Shoah Is the statute of limitations approaching ?
4. Israeli President Ezer Weizman SpeechAddress by Israeli President Ezer Weizman to the Bundestag and Bundesrat of the Federal Republic of Germany (January 16, 1996)copied from: Information Division, Israel Foreign Ministry- Jerusalem -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Esteemed President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Madam Speaker of the Bundestag, Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Bundestag and Bundesrat, Honorable Ambassadors, Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era, when the Jews returned to and re-established their homeland. I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there, in previous generations, places, and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew, but not along the far-flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time, from generation to generation, down the paths of memory. Memory shortens distances. I was a slave in Egypt. I am a wandering Jew who follows in the footsteps of his forebears, and just as I escorted them there and then, so do my forebears accompany me and stand here with me today. Just as memory force us to participate in each day and every event of our past, so does the virtue of hope force us to prepare for each day of our future. After all, in the past century alone we have been suspended between life and death, between hope and despair, between displacement and rootedness. Ours is the terrible century of death, in which the Nazis and their assistants destroyed a large portion of us in the Holocaust, but it is also the mind-boggling century of revival, of independence, and -- recently -- of a chance for peace. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Never before has a President of the State of Israel spoken in this esteemed place. I wish to thank you for the honor you have bestowed upon us, and I am happy to see familiar and friendly faces here. Mr. President, Madam and Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chancellor: Israel remembers with exhilaration your visits to us and the sincerity that you expressed, both toward events of the past and in hopes for the future. You were with us, too, at that difficult time when we escorted our Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin of blessed memory, who was murdered on the path of peace, to his final resting place. Yitzhak Rabin, who was one of the leaders on the road to peace. I express my gratitude and blessings for the friendship and cooperation that prevail between Israel and Germany today, as reflected in many diverse spheres of economic, security, and cultural affairs, along with one that is especially close to my heart -- scientific research. German and Israeli researchers are sharing their expertise and skills, and German assistance in Israeli scientific research is one of the factors that Israeli citizens appreciate most highly. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- However, ladies and gentlemen, this is not an easy visit. Only fifty years, a mere moment in the lengthy history of my people, have passed since the end of that terrible war. It was not easy for me to visit the Sachsenhausen concentration camp today. It is not easy for me to travel around this country and hear the memories and voices crying out to me from the ground. It is not easy for me to stand here and speak with you, my friends in this house. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I imagine that for you, too, ladies and gentlemen, a visit by the President of Israel includes several difficult moments. However, we meet here not as private individuals but as the envoys of sovereign states. We must find common ground so that we may advance toward the goals we have set for ourselves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am a wandering Jew. With the cloak of memory around my shoulders and the staff of hope in my hand, I stand at this great crossroads in time, the end of the twentieth century. I know whence I have come, and with hope and apprehension I attempt to find out where I am heading. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: For more than a century of Zionist endeavor, we have hoped for this peace and struggled to achieve it. We did not return to our borders in warships; we did not march home waving spears. We returned in convoys of dreamers and in boats of oppressed refugees. We returned, and, like our forefather King David who purchased the Temple Mount, and our patriarch Abraham who bought the Cave of Makhpela, we bought land, we sowed fields, we planted vineyards, we built houses, and even before we achieved statehood, we were already bearing weapons to protect our lives. Time and again we stretched out our hands, and time and again we were rejected. Time and again we went to war; time and again we killed and were killed. Time and again we left our homes, offices, universities, and orchards for the battlefields. Time and again we discovered that beyond even the greatest victories, only crises and losses lurked. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We yearn for this peace; we dream of it and pray for it. It appears at every juncture of Jewish thought: In the Torah, the Psalms, the Talmud, the commentaries, liturgy, and homiletics. We deal with this fragile, delicate process of peace suffused with hope and, I am sure, with sang-froid and wisdom. Terrorist organizations and extremist Islamic states wish to sabotage the process, as do extremist elements in our midst. The atmosphere is charged; things are not easy -- not only because murderous extremism is striving to destroy this peace, but also because even those who love peace are apprehensive, and both camps still have unhealed wounds and fresh memories. The blood still cries out to us. Many peace treaties have been signed in the course of history. They speak of economic relations and security arrangements, compensation and borders. When I was Defense Minister in the Government of Israel, I took part in the peace negotiations with Egypt, and I can tell you that in peace treaties in the Middle East, we are strict about these matters but not only about them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our most recent agreement with the Palestinians includes a clause about educating both peoples for a life of peace. In the Middle East, where ancient fundamentals of vengeance and settling of scores millennia old intermingle, extra caution is required. The mind strives to be practical and judicious; it wishes to build the future. The feet, however, tread on the residues of those generation, and the hands are the hands that built the ramparts of Jerusalem at the time of the Return of Zion. The work was done with only one hand, for the other hand clutched a weapon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do not take this lightly. We are trying to achieve a peace that will propel us into the twenty-first century. But ancient Crusader maps hang on the wall, and ancient Biblical memories hover in the atmosphere, and primeval prophecies strive to fulfill themselves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 1977, the late President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the late Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, met in Jerusalem. A peace treaty was signed in Egypt, a treaty with which I am personally familiar. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We respect our neighboring countries and the culture that surrounds us, and we wish to take up our position among them, but in our own way and with allegiance to our values and culture. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I speak not only of military prowess and material assets. In the last century, since we returned to our country, we have built more than villages and towns, factories and barns, shops and army bases. We and our language are alive. We who have arisen from the ashes, and the language that waited in the shrouds of Torah scrolls and between the pages of the prayerbooks, are alive. The language that was whispered in prayer only, that was read only in synagogues, that was sung only in liturgy, that was shrieked in the gas chambers -- in the prayer "Shma Yisrael" -- has been revived. I know that German is richer than Hebrew in many ways, but I do not lack the words to express my feelings, nor have Jews ever lacked words to express their faith, love, dreams, yearnings, and hopes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have developed a suitable vocabulary for our special needs. We await, we yearn, we desire, we anticipate, we long for, we hope, we thirst, we crave, we imagine... I stop her in order to apologize to the interpreters in case they find it hard to select the right words. These two cadavers, revived after so many years -- the Jewish state and the Hebrew language -- are the very essence of our lives in this century. In this of all centuries, which observed us devastated and dead, we have risen again. And we now use this language, which in exile we used to speak to God only, to speak to each other. We still pray in Hebrew, but now we also use it to speak, to write, to work and study, to argue, to court each other, and to sing. And the miracle is all the greater because if Isaiah, Solomon, and Jesus were here today, they would understand what I am saying just as I and my daughter and grandchildren understand their words, spoken and written and preserved in the same language thousands of years ago. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. President, Madam and Mr. Speaker, dignitaries: I thank you again for your hospitality to my wife and myself and to our staff. With your permission, I would like to end with a Biblical verse of hope and peace. My forebears described peace with a Hebrew expressions that every farmer in the Middle East has experienced first-hand: "every man under his vine and under his fig tree." This is a handsome expression, but it is no longer sufficient to rest in the shade of one's vine or under the branches of one's fig tree. Peace has to be dynamic, not quiescent. It must propel us into the fifth millennium of our history, into the twenty-first century, where new cultural, educational, technological, scientific, and agricultural challenges await us. Today's Israel, with its large influx of immigrants, its economic momentum, the peace accords, should and can reclaim its position as the predominant cultural center of the Jewish people. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have invested too much time, resources, and physical and psychological effort in the battlefield. Now we have work to do in our schools, research institutes, workshops, and laboratories. Our true aspirations reside there, not in the battlefield. Our veery essence is anchored in study and education. Jewish ethics has always preferred the pen to the sword, and as a former soldier, believe me, it is not easy for me to say such a thing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ladies and gentlemen, we are a people of memory and prayer. We are a people of words and hope. We have neither established empires nor built castles and palaces. We have only placed words on top of each other. We have fashioned ideas; we have built memorials. We have dreamed towers of yearnings -- of Jerusalem rebuilt, of Jerusalem united, of a peace that will be swiftly and speedily established in our days. Amen. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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