Davidovich, Martin Davidovich, Czech Brigade discussed on The Promised Podcast

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

Real juice, blue raspberry with real juice, cherry with real juice, cherries, the bomb, peach perfect, red bang with real juice, sour orange and sugar free cherry limeade. And I know that you are thinking what I am thinking, that's all good and well, but this list is clearly not comprehensive. For instance, the 7 11 site lists slurpee flavors like pink think, kissing cousins, gully washer and sticky icky. Are these flavors kosher? Will we even get sticky icky slurpees in the 7 11 and these enough center? Apparently, only time will tell. And arguably nothing captures the cool in every sense, cosmopolitanism and the easy familiarity with the best of international culture of this city we love so well, Tel Aviv, better than the good news that very soon, like the most refined cultural in New York, Winnipeg, Sydney and Hong Kong, our cups two shall runneth over with somewhat frozen, somewhat carbonated red bang with real juice, though maybe not strawberry twizzler and monster black because here in Tel Aviv, it can truly be said that we drink in life in big gulps with us in the studio is a woman who's marvelous prose is not unlike a slurpee effervescent sparkling with life and full of froth and fizz. Obviously, I am talking about Allison Kaplan summer Allison has written for Politico, the new republic foreign policy, the Jerusalem post, the JJ the forward and many other of your very best papers and magazine, she is a columnist with her arts. You have heard her on mpr PRI in the BBC. And you have seen her on I 24 television and Al Jazeera TV, Alison holds a beneath world center award for journalism recognizing excellence in Diaspora reportage and a Simon rock our award for excellence in covering Zionism Ali and Israel Alice and how you doing? So if you're a Broadway nerd like me, you hear 7 11 and slurpees and you immediately think of the iconic musical heathers, which was made after the movie, in which the psychopathic hero named JD who was played by Christian Slater in the movie, sings an ode to 7 11s and to drinking slurpees in the show. He travels around all over the country after his mom dies, and the only place he finds comfort is in 7 11 and he sings from Las Vegas to Boston linoleum aisles that I love to get lost in. I pray at my altar of slush. Yeah, I live for that sweet frozen rush. Freeze your brain sucking that straw get lost in the pain. Happiness comes when everything numbs who needs cocaine. Use your brain. Ah, the music of the muses, that's beautiful. I didn't know about that. I loved the movie and this is so for me. Also with us in the studio is a man who likes 7 11 is always there for you when you need them 24 6, and in his case, if you really need him, he'll help you out on that 7th day too. That man is Don federman. Don is the director of the Mariah fund in Israel and the director of the Israel center for educational innovation. He is also the genius behind a series of podcast theater productions of autobiographical monologues called federman's one man show, which you can find wherever find podcasts are pervade Don how are you doing? Well, I'm going to stay on the theater theme because when I was back in my theater days, my friend, Anthony, and itinerant actor, like most of us worked at 7 11, and I used to visit him at three a.m. for the weekly hold up. You know, so that was we had a set date. Now don't you think 7 11 is like a subconscious suggestion for all of us to be shooting craps? I'm going to open a rival train called snake eyes. We'll see how that one does. As for me, my name is no Efron, and I don't mean to boast. But I was once beaten up at the 7 11 over there on Amherst avenue in Wheaton, Maryland when I was ten years old, new to the area and I biked over. In fact, to get me a slurpee, and there were some tough kids in front. At the time, I estimated their ages to be maybe 18, maybe 20, maybe 40, though in retrospect, they were probably 13 and one of them said kid give us your money. And I said, no, I'm going to get a slurpee after which a spirited disagreement arose at the end of which we all agreed that I would rather give them my money than to get punched yet again. And I biked home penniless and crying all the way. And I am not bragging. That is just not the way that my folks raised me. I don't know about you. But while everyone loves slurpees, how many people have actually sacrificed for slurpees as I have? Today, we will discuss three topics of transcendent importance, but first we have a matter that we're following with alert interesting great concern. As part of an occasional series that we call the promised podcast, ponders the power and pathos of exhumation and posthumous repatriation. As we record on the morning of Thursday, October 28th, 2021, the 22nd of cash Evan, 57, 82, dozens of relatives alongside a delegation of worthy's representing the IDF and Israel's government are laying to rest in the military cemetery on mount herzl, private Martin davidovich, Martin davidovich would be 94 today if he were still alive. He was born in 1927, exactly two days before my mother in the event. In a town called de novo, then in Czechoslovakia now in the Ukraine, one of 7 kids four boys and three girls in a family that told seltzer with a beer operation on the side. He studied in a heter, but when he was old enough, he joined Hashimoto's ear. When Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1938, de novo became part of Hungary and when Hungary was taken by the Nazis in 1944, davidovich was sent to mouth housing where he worked as a tailor and then to Auschwitz after the war, davidovich went home to learn that his parents and one of his brothers David fee and two of his sisters rift and Miriam were dead, but two of his brothers laser and naftali and one of his sisters hay been or Blanca survived with nothing to keep him at home. Martin davidovich wandered westward like so many Jewish kids alone after Auschwitz and other such places. And he joined a zionist group Hanoi and knocked around planning to move when he could to a Jewish Palestine where Jews were at the time forbidden by the Brits to enter. In July, 1948, just before his 21st birthday, davidovich volunteered for something called the Czech brigade. The check brigade was the idea of a small group of Czech Jews who fought with the Nazis. Most as part of the Soviet Army, some as partisans, and they now had the idea of training Jewish survivors in the Jewish brigade that when their training was done with travel to Palestine to fight in the war of independence, the men behind the Czech brigade presented their idea to Ehud abriel the envoy to Prague of the provisional Jewish government in Palestine and also to check foreign minister Jan masaryk, who had always done what he could to help those trying to set up a Jewish state. For instance, signing in January 1948, a deal with Ariel to bring 5000 guns and 5 million bullets to Jews in Palestine, eventually check planes came to after maserak died in March, the leaders of Czechoslovakia kept on supporting the provisional Jewish government in Palestine. And that is how it happened that the check brigade got on the down low, check uniforms, check weapons. The use of check bases and some of the commanders of the brigade coming from Czechoslovakia with others coming from the issue from Jewish Palestine. The head of the brigade was high in gori, the great poet novelist and journalist who died just a couple of years ago in 2018. The brigade took up residence in barracks and training grounds that had been built by Nazis just north of Prague. Gory said, quote, I'm the gates of the camp. There was an inscription, fear is the worst crime. Everything was highly secret. The secrecy was such that outside the camp, it was forbidden even to speak in any language. When we went swimming in a nearby Lake, we were forbidden to utter a word. It was forbidden to photograph there is not a single picture of us there. There were misunderstandings. There were people who had been through the Holocaust on the one hand, and people who had fought the Nazis on the other hand, there was no common language, not everyone knew Hebrew, not everyone in new English, but there were lovely moments of meeting. Another of these Israelis there for training was yossi Agassi, who later went on to study philosophy of science under Carl popper at the London school of economics and married the granddaughter of Martin buber Judith boober Agassi and who supervised the dissertation of my beloved dissertation supervisor Monaco fish, and who once took over a keynote session of a conference I was in charge of denouncing all of us in the most vicious way for teaching our students heidegger, whom Agassi said was an unreformed Nazi, we whitewashed every new academic year of fresh in Israel, had we no shame when I was 18 in Israel for the year with young Judea, our Madrid Ronnie kahana now harad Roni kahana brought hi I'm gory to talk to us and he told us how walking the streets of Tel Aviv on evenings in the 1950s, one could not escape whales coming from apartment windows open to the cooling air. He said, survivors grew agitated as the sun went down, reliving horrors and loss that were then only a decade old and their screams were the dusk music of the city street. Gory added, none of this was ever mentioned during the day. And that image of the solitude of suffering is never left me, but I had no idea no idea of how much gory had seen. It was his reporting of the ackman trial for a now long defunct labor left paper called la mer havre that captured the trial best. He wrote of the parade of testimonies from the planet Auschwitz on display in Jerusalem that he worried that they would, quote, turn us all to stone. Gory was 25 in Prague trying to make a group of survivors and partisans and Soviet soldiers and provincial kids from Palestine into a paratroopers unit. Israel was then two months old under attack and very much in need of that paratroopers unit. And that is when the tragedy happened as part of exercise is one of the Czech commanders thinking his gun was empty, shot 20 year old Martin de vinovich, killing on the spot, this kid who had survived Auschwitz and all the rest. The body was brought to the new Jewish cemetery in Prague and buried. Gory later wrote in his book until the sunrise quote, I can not escape the image of that young man of ours, Martin davidovich, who was killed by the bullet of one of the Czech commanders. He was buried in secret, we called terrible tragedies like those training accidents when Martin davidovich died his brother enough Holly was also in the Czech brigade. He was the only family at davidovich's secret burial in Prague. And he and later moved to Haifa and then later to America. High avena or Blanca davidovich moved to the states too, eventually settling in Muncie. Already in 1948, according to archival documents that I have not myself seen, members of the quote unquote parachuting instructors team of the Czech brigade asked that the newly formed IDF recognized Martin davidovich as the first Israeli paratrooper ever to fall in the line of duty. But davidovich was not a citizen and there was a war to be fought. One of davidovich's friends from the brigade, a writer named yitzhak greenwald, who returned to Israel and served as a paratrooper published in Hebrew in account of davidovich and spent years collecting documents and petitioning the IDF. Finally, more than 50 years later, in 2001, davidovich was recognized as an IDF soldier at the rank of private, and in fact, as the first IDF soldier in his unit to die in uniform, though his was not an IDF uniform. Back then davidovich is surviving sister and brothers disagreed about whether Martin should be brought to Israel before she died though Blanca Friedman nay davidovich, told her daughter iris Friedman that she wished for Martin to be interred in Jerusalem. Eris Friedman told reporters that she visited Martin davidovich's grave in Prague for the first time in 2013. She said, quote, I felt strong vibrations. I felt that Martin's spirit was sending me a message. I went to my rabbi from habad in a long journey began. As I am saying these words, that long journey is ending this past Monday after three years of negotiating with the checks, a delegation of generals rabbis and at least one of David over his nephew's exhumed Martin davidovich flew his remains to Israel and right now with 60 of davidovich's relatives from all around the world in attendance, he is receiving a military funeral in a military cemetery in a country he trained to fight for and the country he died for, though he never lived to see it. He's a Robert. Today, three topics, topic one, burdens of proof as minister of defense Benny Gantz outlaws 6 Palestinian human rights organizations or depending on how you see it 6 quote unquote human rights organizations on the ground that they funnel money and support to the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine, which has long been stipulated a terrorist organization. Guns did this as brilliant measured mild and wise political analysts due to Ari gross father of two, tweeted, quote, without offering a shred of concrete evidence to the public. And many others believe, of course, at the very fact that he banned the groups is all the evidence you need to see that they deserve to be banned, causing many to how and some like me to admit that maybe I kind of buy it sort of. We'll talk about it and whether I am more a knife or an idiot, though people, people, it doesn't have to be one or the other. Topic two, a great deal of new green as ahead of the cop 26 international climate change extravaganza, beginning tomorrow, as we record in Glasgow, Israel's cabinet approved a hundred count them hundred point plan to green up lots of things here. We've scrutinized the plan and we'll ask whether the whole, maybe doesn't turn out to be less than the sum of its 100 parts and topic three, breathing, easy, as Israel is experiencing a life threatening shortage of ready to be transplanted lungs for the COVID afflicted patients who need them. And one of the country's greatest transplant experts proposes that replacement lungs be denied to patients who chose not to get vaccinated until everyone who chose to get vaccinated gets the organ they need. This is based on a principle he calls reciprocal altruism, will wonder whether morality dictates that we give preference to the vaccinated or prohibits us from giving preference to the vaccinated or maybe something in between and for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, we will discuss a photo es in The New York Times by two journalists who traveled to Israel north to south over a week and a half to learn that Israel is quote an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle a collection of incompatible factions each with its own priorities, grievances, and history. To which at least some respond in print and pixels, dudes, I think you may be missing something. We'll try first to make heads of the essay and then time permitting tales. But before we get to any of that, you lucky people listen to this..

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