Sabonim - Sabra mistreatment of Holocaust Survivors
I have heard of the problems the Sephardi/Mizrachi community faced in Israel during the early days of the state but this is complete news to me. Apparently during the early days of the state, there was a lot of mistreatment of Holocaust survivors in Israel at the hands of the sabras. I am amazed that I've never heard of this before...
A couple of things I found so far on the Internet:
[source]
Here is another:
A couple of things I found so far on the Internet:
Moshe Sanbar, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel - an umbrella organization for 29 groups and 300,000 survivors - links the lack of interest to the survivors themselves.
"Israeli survivors did not want to have anything to do with these issues," he says. "They wanted to close the book on the Holocaust."
Sanbar traces this attitude to survivors' experiences just after their liberation from the death camps and arrival in the nascent Jewish state. "They called us the sabonim," he says - using Hebrew slang for "cowards." But it also sounds like the Hebrew word "sabon," or soap, which survivors perceived as a reference to the soap the Nazis made from Jewish corpses.
With some justice, survivors arriving in Israel felt stigmatized. Israelis were creating a "new Jew," symbolized by the suntanned kibbutznik working the fields or the fearless underground fighter. They looked down on the passivity of European Jews, who they felt went like sheep to the slaughter. Eager to fit into Israeli society, Sanbar says, many survivors tried to shake off their Holocaust experiences.
[source]
Here is another:
“It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim, nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long: hanged herself in the kitchen one night.
posted by e-kvetcher at 7:38 AM
7 Comments:
As Jews we are taught that Jews MUST treat other Jews with love, respect, understanding....Ahavat Israel...Thanks to my parents and Grandparents I knew the concept long before I knew what it is called. But the reality is that we are just people with people like universal faults. The information you shared is both shocking and at the same time not at all, at least not to me. When my family came to the US toward the end of the cold war, I at the age of 14 was met with mixed reaction in my small town suburban teenage high school society. Guess who offered most welcome? That would be the gentile kids from middle class / upper middle class families (that was the prevalent demographic in my school district). Guess who offered least to none, and in some cases even offered plain emotional cruelty? The few gentiles from very wealthy families and ALL Jewish kids with only 2 girls as the exception (they are my friends to this day). I find that Jews in general function differently based on where they are. In the Soviet Union Jews found each other wherever they were and bonded - almost always. In the US Jews put up barriers among themselves, often almost with sport-like vigor and all too often citing some crazy false sense of superiority of one Jewish group over another. Israel is not immune to this insanity either. Every time I am in Israel I hear negativity toward the Sephardim coming from the Ashkenazim. Why? No reason, at least none that I see for the former to look down on by the latter. We Jews forget who we are...we get comfortable and instead of acting like the Chosen People we act like the common people - its the path of least resistance. Sad...all we can do is share the tidbits we find and use them as teaching moments to teach our children right...hopefully.
As Jews we are taught that Jews MUST treat other Jews with love, respect, understanding....Ahavat Israel...Thanks to my parents and Grandparents I knew the concept long before I knew what it is called. But the reality is that we are just people with people like universal faults. The information you shared is both shocking and at the same time not at all, at least not to me. When my family came to the US toward the end of the cold war, I at the age of 14 was met with mixed reaction in my small town suburban teenage high school society. Guess who offered most welcome? That would be the gentile kids from middle class / upper middle class families (that was the prevalent demographic in my school district). Guess who offered least to none, and in some cases even offered plain emotional cruelty? The few gentiles from very wealthy families and ALL Jewish kids with only 2 girls as the exception (they are my friends to this day). I find that Jews in general function differently based on where they are. In the Soviet Union Jews found each other wherever they were and bonded - almost always. In the US Jews put up barriers among themselves, often almost with sport-like vigor and all too often citing some crazy false sense of superiority of one Jewish group over another. Israel is not immune to this insanity either. Every time I am in Israel I hear negativity toward the Sephardim coming from the Ashkenazim. Why? No reason, at least none that I see for the former to look down on by the latter. We Jews forget who we are...we get comfortable and instead of acting like the Chosen People we act like the common people - its the path of least resistance. Sad...all we can do is share the tidbits we find and use them as teaching moments to teach our children right...hopefully.
Comparable in some ways to the Indos "returning" after 1949 to the Netherlands - were most had never been, and many did not even have relatives.
Three years in pow camps. Several more in 'resettlement' camps in Java during the bersiap period.
Oh, but you had servants over there (most had been quite poor), and you were the privilidged class (yeah, above the gutter but below the social club set).
As just a side note, look up Tjideng sometime.
Indos were told they should be grateful to be welcomed in Holland, where clearly they were little more than a burden. A burden with queer habits, which was in many ways not 'civilized'.
The article has it right - it's about cowardice. For two thousand years, our leaders were left-leaning liberal scum who led us astray . . . and G-d turned his backs on us. In the time of the Roman Empire and the Greek city-states, we were known throughout the Mediterranean as mercenaries, as soldiers, with a devotion to our G-d. For two thousand years we acted as cowards, and paid the ultimate price in WWII. We're continuing to repeat this mistake in the United States and in Israel, and hopefully it won't cost us so dearly. The MSM and our so-called leaders keep trying to make this a racial or religious divide. It's not - it's political. I don't like slavish, passive, submissive, prissy curs, no matter whether they're my people or anyone elses. We - real Jews - don't hate other Jews for their religious views. We hate them for their cowardice. It's time we stopped protecting these scumbags from their folly.
As I understand there was another reason for refusal to accept the newcomers from post-war Europe. Some of the Jewish leaders felt that ever so often the victims take on the worst traits of their tormentors. For example, there were gangs of Jews in Poland who systematically murdered former nazis. Unfortunately, I believ the same happened in Israel with the firs wave of the Holocaust survivors and the second wave of the Soviet Jews. They changed completely the Jewish character of Israel with their hatred to Palestinians. Now they are the majority, and Israel, instead of being a place of wisdom, learning, philosophy and compassion is the militaristic state that manipulates the world into fighting for palestinian lands..
As I understand there was another reason for refusal to accept the newcomers from post-war Europe. Some of the Jewish leaders felt that ever so often the victims take on the worst traits of their tormentors. For example, there were gangs of Jews in Poland who systematically murdered former nazis. Unfortunately, I believ the same happened in Israel with the firs wave of the Holocaust survivors and the second wave of the Soviet Jews. They changed completely the Jewish character of Israel with their hatred to Palestinians. Now they are the majority, and Israel, instead of being a place of wisdom, learning, philosophy and compassion is the militaristic state that manipulates the world into fighting for palestinian lands..
There are no "Palestinian" lands. They chose war instead.
My father-in-law told me about them being called "sabonim" back then.
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