From the Editor

Jane Liddell-King One of the pleasures of editing this magazine is reading the contributions as they arrive. The final paragraph of Jo’s evocative piece on the Isle of Man surely touches us all as we prepare for the Seder and to ponder the meaning of freedom. Having been born in the wake of the Second World War and brought up in a family of pogrom survivors who escaped on Russian passports, and having friends and neighbours who were Holocaust survivors, I wonder whether social justice can ever be achieved. What is the fatal attraction of power which dispenses with responsibility and justifies the slaughter of children? Targeting a TV tower on 1 March, the Russians damaged the Babi Yar memorial site. But can we draw encouragement from Yevtushenko’s determined empathy with the victims of Babi Yar in his remarkable poem of 1961 written in protest against the Soviet Union’s refusal to recognise the site as the place of the mass murder of 33 000 Jews? Can we feel inspired by Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony which makes reference to that poem? Perhaps, in search of hope, we can revisit Chagall, writing on 6 June, 1967, in the Tel Aviv Yiddish journal, Die Goldene Keyt: I have always painted pictures where human love floods my colours. Day and night I dreamed that something would change in the souls and relations of people … We now stand before the great trial of the soul: will all dear visions and ideals of human world culture of two thousand years be blown away in the wind? Chagall had witnessed pogroms, the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, and the 1967 war which he felt threated the very existence of the state of Israel. He continues: I have always thought that, without human or biblical feelings in your heart, life has no value. Surely the mitzvah to assert the value of life informs Pesach. חמש גח חספ

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