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Stan Goodenough is an experienced journalist who has written about politics in South Africa and the Middle East for such organizations as The Daily Dispatch of East London, South Africa, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post, and the Virtual HolyLand website. He has been a South African gentile resident in Israel for 12 years. Stan is editor of and .
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By Stan Goodenough
April 30, 2003
Courtesy of Jerusalem Newswire.
Find yourself, as a gentile, standing on Jerusalem's streets as the air raid sirens sound their remembrance call for the six million Holocaust dead, and again a week later as they wail for those cut down in uniform since the blood-birth of their haven state.
Listen to the pain of a people which has suffered unparalleled persecution at the hands of others, and you can never be the same.
Where else in the world...? The question is spontaneous, unavoidable. In days when others try to play down the extent of Jewish suffering, this question demands a response.
Loud. Long. Keen. The rising sirens immobilize the nation, paralyzing movement up and down the land. Vehicles stop, their drivers alighting to stand, heads bowed, in the streets. On the sidewalks, in shops, offices, schools and cinemas, on beaches and playing fields, people stop dead in their tracks.
Life arrested. The world turned to stone. Sirens howl their pain to the skies. And in the howling are a myriad sounds, hard to listen to, impossible to ignore.
Screaming children torn violently from mothers' arms, their cries reverberating echoes in your mind. Despairing, pain wracked cries of tormented generations.
Listen - Rachel weeps for her children. Through the clash of hooves, tracks, jackboots, steel; the shouts of Roman, Crusader, Cossack, Nazi - impaling children, women, new-born babies on spear, sword, bayonet - she weeps, her cries drowned out by theirs.
"For the glory of Rome!" "By the blood of Jesus!" "Juden Raus!" "Itbach al yahud!" "Death to the Jews!"
Christian ears deafened to the hopeless pleas of families driven from their towns, burning homes behind them sending bitter black smoke into the skies. Roaring flames engulf temple and synagogue; exploding fires, crashing buildings; the screams of terror, horror and agony. The long, long silence of death.
For 2000 endless, blood soaked years, the deep cry of the Jew has sounded to seemingly unhearing heavens: "Our God, our God. Why have you forsaken us?"
In Israel, the siren's wail - audio-recordings of the expression of Jewish pain played, and replayed, year after year, to ensure that a nation which never could forget, never will.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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