I had a very cold, but crisp and bright and sunny, cycle ride to Uppermill this morning. Various people I spoke to told me that it’s going to get colder and wetter towards the weekend, and maybe it will even snow! I might have expressed total disbelief at that but then, I remember a day long ago when I set out from my lodgings in Leeds to go to the university, wearing sandals and a light jacket. By the time I was returning at the end of the day there was a thin covering of snow on the ground. And that was probably early in the month of May. So I may well look back nostalgically to this day 44 years ago (the day our daughter was born) when I was in the village centre in a thin cotton maternity dress because it was warm and sunny but both extremes are possible.
Uppermill was very quiet, especially for a Wednesday market day. Maybe everyone was huddled indoors keeping warm. Only fools like me were out and about, seriously underdressed in my cycling gear.
We’ve just had Easter although for believers it’s not really over until Ascension Day. The Muslims have had Ramadan. And now the Jews have Passover, a festival of freedom, commemorating the Israelites exodus from Egypt and their transition from slavery to freedom. Bitter herbs are eaten to remind them of the bitterness of slavery.
Yesterday we had reports of pro-Palestinian protestors arrested for demonstrating, and setting up a protest camp, outside Columbia University in New York. The university president called for the help of the police as some students felt threatened and intimidated the peaceful protestors. That protest spread to other universities. Today I read that hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder meal that doubled as a protest in New York. Theyshut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.
Speakers included some well-known people, such as journalist and author Naomi Klein, and Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour as well as several Jewish students suspended from Columbia University and Barnard College.
“We as American Jews will not be used, we will not be complicit and we will not be silent. Judaism is a beautiful, thousands-year-old tradition, and Israel is a 76-year-old colonial apartheid state,” Morgan Bassichis, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, told the crowd.
“This is the Passover that we take our exodus from Zionism. Not in our name. Let Gaza live.”
Rabbi Miriam Grossman, from Brooklyn, led a prayer before the first cup of ritual wine. “We pray for everyone besieged, for everyone facing starvation and mass bombardment.”
“This Passover is not like other Passovers,” said Naomi Klein. “So many are not with their families but this movement is our family,” she added in reference to political disagreements that have divided Jewish families since the start of the war.”
Some feel threatened by the protests, and very probably there were people among the protestors who would shout out their protest, somehow blaming and shaming Jewish students for the conflict. Others join in the protest.
Here’s a link to an article about the Stutthof Nazi concentration in Poland. In the area where camp used to stand the ground is covered with a layer of soles of shoes. Thousands and thousands of them have been found and there are moves to preserve them so that nobody forgets what used to stand there. “Stutthof, which was built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later became an integral part of the machinery to exterminate European Jews, eventually assumed a role as leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The shoes transported there – mostly from Auschwitz, after their wearers had been sent to their deaths – were recycled into leather goods such as belts, rucksacks and holsters.”
Shoes, and in this case the soles of shoes, are a powerful symbol. It’s why so many parents preserve their child’s very first pair of shoes. Recently some anti-war / pro-Palestine protests have taken the form of laying out thousands of pairs of shoes, of different sizes and colours and styles, to represent the people, especially the children, killed and missing in Gaza in recent months. We need reminders of the enormity and sadness of war.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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