The Lucky Ones

By Rebeca Permuth de Sabbagh

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I can go back in time, when Yizkor was, second to breaking the fast, one of the most anticipated moments in Yom Kippur. It was the time when those of us who didn’t have a deceased relative were asked to leave the synagogue. We were allowed to go out to the garden with our best friends, to chat—and possibly don´t return at all to the service, with the excuse that we hadn’t noticed the Rabbi had already announced we could come back in.

We wondered, briefly and in half jest, what happens in there?, during that Memorial service. It was something mystical, its secrecy sparked our curiosity, but not enough to defy neither authority nor superstition, to even peak inside for a brief moment. Anyhow, the fasting hours certainly passed more quickly outside, laughing and chit chatting in lighthearted company,  with all the others lucky enough to be remain outside.

I’ve now spent five years being among those who stay inside the synagogue. The mystique has been revealed. So what actually happens inside? Sadly, I found out. It is nothing cabalistic or secret, but it is indeed solemn and piercing. Each of us gets to say out loud the Hebrew name of our loved ones. Yes, that alter ego, that name half hidden in life but wholly sacred in death—that becomes the bridge between memory and eternity.

Belonging to this small congregation of the diaspora in Guatemala, the weight of this ritual becomes amplified.  It allows each of us, with neither haste nor hurry, to have the opportunity both to say and to listen, to the names of a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter. The silent nods of recognition of others in the room, those gestures, nearly imperceptible, offer profound comfort: the assurance that others remember too, that they also carry the grief of wounds that time does not heal.

Jewish tradition holds that in life we are named as children of our mothers, and in death, as children of our fathers; but when my turn comes, I cannot follow the rule. For five years I have said the same name, and still saying it out loud breaks me like that first time: Beile bat Rivka. My mother’s name.

For me, it daily feels like my mother remains alive, so it is only fitting to still name her as “the daughter of her mother”. Her light still shines, as tangible as the candle I lit just that eve before  Kol Nidre,  at the entrance of this synagogue that I have been attending to for over 50 years. To remember her this way, is to bind myself to a chain of Jewish women whose strength  and resilience run through me. My mother was Beile bat Rivka, and I am Rivka bat Beile.

I descend from my great-grandmother Beile, murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto by the typhus imposed by the Nazi regime—her name carried on by my mother. I descend from my Bobe Rivka, who had the courage and vision to leave Poland, even if that meant never to see her parents again. She secured life for those of us who came after. Through these amazing women, my identity is anchored. I inherit both their grief and defiance.

When the service ends, I step out for a breath of air and see the ‘lucky ones’ outside. I see them as I once was not so long ago—chatting, exchanging greetings, perhaps not to meet again until the next Yom Kippur.

But today, as we near two years since October 7th, this bitter anniversary strikes differently. We should all be inside. There are no more “lucky ones” with the privilege of standing apart. Those brutally murdered that day in Israel, every one of our brave chayalim who have since fallen defending our homeland and our people, and those murdered in the diaspora under the call to “globalize the intifada”—like this very Yom Kippur in Manchester, outside their synagogue—are all our brothers and sisters.

None of us can remain outside any longer, on the comfort of the side tracks,  while others carry this enormous weight. We are one people, bound together by the obligation not only to remember- but to fight.

Yizkor—for each of their souls.