Some Benninga
family history. Yad
Vashem page largely written by my sister Chana Arnon-Benninga.
My mother, Helena
Benninga-Frank (1913-2008), recorded her memoirs with
the loving help and editing by my son Noah Benninga (this is a large
file—35mb! ). She writes about her youth in Holland, the
wartime in the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese concentration camps, moving to
America …
vComments by Prof.
Aleida Assmann of the
University of Konstanz. Her praise of Noah
and his work starts on page 16 of this moving essay.
Noah Benninga is a Holocaust
scholar. Here is his essay on Auschwitz
(in German, for a German-Jewish encyclopedia).
Sara
Benninga: My favorite daughter. Artist,
idealist, scholar
vSara in action in Silwan. Silwan is an Arab
neighborhood of Jerusalem, at the edge of the Old City. 50,000 Arabs and a few dozens of Israeli
settlers. The settlers have built an
illegal building, Beit Yonathan,
which the Jerusalem Municipality, in contravention of numerous court orders,
refuses destroy. Here are a few tapes
that show the action in the neighborhood:
Ø Israeli Border Police occupy the
roof of an Arab building in order to “protect” the Jewish settlers. They leave garbage all over the roof, pee and
shit in the corners. The Arab residents
who are “hosting” the unwanted Police are living in the building below. A fuzzy YouTube.
Ø Border Police “requested” coffee
from the building residents. They did
this by breaking the windows of the door and terrorizing the building
residents. The fear of the residents is
evident in this low-quality YouTube.
Ø Sara plays with girls in the
neighborhood. One of the Israeli
activists writes: “The [Arab] residents
of Silwan recognize us by our Sheikh Jarrah t-shirts.
They welcome us to the neighborhood.
The girls ask for Sara.”
Zvi Benninga: Before doing his three years of IDF service, Zvi took an extra year to do community service in Kiryat Menahem, one of Jewish
Jerusalem’s poorest neighborhoods. He is
now a student and is active along with Sara in Sheikh Jarrah,
Silwan, and other activities. Like many of the Jewish protesters, his
activities have their roots in a traditional Jewish upbringing and a deep
concern for Jewish ethics. [Our family
keeps a kosher home. All of our children
went to religious elementary schools and attended an orthodox synagogue in
Jerusalem. Many of the activists in
Sheikh Jarrah have similar backgrounds (see an interesting
essay by Dr. Donniel Hartman, an orthodox rabbi
and the head of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem). ]
vZvi’s year of community service was part of the Bronfman
program. Here is an essay he wrote
for the Bronfman journal on military service in Israel.
vZvi quoted in the Boston
Globe, 22feb2010
vOpen letter to Eli Wiesel, April 2010
Lauren Caulk: A gifted young photographer (almost my
niece).
