for hooligans in a police state, where such chaos was impossible in any other space. In 1978, I visited again. A small special section was lovingly being restored by the young Catholics. Theirs was a small act of resistance to the totalitarianism of the left and right, to popular antisemitism, and to the complicity of the Polish Church in antisemitism. Seeing the restored section of the cemetery was moving. The young Catholics, of course, did not put an end to Polish anti-Semitism, today very much present in the nationalist memory work, a kind of holocaust denial, of the new far right President. I could explain more fully, but not this evening.
I think it is important to note that the repair of the cemetery was part of a broader movement of independent decency that ultimately led to the overthrow of the Communist system and to an enlivened tradition of respect for the Jewish presence in Poland. It included a new form of Polish historiography of Polish Catholic-Polish Jewish relations, provocatively spearheaded by Jan Gross’s Neighbors, and a richly respectful and beautiful, award winning, very popular museum of Polish Jews, Polin, in the very center of Warsaw, close to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and the old cemetery. The actions of those young Poles remind me of some new actions appearing in Israeli protests against Netanyahu and the war in Gaza.
Ever since October 7th, there have been large demonstrations of Israelis protesting Netanyahu’s war leadership policies. Often these protests have centered around photos of the hostages, accompanied with calls to make them a priority. “Bring them home now!” I came across an echo of this form of protest in an encounter I had in Long Island City, on the boardwalk (where my son and his family live). It was a little memorial for the hostages, with their names on miniature headstones. It was moving. My ten-year-old grandson, Benji, apparently regularly spoke to the protestor. But when I asked the Israeli creator of this mini memorial what he sought when it came to the conflict, he would say nothing more than the need to bring the hostages home. In the face of the immense suffering in Gaza, I was disappointed that he wouldn’t speak of anything else.
I thought of this a week ago, yes while I was suffering from Covid, when I had a Zoom conversation with a former student of mine, Yifat Gutman, now a dear friend and a professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She is a scholar of what she calls memory activism and peace activism, among Israelis and Palestinians and reported to me an important innovation at peace demonstrations that developed after Israel broke the first cease fire in March 2025: Jewish Israelis holding photos, not of Israeli hostages, but of dead Palestinian children in Gaza, victims of bombings, shootings, and starvation. She also reported an increase of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli joint action, and collaboration among separate peace and human rights groups across the Palestinian-Jewish Israeli divide.
Thinking of these two cases as small acts of repair, one Polish, the other Israeli, I recently read a piece by Roxanne Gay in The New York Times, a piece critical of civility, underscoring the priority of repair. I also read an exchange, presented by our very own Micah Sifry (a member of Mishkan Ha’am), recently featured on his Connector Substack on bridge building, questioning the value of bridge building in these times, followed by his rather optimistic “Good American” post from this week, arguing that we Americans are not acting like the “Good Germans” did in the 1930s, highlighting that the resistance to Trump and his MAGA movement is significant.
I share Micah’s qualified hope as I see in the showing of Palestinian death and suffering by Jewish Israelis a small act that is both civil and repairs, laying the groundwork for a more hopeful future in a very dark time, as was the case with the Catholic intellectuals who helped repair the damage to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. I struggle to find the small acts that I can do; struggle against the despair I feel that they won’t make a difference. I admit this sometimes has led me to inaction. But I know I must persist, understanding that it is better to live in a world where such actions are taken than one in which atrocity is met only with silence.
These reflections were first shared at the Kol Nidre service of progressive reconstructionist congregation Mishkan Ha’am, where I am a member, led by Rabbinical student, Jesse Weil. I joined the service through Zoom from my study, suffering from Covid at the time. The Congregants were in a tent in Yonkers, New York. J.C.G.
