2008 Woodie Awards
As We Stand in Silence
Jaimie Fogel
Issue date: 5/13/08 Section: Opinion
Sirens blare all the time on Lexington Avenue. There is rarely a class that passes undisrupted by cars, fire trucks or ambulances racing by on the busy streets below. In a city teeming with over eight million residents, one can imagine that emergencies occur quite often. The sirens of Manhattan have an immediacy to their ring-at that moment there is someone screaming as they burn in a fire; someone lying in pain and sprawled on the floor after a bad fall in the landing of a staircase; a family member crying as they watch their father, sister, brother or mother suffering. But we never cease our daily activities, stopping to think about the possible implications of the siren's blare. We close the windows, complain about the city's constant bustle and continue on with our day.
But the sirens that blare on the streets of Israel on Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron stop traffic on highways. They adjure Egged bus drivers to step out of their vehicles and stand erect in a city intersection. They inspire even the most religiously disconnected to stand for a moment in respectful silence. Those sirens scream of no immediate pain. They scream for those who can no longer raise their voices, and bring forth the internal suffering felt by so many citizens of Israel who long for their fallen friends and family. Those sirens fill a moment with more images and emotions than words could ever produce.
I remember hearing the siren for the first time. Sometime on the morning of Yom Hashoah in the lobby of my seminary, it blared like the sounds of air raids I had seen in war movies. I remember standing still for a moment in the lobby, never before having felt part of such a societal, national commemoration. The realization became that much bolder on Yom Hazikaron, when my classmates and I all stopped in the streets of Jerusalem's Bayit Vegan neighborhood on our way back to school from our visit to Mount Herzel. All of the cars braked softly on the roads, we stopped our chatting and, for a moment, I understood what it meant to share a national destiny. To be part of a community which on that day, recognized that it shared each other's sorrow and pain.
But the sirens that blare on the streets of Israel on Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron stop traffic on highways. They adjure Egged bus drivers to step out of their vehicles and stand erect in a city intersection. They inspire even the most religiously disconnected to stand for a moment in respectful silence. Those sirens scream of no immediate pain. They scream for those who can no longer raise their voices, and bring forth the internal suffering felt by so many citizens of Israel who long for their fallen friends and family. Those sirens fill a moment with more images and emotions than words could ever produce.
I remember hearing the siren for the first time. Sometime on the morning of Yom Hashoah in the lobby of my seminary, it blared like the sounds of air raids I had seen in war movies. I remember standing still for a moment in the lobby, never before having felt part of such a societal, national commemoration. The realization became that much bolder on Yom Hazikaron, when my classmates and I all stopped in the streets of Jerusalem's Bayit Vegan neighborhood on our way back to school from our visit to Mount Herzel. All of the cars braked softly on the roads, we stopped our chatting and, for a moment, I understood what it meant to share a national destiny. To be part of a community which on that day, recognized that it shared each other's sorrow and pain.
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