DV Journal

Artist Judy Rohtbaut of Wynnewood was among the 1,000 or so people who attended the Oct. 7 remembrance at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley on Sunday.

“It was very powerful,” said Rohtbaut, whose parents were Holocaust survivors. “And [it] so strongly brought the message home of how Israel needs support.”

That was the goal of the ceremony, featuring music, prayers and talks, both in person and on video, about the experiences of survivors, hostage families, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers.

October 27 was the one-year anniversary of the Hamas massacre, according to the Hebrew calendar. The event was sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

The gathering also featured a moment of silence was observed for those who died in the Tree of Life synagogue mass murder in Pittsburgh six years ago that day.

“I would have liked to come here under different circumstances. Prior to the war, I had a very ordinary life as an Israeli citizen,” said Eldar Mayder, a reserve IDF soldier told the attendees. “I worked. I spent my weekends at the beach, playing volleyball or surfing.”

“On Oct. 7, 2023, on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the Hamas terrorist organization launched a deadly genocide attack against Israeli men, women and children. And everything changed.”

He awoke to sirens blaring at 6:30 in the morning, contacted the leader of his unit, grabbed his weapon, and headed to his army base.

The Nova music festival where terrorists slaughtered many young attendees is the topic of a drawing by IDF soldier and artist Iftach Mashal.

“After a few days of fighting, we were able to stop this horrendous attack. We went into the Gaza strip to save the hostages and bring those who committed this massacre to justice, to make sure they will never be able to threaten Israel again.”

A member of the unit tasked with rescuing the 251 hostages, including Americans, he noted that every Gaza house they went into and even incubators for babies in hospitals “contained unprecedented amounts of weapons.”

The huge sums of money spent on weapons could have gone to help the people of Gaza, he said.

Nearly every house had a copy of Adolf Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf” translated into Arabic, he added.

“It’s a bestseller in Gaza,” Mayder said. “We found thousands of copies of this book.” Hamas “has filled the minds of an entire generation raised to hate Jews,” he said.

The Israeli soldiers also found photo albums with “pictures of kids holding AK-47s (rifles) and wearing suicide vests.”

He compared the Hamas terrorists to those who crashed planes into the World Trade Center.

In March, Mayder received permission to travel to the U.S. to talk about the war with students on university campuses, including Harvard and M.I.T. He was “surprised by the level of deep ignorance and false information about Israel” among students at “the best universities in the world.”

They want to “boycott, divest and sanction the only Jewish state,” he said. Mayder, talked to LGBTQ protestors for Hamas who “the minute they step into Gaza would be thrown off roofs.” But Jewish professors and students are not safe and afraid to wear a yarmulke in public.

The IDA has the “highest moral values” of any army on the planet, he said.

Experts like John Spencer, who teaches Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, cite the IDA warning civilians to evacuate ahead of an attack, putting their own soldiers at risk.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I assure you of one thing, we will win,” Mayder said to applause. “First, we don’t have any other choice. Israel is our homeland. Second, our enemies will learn the lessons (enemies) from the ancient Babylonians to the Seleucids and the Persians, the Inquisition, the perpetrators of pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Nazis have learned for the last 4,000 years… Israel will not bend…Am Yisrael Chai [Israel lives].”

Members of hostage families lit candles for hope and for the 1,200 who died in the attack.

Sorrowful drawings from IDA soldier Iftach Mashal that depict the Oct. 7 massacre were on display, several with forlorn, abandoned teddy bears, a reminder of the children lost. The pictures showed scenes from the kibbutzim where terrorists killed innocent residents, the Nova music festival and combat in Gaza. While Mashal was unable to attend the ceremony, two other IDF soldiers read from their unit’s war diary. Some 762 IDF soldiers have died in the ongoing conflict as of Oct. 27.

Hostage families lit candles in the hope that their loved ones will return.

Young students from Perelman Jewish Day School sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, to close the somber ceremony.

Rohtbaut, whose portraits of 40 of the hostages are part of a traveling exhibit that began in the Weitzman National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia, told DVJournal that, a year later, the horror of the event was still difficult to process.

“It’s just so shocking. Who would ever imagine this would happen?”

Henry Kissinger has died age 100. I remember him through his archrival, James Schlesinger.

April 24, 1980, was a bleak day for the United States. It was the day we lost helicopters and eight men in the desert during Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the hostages held by Iran.

Two Washington titans were out of office, chafing at their distance from power, their inability to take action and the attendant sense of impotence. They also disliked — no, hated — each other.

These giants were Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. Kissinger had been a national security adviser and secretary of state. He shaped geopolitical thinking for the latter half of the 20th century. He informed foreign policy as no other has.

Schlesinger had been the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense and the first secretary of energy.

I had started covering Schlesinger as a journalist when he was at the AEC in 1971, and we formed a friendship that would last until his death.

I created The Energy Daily in 1973 and later Defense Week, high-impact newsletters dominant in their fields at the time. I wanted to know what was going on with the failed rescue attempt. Although Defense Week was weekly, we frequently put out daily supplements. Along with The Energy Daily, these were hand-delivered in Washington. We got the news out fast.

I had helped Schlesinger create the Department of Energy as a sounding board and, at times, as the public voice of his frustration with the Carter administration — where Schlesinger, a Republican, didn’t always fit.

I called Schlesinger to get the story on that fateful day in the Iranian desert. He astounded me by telling me that he was in close contact with Kissinger. “Henry has better sources than I do on this,” he said.

I remember that sentence verbatim because it was extraordinary to hear Schlesinger refer to Kissinger by his first name. I had never heard it, and, except for that day when I heard Schlesinger refer to Kissinger as “Henry” all day, I never heard it again. Before and afterward, it was always just “Kissinger,” often preceded by a derogatory qualification.

“Henry may know.” “I’ll ask Henry.” “Let me see what Henry has heard.” Schlesinger had an open line to Kissinger, asking questions on my behalf all day.

I assumed that the rift between two of the most formidable figures in Washington was bridged. Some said this animosity went back to their time at Harvard.

Certainly, it reached its zenith during the Nixon administration when both men were high officeholders with considerable input into national policy.

In 1984, Kissinger published one of the volumes of his memoirs. I asked Schlesinger if he had read the book. (He seemed to read everything.) He responded with a string of invective against Kissinger. Obscenities often flowed from Schlesinger, but this was epic. So much for first names and respect that one day of entente.

When Kissinger famously told The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn at a party that he was a “secret swinger,” he wasn’t far off. Kissinger loved the social world and his place in it.

By contrast, Schlesinger entertained sparingly at his modest home in Arlington, Virginia. My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I were there frequently, and it was always takeout Chinese food and lots of Scotch.

In all the years I knew him, Schlesinger only came to my home once, although I must have gone to his scores of times — especially toward the end of his life when he liked to talk about the British Empire with me and European history with Linda.

That one visit to an apartment I had in the center of Washington wasn’t pure socializing either. The deputy editor of The Economist, the legendary Norman Macrae, was the guest of honor. Schlesinger, then secretary of energy, was keen to meet Macrae, so he and his wife, Rachel, came.

In government, Kissinger thought Schlesinger was too hardline, too reckless in his attitude toward the Soviet Union, Iran and, later, Saddam Hussein. Schlesinger thought Kissinger’s reputation was overblown and he enjoyed the machinations of negotiation without regard to the end result.

I never formally met Kissinger. But at a dinner in Washington where Kissinger had spoken and was taking questions afterward, someone at my table asked me to ask his question on the grounds that asking questions was my job.

I thought it was a stupid question, but I asked it anyway. Kissinger glowered at me, so everyone could see who had asked the question, and declared, “That is a stupid question.”

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The last time I talked with Bob Dole it was nearing sunset on a glorious late October afternoon in 1988. On that occasion, he displayed his trademark trait, the quality that brought him attention and, all too often, got him in trouble: His sense of humor.

It’s a quality most politicians highly value, but which is sadly lacking in today’s political arena.

It all began on Monday, March 7, 1988. I was a young TV reporter and the Kansas senator was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. (His second of three tries.) Dole was doing a “fly around” on the eve of the next day’s Super Tuesday when 20 states (and American Samoa) would hold their primaries and caucuses. I was waiting when his plane touched down in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which would be voting the next day.

Dole walked up to me on the tarmac, extended his left hand, and said, “Hi, Bob Dole. How am I looking here tomorrow?” I told him my father and then-fiancé were planning on voting for him. He asked, “What about you?” I smiled and with suitable vagueness for a journalist answered, “We’ll see.”

Fast forward seven months to the lovely late Indian summer evening I mentioned earlier. Dole was doing yet another round of fly-around interviews, this time on behalf of George H. W. Bush, the Republican nominee, who would be facing Democrat Michael Dukakis at the ballot box a few days later.

Once again there was the outstretched left hand and the friendly greeting. “Hello, I’m Bob Dole,” he said. He did not remember me. Not that I expected he would. I was one of literally hundreds of reporters he had spoken to since our last encounter. And let’s be honest: When you’ve met one reporter, you’ve met them all.

Still, I prompted his memory, hoping it might spark a faint recollection. “Yes, we met here at this very airport last March on the day before Super Tuesday. I told you my father and fiancé were voting for you.”

Dole instantly shot back: “You needed a bigger family.”

That lightning-quick retort was witty, slightly self-deprecating, even a tad charming. It was vintage Bob Dole.

There were times—a lot of times, in fact—when his sense of humor landed him in hot water. There were occasions when he went too far, when the joke was more ferocious than funny, more dour than droll.

You certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his tongue when he was angry, either. Remember what he famously snapped at Bush on live TV during the heat of the ’88 primary campaign? “Stop lying about my record.”

And it didn’t take a psychiatrist to see much disappointment was festering just below the surface, hurts that often came out in ways that bordered on self-pity. That less-than-flattering side of his personality was brilliantly captured in Dan Aykroyd’s devastatingly spot-on “Saturday Night Live” impersonation.

Yet there was far more of the “good Dole” humor than the bad. It was filled with warmth, even a passion, that made this most inside of all Washington Insiders human and approachable. You may not agree with what he said, but you couldn’t keep a smile from spreading across your face when you heard him say it.

Much has changed about politics in general and Washington in particular since Dole’s day. Jocularity has gone the way of the dodo. What passes for humor today is using laughter to belittle the opposition. Politicians rarely, if ever, make fun of themselves anymore. In a climate where everyone sees themselves as utterly right and everyone who disagrees with them as totally wrong, DC is now as merry as Josef Stalin’s Moscow.

That’s truly a pity. Because in an age when there is so little to be amused about, a little laughter would go a long way. Our political leaders could lead by example by laughing at themselves, their flaws, foibles, and failures a little more often.

“You needed a bigger family.” Thanks for the chuckle, Senator Dole. It’s still making me smile 33 years later.

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