10 Oct THE MEANING OF AM YISRAEL CHAI

We always knew
how to die together.
The time has come
for us to know also
how to live together.
When the Jews of
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
were liberated on April
20th 1945, they sang
Hatikvah. At the end of
the anthem, British Army
Chaplain Rabbi Leslie
Hardman, cried out, “Am
Yisrael Chai – the People
of Israel live!”
When Golda Meir
visited the Great
Synagogue in Moscow as
the Israeli Ambassador in
1948, the crowd of
50,000 ecstatically
welcomed her with
shouts of “Am Yisrael Chai!”
In 1965, in order to energize the

Soviet Jewry movement, Shlomo
Carlebach was asked to compose a
song. He wrote the famous version of
Am Yisrael Chai.
In 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu
visited Wannsee Villa in Berlin, where
the Final Solution for the destruction
of Europe’s Jews was planned in 1942
by Hitler and leaders
of the Third Reich.
In the visitors’ book
he wrote just three
words in Hebrew
and then translated
them into English:
“Am Yisrael Chai –
The people of Israel
live.”
As a slogan, Am
Yisrael Chai affirms
that despite the
systematic attempts
to exterminate and annihilate the
Jewish people, thanks to God’s guiding
hand and the tenacity and resilience of

the Jewish People, we
stubbornly persevere. God has
made an eternal covenant with
the Jewish People; He has
their back.
Am Yisrael Chai is also a
prayer, a longing for a united
Jewish people living together
in safety, security and with
unity and harmony.
Explaining the words “I will take you
to Me as a people [in Hebrew ‘l’am’]
(Exodus 6:7), Rabbi Soloveitchik
writes:
The political-historical unity as a

nation is based on the conclusion
of the covenant in Egypt, which
occurred even prior to the giving
of the Torah at Sinai. This
covenant forced upon us all one
uniform historical fate. The
Hebrew word עם Am, nation, is
identical to the Hebrew word עם
Im, with. Our fate of unity
manifests itself through a
historical indispensable union…
No Jew can renounce his part of
the unity…Religious Jews or
irreligious Jews, all are included
in one nation, which stands
lonesome and in misery in a
large and often antagonistic
world…
In the ashes of the crematoria,
the ashes of the Hasidim and
pious Jews were put together
with the ashes of the radicals and
the atheists. And we all must
fight the enemy, who does not

differentiate between those who
believe in God and those who reject
Him.
The secret to a strong Am Yisrael is a
sense of Im Yisrael, being in it together,
united, loyal, giving one another
the benefit of the doubt and
judging each other favorably.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau,
standing in Auschwitz-Birkenau
at the March of the Living
several years ago said, “We
always knew how to die
together. The time has come for
us to know also how to live
together.”
During this most difficult time,
may the people of Israel learn to
live with one another in harmony
and unity. Am Yisrael Chai!