Acceptance speech for Eliav-Sartawi Award by Barbara Sofer

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Acceptance speech for Eliav-Sartawi Award

by Barbara Sofer

13 November 2008

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JERUSALEM – Good evening. Erev tov. Masa alhir. Greetings to all who have come from near and far.

I live in Jerusalem. I vote in Jerusalem. And I work in this remarkable city not far from here (the International YMCA). My office is in the centre of Jerusalem, a mere ten-minute walk away.

I was at my office on 27 January 2002, a winter day with especially clear blue skies. My cousins Mark and Rena were in town visiting from New York. Their visit was not just a usual tour. It was a sort of pilgrimage of thanksgiving.

Four months earlier, on 11 September, Mark was at work early, in his law office, in the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York. When the first plane struck, he started walking down 38 flights of stairs. He was in the stairwell so he didn't hear the announcement that everything was under control, he could go back to his desk.

And he was already in the lobby of the building when the second plane struck. He left his car, and took the last subway out.

By the time Rena called in a panic, Mark was safely out of the building.

They were grateful, and they wanted to express their thanks to God here in Jerusalem. They brought their daughters Loren (15) and Jamie (12) newly Bat Mitzvah, with them.

On the last day of the visit, the girls wanted to buy Israeli sandals downtown near my office. We decided to meet after they had finished their shoe shopping. Anyone who has shopped with teenagers understands why…

Mark phoned me from a shoe store on Jaffa Road, near King George Street, less than two minutes from my office. I grabbed my phone in one hand and in the other, a manuscript I was editing to return to Mark's stepmother in New York. It was the story of her rescue in the Holocaust in Berlin by a woman named Maria.

I remember looking up at the blue sky and thinking what a magnificent day it was. I felt ebullient and started skipping towards my cousins. Suddenly, a blast rocked me backwards. A black cloud rose above the area of the shoe store. I was still far enough away so that I wasn't hurt. The street was instantly closed and pedestrians held back. I begged the police to no avail to let me through so I could find my cousins.

When my mind cleared, I made my way to a small hospital downtown. There I first found Mark. Rena and Lauren have been taken to another hospital.

Jamie, the 12-year-old was supposedly in the next room in the same hospital as Mark, but I didn't recognise her at first. Her face was distorted; her eye was bulging.

The downtown hospital doesn't have an eye department. Jamie needed the internationally recognised experts at Hadassah Hospital. Soon Jamie and I were riding together in an ambulance, sirens screaming. I kept promising her that everything would be all right.

At last, we arrived at Hadassah Hospital. Jamie was hurriedly carried into the emergency room.

Until that moment, I'd been the calm one. But once on the terra firma of Hadassah Hospital, I started to lose it. I demanded immediate care for Jamie. Where in the world was the ophthalmologist, I wanted to know? A young woman tapped me on the shoulder. "Hello." She said. "I'm here."

I looked at her nametag and I understood.

My cousin Jamie was blown up by a young Palestinian woman, a medic who entered Jerusalem on an ambulance. She strapped a pack of explosives on her back, killed an old man and injured 100 others, Jews and Arabs. She also killed herself. Her head rolled nearby my cousins on Jaffa Road.

At Hadassah Hospital, the ophthalmologist was also a young Palestinian woman. She would repair Jamie's sight.

There we have it my friends—on one hand, the wantonness and the waste, on the other, the hope and the healing.

We have to choose.

Which will it be? Choose life, urges God in the Bible. Choose the blessing, not the curse.

We should be pooling our many talents and turning our lives here together in this region as a blessing and not as a curse.

That process of change has to begin with a search for common ground. What a grand quest that is.

I want to thank John Marks, Search for Common Ground, and the committee that selected my Jerusalem Post column "Beyond the Comfort Zone" for this prestigious award. I want to thank the editors of the Jerusalem Post for giving me a soapbox to express myself, and my faithful readers for their encouragement. I thank you all, my family and friends, and particularly my six-year old grandson Tzur, a first grader, for being here at this great moment in my life.

I am grateful to God, the true "Builder of Jerusalem", as we say in Psalm 147, the one who must ultimately bind up our sorrows.

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*Barbara Sofer of Jerusalem writes magazine and newspaper articles, fiction and scripts for the short films she directs and produces. She is an Orthodox Jew, a feminist, a passionate speaker about Judaism, women's lives and Israel and one of three recipients of the 2008 Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle East Journalism. Barbara Sofer may be reached at: bsofer@netvision.net.il and www.barbarasofer.com. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service, 11 November 2008, www.commongroundnews.org.
Copyright permission is granted for publication.


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