The (un)making of History

There is this photo that I used to come across from time to time that was taken on the first day of the school year when my youngest son, Na’or was starting the second grade almost eight years ago. In the photo, Na’or, dressed in a white shirt and holding a little flag is waiting patiently in line with other classmates of his as none other than the President of the State of Israel, the symbolic leader of the Jewish state that came into being after 2000 years of exile, comes to bestow his blessings on them. Under normal circumstances, a photograph such as this should occupy a place far more honourable in one’s house than at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. But in this case, the President in question was Moshe Katzav, who has just been convicted of several cases of rape and sexual harassment and whose sentence – 7 years in prison, has just been pronounced.

Watching the events unfold on television reminded me of the photo, that we will, no doubt, come across again whilst cleaning for Pesach. During the past few years while the trial was going on, we often joked about the photo. Now I am seriously wondering what ought to be done with it.  Should I put it in an album with other pictures of Na’or growing up with the ironic caption “Na’or waiting to be greeted by a sex offender”?

Truth be told, this is no flippant matter. How should we relate to the seven years of Katzav’s presidential term? What will they do in the presidential residency or the Knesset? I imagine that there must be walls in those buildings adorned with framed photos of each of the presidents of Israel since 1948. Will Katzav’s photo remain there or will that of Shimon Peres, president number nine immediately follow that of Ezer Weizman, president number seven? If so, there will be more than a little poetic justice in this as Peres should have served as Israel’s eighth president if it hadn’t been for political wheeling and dealing on the part of the Shas party which led to Katzav’s surprise election.

But what will future generations being taken down the Corridors of Power think when they ponder over the photographs of Israel’s Heads of State? Will they wonder why there was no president during the years 2000-2007?

And anyway, how will this sorry episode be taught at schools? I remember seeing a Bible that was brought out for use in schools with a linear translation into English. As I flicked through it, I noticed that the story in the book of Genesis of Judah and Tamar, in which Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law dresses up as a prostitute to entice him into procreation after her husband died without leaving an issue and his brother Onan (whose name gave rise to the term onanism, a charge that has been laid at every football referee) failed to fulfill his brotherly duty of ensuring the continuation of the family line, was left untranslated.  The story, it seems, was deemed unsuitable to be taught to school kids. Will this be the fate of the Katzav saga? Will his name simply be omitted from history text books?

Around 12 years ago, a scandal erupted at the Yeshiva high school in which I teach. It turned out that the head of the Yeshiva, a man for whom hitherto, I had had only the greatest respect as an educator, had been sexually harassing pupils (this, of course is a boys-only school.) At first I and other teachers refused to believe the allegations which had found their way in to the press, but eventually it became apparent that people knew about them and after talking to former pupils of mine who confirmed that the allegations were indeed true, I realised that I had placed my trust and respect in a monster, albeit one with rabbinic ordination.

Fortunately, he did the one decent thing in his life; he took a plea bargain and confessed to the crimes. This prevented the holding of a trial which would have necessitated calling his victims, young men who were now students, army officers or newly-weds to the witness stand. Their identities would have been revealed and who knows what damage would have been done to their lives. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Where he is today I neither know nor care.

The point is that several years after this took place I noticed something interesting at school. Many schools in Israel hang photos of each year’s 12^th grade on the walls of their corridors. I have been into schools in which these photos, which include the faces not only of the pupils but of the teachers who taught them as well, stretch back over 30 years or more. They are an integral part of the school’s history and tradition. My school is no exception, except that one day I saw that the pictures of the years in which the sexually deviant head of the Yeshiva had been in charge had vanished from the walls.

This was an particularly Orwellian moment for me. I suddenly felt like Winston Smith in 1984, working in the records department of the Ministry of Truth, whose job it was to go through the archives of newspapers and cut out the photos of those former heroes of the state who had been discredited. His job, basically, was to change history.

The trouble is, in the case of Katzav and of the former Yeshiva head of my school, that when they are deleted from history, they take the memories of others with them. Meeting the president of one’s country should be an unforgettable moment of one’s life, one that should be treasured, recorded and related time after time. How many people in Israel will now try to put behind them the fact that they once shook hands with a sex offender in the guise of their Head of State? Will they too hide the evidence of that meeting in a kitchen drawer? And in removing the pictures from the walls of my school, not only was the existence of the former Yeshiva head denied but so too was that of the hundreds of boys who happened to be there at the same time and whose photos appeared alongside his.

Rape is one of the most terrible of crimes. Katzav abused his power and the women who worked for him. Yet the fall-out from his actions will last far longer than the seven years during which he will sit in jail and all of us who lived through his term of office should feel sullied by him.