Greetings, Friends, from Eastern Europe.
Yesterday, I spent the day in Budapest, and I had the occasion to see the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe. Its architecture towers beautifully in a highly populated neighborhood with restaurants, shops, and people walking about — both residents and tourists.
That very neighborhood is, of course, painfully, the area once known and experienced as the Jewish ghetto. Before Hungary was occupied by the Nazis, 825,000 Jews lived in Budapest, but during that occupation, half of that population was deported and systemically killed in the Holocaust.
As we walked through the neighborhood, I was struck by the contrast of remembering and honoring the reality that people were restricted to this very neighborhood, grieving for loved ones while knowing that their own death was imminent, yet today, it stands as a bustling location of life and memory, with a synagogue that remains and people pausing to honor loved ones, eat, and shop in that very neighborhood. Today, that feels like a miracle, yet hundreds of thousands of Jews lived a markedly excruciating and contrasted reality right here.
I thought of Jewish loved ones who I hold dear, aware that today, anti-Semitism continues to be a threat in my country and around the world. We must speak out about this when we see it and hear it.
I thought of loved ones who are connected to people around this world where violence, genocide, restriction, and starvation are underway now. Can our collective memory and collective life move toward collective action to protect them?
Over 40,000 people have died in Gaza in the last 10 months — 1 in 55 people — and many of them are children. Nearly everyone is displaced while the basic infrastructure of life has been destroyed across the Gaza Strip. Learn more here.
Over 14,000 people have died in Sudan in the last year, and many of them are children. 8.6 million people are currently displaced from their homes. Learn more here.
All of these loved ones deserve our collective action now — our speaking, our honoring, our interrupting, our protesting, our caring, our financial giving, our policy-crafting, and our protecting.
Smuggling Grace 