I
stand here before you, burning memories in my heart, great hopes in my
soul.I carry profound pain concerning the past. And look with confident
eyes to the future.I immigrated to Israel in 1934, at the age of 11. In 1942, most of the inhabitants of my town were burned alive. Had my family delayed their emigration by 8 years, we would have been exterminated.
A year before the creation of Israel, in 1947, I was recruited to the Haganah headquarters.
Since then, Israel has been attacked seven times in its 65 years of existence. We were outmanned and outgunned. The choice was to win or to die. I participated as well in confronting another enemy – the desert.
We won. We made it bloom. No other people experienced anything similar.
I have my memories, but I carry my dreams. I did not come to reminisce, but to continue to dream.
People age. Dreams are ageless. We changed. Europe changed. I came to express our admiration for the changed Europe. Europe picked itself up in the wake of the worst of world wars.
It divorced its past, it created a new Europe. You converted the divided Europe of the last thousand years, to the united Europe of today. You replaced military camps with scientific campuses. Europe which knew racism now considers it a crime. I know that you are facing an economic crisis, but your skies are without clouds of war. A European country introduced the Nobel Prize. And now a united Europe won it rightly.
Europe corrected its mistakes and is building a better world.
For us, the Europe of the Shoah is becoming a Europe supporting our renaissance.
Friends, the idea of the rebirth of Israel was born on European soil.
In the past thousand years, more Jews lived in Europe than in any other continent.
Alas, more Jews were murdered in Europe in the last hundred years than in the preceding two thousand
