I stood beside my partner Dave outside my family’s house and rang the doorbell to the tune of “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.” It was the first night of Hanukkah but unlike previous family celebrations, the current political climate had indisputably altered our family dynamic. My mother is a holocaust survivor; my dad fought in the Israeli Army. This past June my brother and his now fiance, Kristine, survived a terrorist attack at the Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Our Jewish identities have been challenged, threatened, and compromised time and time again. As we lit the Menorah, we stood in silence unable to even make eye contact. The flicker of the candles illuminated my family in a way that made them look like strangers. This Hanukkah, it felt like we had enough oil to keep the flames of fear burning for years to come.
During World War II, my grandparents were captured and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. While there, my grandmother gave birth and shortly thereafter, a camp guard ripped the child out of her arms and threw it into a fire. That act snatched away the small embers of hope that still remained in my grandparents.
After years of struggling against Nazis, starvation, and typhus epidemics, my grandmother became pregnant once again. She bore the pregnancy while bearing witness to the deaths of tens of thousands around her. For the child, they remained in the camp even after it’s liberation. In September of 1945, my grandmother finally gave birth on soil drenched with death: that brave baby girl would become my mother. When my mother’s parents emigrated to the United States in the late 40s, they did so in search of a better life. They arrived as refugees to the warm embrace of Lady Liberty who helped breathe new life into a future they didn’t feel worthy of.
My father was born in communist-ruled Romania but emigrated to Israel with his family soon after. As a child, he worked on a kibbutz before enlisting in the Israeli Defense Forces at the age of 18. While in the army, he was taught of the evil and terror that awaited him in neighboring countries. He fought in the Six-Day War, a battle that pitted Israel against all of its neighbors and saw things that, even now, has only hinted at. He saved every penny that he ever made and as soon as he finished his service, he traveled to all the lands that he had only read about in books. After growing up in two different countries that had built fences around the possibilities of his future, he broke out and became a citizen of the world. He slept in airports, on park benches, and in bus stations, navigating through each country by talking to locals and following their lead. He’d fly multiple trips on the Concord, go to multiple Olympic ceremonies, and he even climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Any country my dad was taught to hate, he would visit. He visited the pyramids in Egypt, played chess in Aleppo, and taught English to school kids in Indonesia. Over his lifetime, he’d go on to fill up more than a dozen passports. In January, my dad boarded a plane and made his way to another historic event: the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.
I have spent the majority of my life marinating in the fear of terrorism. My nightmares began at the age of 10 after Columbine and continued with 9/11, until any place I had ever held sacred was eventually connected to an attack, from movie theatres to concert venues. On a Tuesday morning in September, I watched a cloud of smoke trail over New York City: the North Tower was burning. At 12, I didn’t process what I was watching. It wasn’t until I sat in a stunned world history classroom, watching the towers fall, that I understood. The innocence of our childhood crumbled along with the towers that day. I sat in half empty classes because parents were afraid to send their kids to school. I walked home that day with my best friend since the 5th grade, Nadia. She is Muslim. As a kid, I would tell her about this dreaded day called Yom Kippur in which I had to fast for the entire day. She would immediately counter with this dreaded month called Ramadan in which she had to fast for an entire month. We talked to each other about everything, but that afternoon we walked home in silence. It was hard for me to understand how and when things would get better.
Later that year, we walked to meet her mom at the Starbucks in our neighborhood. Her mom was always at that Starbucks. Before we left, Nadia’s mom gave each of the baristas a Christmas gift with an accompanying card; she left another stack of gifts for the employees that weren’t working that shift. There was Santa Claus, Hanukkah Harry, and then there was Nadia’s mom. For her gift giving wasn’t part of an act or a tradition, it was love in it’s purest form. I saw firsthand what it meant to invest in your community. Nadia and her mom didn’t teach me what it meant to be Muslim: they taught me what it meant to be human, to care, to grieve, to love and to hope.
On June 28th, 2016, my brother Adam and his girlfriend Kristine were at the Atatürk Airport in Turkey when terrorists launched an attack that would go on to kill 45 people and injure hundreds more. My personal world and the world at large felt like they were crumbling, and I began to retreat within myself, terrified of the unknown. I obsessively sifted through Reddit threads that showed security cam footage of the gunmen storming the terminal and loops of the bombs going off. Initially, I was consumed by my fear of the men that had executed the attack, but then slowly my focus drifted to the quiet moments before the chaos. The man leisurely pulling his bag behind him, the girl pushing her friend through the terminal on a luggage cart, the family embracing their son as he turns to catch his flight. Each moment was interrupted by the sound of gunfire and the wave of fire that swept through the terminal. What were the last words that they said to one another? Did they know that they were loved? What dreams were they robbed of? I wrote a piece entitled “Three Little Dots” about the storm of dread and anxiety that had infiltrated my body as my brother texted me during the attack.
Then I got the letters. Their origins were diverse: Germany, Pakistan, Egypt, and even Turkey. But their message was the same: hope. For the first time in my life, it felt like I was seeing the world through my father’s eyes. I finally had a face and a story to put to the countries I had only read about on breaking news chyrons. As the messages continued to come, Adam called to inform us that he and Kristine would be continuing their trip through Europe. I sent my brother screencaps of the messages that I’d receive and hoped he had a chance to breathe it all in. “The world is with you!” I said.
Our families begged them to cut their trip short, but my dad was the lone voice that implored them to continue on. I asked him why. “If they come home now, they may never leave again,” he said. He was right. In the heat of our panic, we had succumbed to our own fears and instincts to retreat from danger.
Our family felt the ripples of the terrorist attack long after Adam and Kristine arrived home. Each of us used the proximity of the event to reaffirm our own skewed perspectives of the world. Many family members now had a direct confirmation of their worst fears–that the headlines would feature names they’d recognize and love. That fear had seeped into the foundation of our family. For the world, and for my family, the question now is, “Where do we go from here?”
When my dad returned home from the inauguration, we greeted each other in silence. That void peaked on the evening of Shabbat when the news broke of the executive order that banned refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This executive order hit close to home as both my mother and father immigrated to America fleeing the hardships and tragedy and now immigrants were being denied that same opportunity. As my dad and I sat in silence, he spoke then I spoke. Not in extremities but of vulnerabilities, we spoke of our fears and for the first time in more than a year we spoke to each other, not over each other.
The following Sunday morning in January, my brother and I drove with my dad on the 405 and we talked politics. My dad has made this journey many times before so we followed behind him as he led the way to the Tom Bradley Terminal at LAX. When we arrived, there were already thousands of protesters outside of the baggage claim area. Seven months after the terrorist attack at the Istanbul Atatürk Airport terminal, I found myself standing beside my brother hours after an executive order was issued by the president of the United States targeting refugees and immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations. We saw families consoling each other waiting to hear from loved ones that had been detained. Our family’s story was born out of persecution, loss, and heartache so the pain on display at the airport was familiar. As my dad looked on, my brother and I stood holding a sign together. “Two Jewish Brothers Standing with Our Muslim Brothers.” We stood in that terminal bearing witness to the pain that our country could inflict at the stroke of a pen. As we stood there, a Palestinian couple in their early 30s came up to my brother and I. They had tears in their eyes and without saying a word, opened their arms wide to give us a hug. We held onto one another in silence, and I could hear their faint whimpers. The mom gestured down to her daughter who couldn’t have been older than 4. “Look at their sign.” The little girl looked up at the sign and sounded out the words. “They’re here with you!” Her dad said. The girl smiled at me. I saw my mom’s reflection in her eyes.
Noah Reich is a freelance writer by day, a reader by night and a humanitarian at heart.
