Last Sunday I had the chance to spend over four hours visiting the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The building looks deceptively small from the outside but it’s filled with high-end/high-tech/interactive exhibits which really sucked me right into the content and purpose of the museum. Also I learned that it’s certainly not just a “Jewish” or “Holocaust” Museum as it touches on numerous topics related to tolerance, terrorism and war. Overall I found the museum very interesting although somewhat biased in that I felt that it was a little on the pro American/neocon side of things by overlooking what I believe to be some of the less flattering actions and behavior of America as well as certain Jewish organizations. However over all it was an extremely positive experience although emotionally difficult at several points during my visit.

I felt rather touristy most of my time there, that is until we arrived at the Holocaust section of the museum at which point things internally became quite turbulent and emotional for me. The older I get the more sensitive to suffering I seem to be, when I see pain in somebody’s eyes or hear it in somebody’s voice or I guess in this case it’s been re-created in a space I seem to really take it on. I find it quite difficult to stay composed and I usually wind up an emotional wreck. It’s interesting because I never used to be this way so I’m not sure what’s happened over the last few years but I seem to have connected at a heart level and in a way that I was unable to or just didn’t when I was younger. Anyhow I was pretty upset at one point and couldn’t do anything but stand and try not to blabber in front of everyone in the museum, so I just stood still and stayed with the feeling as quietly as possible neither indulging it nor dismissing it, just trying to be present.

As indicated in my last post the fact that I’m a Reform convert sometimes brings into play the question of whether or not I’m actually a Jew and often times I am frustrated and angered by Orthodox institutions and individuals who try to mess with my sense of Jewishness. I’m able to fend them off rationally and throwback volleys of arguments and debate the point to my satisfaction. No one has ever been able to make me feel like I’m not a Jew albeit occasionally they make me feel like a second-class citizen forced to the back of the bus but never not like a Jew. The reason that I bring this up is because part of my being overwhelmed and reduced to tears in the Holocaust exhibit was a profound sense of not being Jewish. Don’t get me wrong I’m Jewish, I feel Jewish, I am Jewish but for a moment in that exhibit I had the clearest sense of suffering and pain imaginable and it felt as though I didn’t deserve to call myself a Jew because I wasn’t really touched by the holocaust directly in any way. Sure both my grandfathers fought in WWII but I haven’t lost any family and I haven’t had to deal with the aftermath or scars of being a survivor, a Jewish survivor.

My first girlfriend’s family was made up of Auschwitz survivors and I’ve seen the effect that the Holocaust can have even two generations after the fact. While in that exhibit I had numerous flashbacks to conversations and arguments between myself and her and I feel like a total asshole for my lack of compassion. I understood intellectually what it meant to be a survivor but I also criticized them for not being observant or practicing Jews. I mocked my ex and her siblings for the fact that I was more Jewishly literate than any of them were. I never tried to understand where they came from and why they might have been raised the way they were. I’m not trying to make excuses simply reevaluate my own preconceptions and ignorance about her and her family.

I don’t want to come off as claiming to have had the supreme ah-ha experience in that this makes me one with all Jews and survivors of the Holocaust because I’m certain that my experience does not even scratch the surface of what really went on in terms of the level of pain and cruelty that was inflicted and is carried on by people like my ex-girlfriend and her family. However I tasted enough of it to know that my suffering and my life’s pain has been insignificant when compared to what took place during the Holocaust and while in that museum I was shaken to a point of feeling too ashamed to consider myself a Jew. Yes the feeling has passed but I would be lying if I said that my sense of Jewishness didn’t take a serious hit that day.

And on that note I think I’ll end this post.

Be Well

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