By Dr. Yonit Hoffman, Manager, Holocaust Community Services

This blog is part of the series of “Yonit’s Journey: Light Out of Darkness,” a narrative of Yonit Hoffman’s month-long trip to Israel and Germany to attend Holocaust-related events – some public, some personal. The director of JCFS’s Holocaust Services program and an authority on the psychology of Holocaust survivors, Yonit is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and descendant of Holocaust victims. See links to other posts at the end of this post.

This is the first blog of “Yonit’s Journey: Light Out of Darkness,” a narrative of Yonit Hoffman’s month-long trip to Israel and Germany to attend Holocaust-related events – some public, some personal. The director of JCFS’s Holocaust Services program and an authority on the psychology of Holocaust survivors, Yonit is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and descendant of Holocaust victims.

“Looking at Then, Now” is the title of the conference that brought me to Israel, to the International Oral History Conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to present a paper entitled, “Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants: Memory and Meaning in the Intergenerational Transmission of Resilience and Identity.”

Before I come back to the topic of the conference, let me give you a sense of the many other reasons that I am here in Israel. I would say that "Looking at Then, Now" could also be a good title for my journey, for my personal story – my own narrative – which is intimately linked to both Israel and to the Holocaust.

I was born on Kibbutz Shoval, a pioneering communal settlement which was founded in 1946 in part by survivors of the Holocaust, among them my father Gershon Hoffman. My father was the only survivor of his family, who had been deported from Hamburg, Germany in November 1941, to the Minsk Ghetto in Belarus, where my grandparents and uncle were killed by the Nazis. After being sent to six labor and concentration camps, being liberated during a death march from the concentration camp Flossenberg to Dachau, and staying for several months in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons camp, my father eventually sailed on an illegal ship to Palestine in 1946. He found a new home in the kibbutz, a different kind of family, and in 1948 he fought for the creation of the State of Israel.

So, what is the "then" that I am "looking at now"?  I arrived in Israel last week, on Erev Shavuot, the day before the holiday that marks the harvest and the day that the Jews received the 10 Commandments in the Sinai desert. The day after my arrival in Israel, I visited my kibbutz with my friend Gali, who grew up there.  The Kibbutz is in the Negev – an oasis in the desert, and thus a fitting place to celebrate Shavuot. There is a "chamseen" the day we go - an unusually hot dry wind which brings the temperature to well over 100 degrees. The kibbutz celebrates the holiday in a special way – not only with a display of the large, state-of-the-art farm equipment, but also with songs, skits, and dances to celebrate the agricultural harvest, the "crop" of kibbutz babies born in the past year, the children, the teens, the soldiers, and the medical professionals: the bounty of the kibbutz.

I am on the kibbutz not for the babies, but for the "vatikim" - the "old-timers" who were there from the beginning, now in their 80s and 90s – the few who remain are, for me, the living links to my father.  My father died suddenly in 1964, when I was not yet three years old. My mother and I left to live with her family in Detroit, where I grew up with my maternal grandparents who also had fled Germany in the late 30s before the worst.

Today I visit a few of the "vatikim" and spend the most time with Bluma, who turns 90 on June 13. She is surprised, but so happy to see me and nearly pulls me down to give me a kiss. She is a tiny powerhouse surrounded by family and friends. And, as always happens in Israel, there is the first of many crazy, magical moments. When I am introduced to friends, we realize that Aliza, a cousin of my maternal grandmother, is here, too.  I haven't seen Aliza in about 30 years, since I stayed at her house for a few days when I was in Israel doing research for an undergraduate honors thesis on the cross-cultural identity of American and Israeli women. And here she is, and by happenstance, she also has a connection to Bluma!

When Bluma and the other vatikim are with me, they are immediately transported to memories and stories of my father, their friend and comrade. Bluma keeps turning my face to the side, saying she sees Gershon in my profile and in my eyes.  Not many people tell me that, as not many in my life knew my father. And here, where my father lived for 18 years after the Holocaust, where he is now buried in one of the most beautiful and peaceful cemeteries in the world – here is where I first found a tangible connection to my father.

I leave the kibbutz that night knowing that I will return, that my children, too, will be here again to keep the connection to the kibbutz, to their grandfather, to this place of memory and meaning, resilience and identity: a place where we can Look at Then, Now.

Read the full series of blogs about Yonit's Journey

• Highlights from Hamburg-A Delicate Balance
• Looking Further Back – Holocaust Survivors and Families Meet in Hamburg
• Visiting Yad Vashem: An illegal photograph and a shoemaker whose children have no shoes.
• The International Oral History Conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
• Finding Connection to the Holocaust and Hamburg, in Jerusalem
• For Child of Holocaust Survivor, Professional and Personal Meet at Looking at Then, Now