There was a touching sky-high tribute marking Israel’s 75 years of Independence.
As several Jews express their joy over their nation’s independence, Israel is going through a tumultuous time politically.
There are several protests over a proposal dealing with judicial reform. But Wednesday night was when several people came together just to celebrate their unity.
“A modern state. Powerful, flying F-35s and F-16s, you know, being able to defend itself,” Ike Fisher said. “I don’t think they can possibly imagine it.”
Fisher said that Wednesday was a day that would have been unfathomable to his aunts, Sarah, her son Issac, Esther, Leah and Pesha, who lived and died in what is present-day Ukraine.
“You had Germans coming across and just wiping out people in front of pits using machine guns and putting them into back of vans and gassing them,” Fisher said.
No one knows exactly what happened to the family, but Fisher’s father, Asher, was studying in what was then the land of Israel, and never saw his sisters or nephew again.
“My father was like many Holocaust survivors, he never said a word about his life in Europe,” Fisher said.
But his father, who died in the 1970s, did see this: the vote in the United Nations to divide what was known as Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.
It passed 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions.
A full declaration came six months later.
And now, on this Independence Day 2023, as members of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation celebrated in Caesaria, north of Tel Aviv, they said they know some things haven’t changed.
Back in South Florida, swastikas are drawn on playground equipment and signs in Weston and scrawled into the dust on a parked car in Dania Beach. Antisemitic flyers have also been tossed onto several South Florida driveways.
“Antisemitism is a very old hate, which just demonstrates the need for a sense of community,” Fisher said.
As nationwide celebrations mark the 75th year of statehood, many in Israel said it’s difficult not to wonder how a Jewish homeland could have changed everything for their loved ones. For their own Esther, Pasha, Leah, Sarah and Isaac.
“There would have some been alternatives, somebody to protect the Jewish community,” Fisher said. “The world was at war. We don’t know what would have happened.”
Fisher was named after little Isaac. Had he lived, he would be in 90s.
It was a theme that was heard all week long: What if there had been a state of Israel in the 1930s? How would world history have been different?
The partition, the two-state solution; Arab and Israel, is something that has not come to pass. It is an ongoing conflict.
The first nation to recognize the state of Israel was the United States.
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