The Pittsburgh Massacre and the Kristallnacht in Caracas: The Jewish Connection
Scene 1: The news
I propose the following exercise of the imagination. The place does not matter. A man wakes up on Saturday October 27, 2018 and it's a beautiful sunny morning. It is the day to go to the market, and before leaving, he is preparing coffee, some toast bread with butter, and suddenly on his Smartphone there is a notice of urgent news from the BBC or CNN: there has been a shooting in the synagogue "The Three of Life" in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, during the celebration of the Shabbat. It is reported that there have been 11 deaths.
That causes him some moral sadness, but, unless he is Jewish, he will not feel particularly depressed or pray for the fallen. After all, it is a tragedy that has happened far away from him. Hardly, he says to himself, he could know someone linked to this massacre.
The second news that enters the cell phone contains more details: it's been a lone gunman, armed with an assault rifle AR-15 and two guns, white, 46 years old, named Robert Bowers, who later was shot by the police. He was taken to the General Hospital of Allegheny, where he was treated, and actually is under custody of the police authorities.
He's drinking coffee, and he thinks, "How does this affect to me, if it happens so far away from me?" The news have not ruined his day, but it flutters in his head as the morning progresses.
He leaves the house to go to the market, puts the radio in the car, and the news comes back, even more detailed. The man entered the synagogue and started firing while shouting "All Jews must die!" On his twitter account, he constantly raised racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic comments. Despise President Trump. Threatens the Jews. "I will go for them, get ready", it is the last thing he said in his active social networks.
Already in the market, one last news enters the cell phone. The wounded attacker was treated at the Allegheny General Hospital, in which they saved his life. The nurse who received his is called Ari Mahler. The first check was made by the President of the hospital, Jeffrey K. Cohen, and then Bowers was transfered to the emergency doctor, whose name was not published. All the three of them are Jews.
The man asks to himself, intrigued: "What is the universe telling me? Why is this news so recurrent, so far from me but present all the morning? There is not the remotest possibility that I am 3 people away from any of the actors in that terrible drama of madness and death. And if that possibility exists, then let it be revealed to me, because perplexity already borders on anguish."
Scene 2: The synagogue in Caracas
Monday November 12, 2018, five o'clock in the afternoon in Caracas, a limpid twilight at the foot of the green colossus, the Avila hill, which guards my city. I ride in a minibus to the 10th Av. of Altamira, to the headquarters of the Zionist Federation of Venezuela, which has generously invited me, as a professor and friend, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht (The Night of the Broken Glass).
Eighty years ago, during three days and nights, in Germany, groups of Nazis armed with pistols, Molotov cocktails, sticks, stones, with cold and methodical hatred, went out to burn the shops and houses of the Jews, murdered more than 3,000, arrested about 30,000 and began what is known in Hebrew as the Shoah.
Do not try to correct me, dear readers, the word Holocaust is not correct in this case. It comes from the Greek "holos" (all) and "kaustos" (burned). In Leviticus, 6: 9, there is talk of the sacrifice of an unblemished ox that must be totally incinerated, except for the leather, in homage to God.
There was no religious ritual in Auschwitz, but technology. And I do not think any of the 6 million of dead Jews, gypsies or gays had the feeling that someone were leading him to a sacrifice to Yahweh. They were not lambs or oxen that were going to be slaughtered and then burned. They had stopped being human. They were a just cypher, a number, that was gassed, and then incinerated, turned into ash, very efficiently (in the German way). So better is the word Shoah, which we could translate as "catastrophe."
Of course, when talking about the Shoah and the Kristallnacht in Caracas, it was inevitable to mention the Pittsburgh massacre, and to say that anti-Semitism has not died, that it is thousands of years old, and that it will surely revive cyclically as long as there are Jews on earth. So a minute of silence was kept.
And the movie-loving reader (as I am) could ask me: What is this digression about? Where does this new line of action lead me? What connection can you have with the man who went out on a Saturday morning to the market while listening to the news about the massacre in the Pittsburgh synagogue?
I enter the headquarters of the Zionist Federation, walk in front of the small synagogue in Caracas, and go up to the main hall, where about 400 people gather, dignitaries of the Jewish community in Venezuela, the ambassador of Germany, intellectuals, a couple of survivors of the Shoah that came to live in this land of grace, or their children and grandchildren, and I think, I tell you, Oh, reader! that maybe there is a connection here, this afternoon under the furious indigo sky of Caracas.
The speeches of rigor are read, prayers are recited, the solemn act closes with a kadish and agape. I'm with Nora Fishbach (in the picture at right), whose grandparents survived Auschwitz, and another friend, Alberto Benahim, who tells us:
-I called Dr. Isaac Levi (I will not say the real name, I'll reserve it) in Pittsburg. He is Jewish, Venezuelan, do you remember him? He ran around these stairs when he was a child, he grew up, he studied medicine at the UCV, a brilliant doctor, he went to the United States when the crisis began in Venezuela. He's the doctor who was on duty at the emergency unit at the Allegheny Hospital in Pittsburgh (pictured below) on Saturday, October 27. He was the Jewish doctor, along with the nurse Ari Mahler, who treated and saved the life of killer Robert Bowers. "
-God! -Nora exclaimed- And did you ask him why he did it, and how did he feel?
-Of course I asked him. He told me that he felt a lot of anger, a lot of pain, but also that he felt a lot of compassion for that poor man blinded by hatred and madness, "it was my duty, I am a doctor and also a Jew: I swore to use my science to save lives, not to take them away ... "
Scene 3: Coda
There we were, three friends: she, Nora, redhead, energetic, Doctor in Political Sciences, her two grandparents survived Auschwitz, they were two children, they swore eternal love in the concentration camp, and when they where released by the Russian army, they were reunited by destiny and loved each other forever in the Caribbean, in Venezuela. There was my other friend, Benahim, publicist, businessman, connected with his friend doctor Isaac Levi in the heart of the tragedy, in Pittsburgh. And there was me, Matute, the philosopher and screenwriter who tells the story.
She, Nora -in that exact moment of the twilight of the crow in which the day begins for the Jews- connects me with the real Kristallnach, not the one we see in the films, but with the real one, which her grandparents lived 80 years ago.
Benahim connect me with Levi, the doctor who saved the life of the atrocious Robert Bowers. And He who handles all this storuy is a writer that I do not know but who secretly guides the cosmos, which connects all the threads of this story, as if it were a script for Robert Altman, kind of "Short Cuts" (1993), in which up to 22 characters count their dreams, their miseries, united by the magic and the genius of a masterful director.
Short Cuts (1993) by Robert Altman.
source
The man who goes to the market on Saturday, October 27, who hears the news and wonders what all this has to do with him, the Jews from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood who attend the shabbat ceremony to name various babies, policemen who carelessly patrol the outskirts of Pittsburg, Nora's grandparents in the concentration camp in Poland swore love, the hospital president, the Venezuelan emergency doctor and the nurse (3 Jews who entered the hospital to take their guard) and we in the commemoration of the Kristallnacht, we all connect with each other with less than 3 people in between (at least 3 people away!), in that flickering light that movie photographers call "the miracle moment", in the synagogue at Altamira, in Caracas. And you, as you read this story, have been 4 people away from the massacre.
It is a script of the Creator, it is the Jewish connection.
No one writes better than He.
Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)
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Jeffrey K. Cohen, President of the Allegheny General Hospital, and boss of the Venezuelan Jewish doctor who treated the murderer Bowers: "We are here to take care of those who need our help, we are not here to judge the people"