Marta and Yosef Motzen were Holocaust survivors. Their
son, Avremi, who was a student at the Kol Torah and Shaalavim yeshivas, fell in
the Lebanon War when his tank set on fire. Immediately after the shiva, his
friends decided to start a Torah class in his memory, in his parents' home.
There are lots of classes set up in people's memory, but how many of those
classes last for 37 years in a row? The class participants started out as boys,
and today they all have grandchildren. Every three weeks, like clockwork, they
arrive at the Motzen home in Petach Tikva. Avremi's father, Yosef, died a few
years ago, but the class continues: some of the participants are rabbis and
educators, some are businessmen, one of them is a judge - and all of their
families know not to schedule any events on the night of “the class at
Marta's.”
Israel’s TV Channel 12 ran a story about this
class in 2019.
(You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhPJt0baNjo) This is how the scene is described:
Marta sat in the living room, the number from Auschwitz
on her arm, sitting across from Avremi's photograph, bearing his IDF ID number.
When the friends entered one by one, and the sound of Torah learning could be
heard from the living room, her face lit up. “There nothing else in the world
like this,” she told me, “that people are so dedicated to elevating a friend's
soul.”
That evening, after class, Marta felt ill and was
hospitalized. Her son, the cantor Yaakov Motzen, recently informed me that she
was growing weaker. On the eve of Yom Hazikaron 2019, Marta passed away, and
she was laid to rest on Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Memorial Day. A life's journey
of faith and heroism, lasting 92 years that passed through Auschwitz and
Lebanon - and ended at the cemetery in Petach Tikva. This is the story of the
Jewish Nation over the past century: The Holocaust, our Rebirth, our Torah. Our
Hope.
We often hear about the flag of Israel in the news when a
country refuses to show the flag at events such as international sports
competitions. And how in recent years that has changed - in places such as Abu
Dhabi and Doha.
Every year I return to these powerful words of Rav
Soloveitchik zt'l, which sums up Yom HaZikaron and Yom Haatzmaut:
If you
ask me, how do I, a Talmudic Jew, look upon the flag of the State of Israel,
and has it any halachic value? - I would answer plainly.
I do not
hold at all with the magical attraction of a flag or of similar symbolic
ceremonies. Judaism negates ritual connected with physical things. Nonetheless,
we must not lose sight of a law in the Shulchan Aruch to the effect that: “One
who has been killed by non-Jews is buried in his clothes, so that his blood may
be seen and avenged, as it is written, 'I will hold (the heathen) innocent, but
not in regard to the blood which they have shed' (Joel 4:21).” In other words,
the clothes of the Jew acquire a certain sanctity when splattered with the
blood of a martyr.
How much
more is this so of the blue and white flag, which has been immersed in the
blood of thousands of young Jews who fell in the War of Independence defending
the country and the population (religious and irreligious alike; the enemy did
not differentiate between them). It has a spark of sanctity that flows from
devotion and self-sacrifice. We are all enjoined to honor the flag and treat it
with respect.
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