I1: Fallen Soldiers

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Introduction

· This is a very serious play which tries to educate the
audience about the various wars of Israel and about those
who fought in them.

· To give justice to it, try to rehearse a few times before you perform in public.

· Each speech is quite long so you and your friends are not expected to learn it by heart. The various parts can be photocopied and people can read from them.

The play can stand on its own for a twenty minute assembly, or you can use it for a longer lunch time programme and lead a discussion afterwards involving points which derive from the performance.

If you have daily assemblies, you can present a different soldier each day during the week.

The Characters

Below is an examination of each of the characters to help you appreciate where each one is coming from and to bring out specific facts about the various wars. Use this information as background for the characters and points for discussion should you do one.

LIVING SPOKESPERSON (at the beginning)

This person is us trying to appreciate Yom HaZikaron, but as commonly happens they focus more on their reactions and feelings about the wars than on the very soldiers who fought in them. The lasting effects of living in a country that is at war every decade are difficult for us to appreciate.

SOLDIER 1

1948 was a desperate war. The Old City was lost and many people, who were not really trained soldiers, died. Women and children fought and should be remembered. They require us to break our image of soldiers being macho adult men.

SOLDIER 2

Many Israelis are very angry about the religious-secular divide in their country. The army is a cause of much strife because ultra-orthodox Jews can exempt themselves from it. This soldier feels himself to be religious in his own way and sees Jewish history as one that valued fighters. This is why he is so upset that the 1973 war took Israel by surprise. This fact had a lasting affect on Israel.

SOLDIER 3

This man is the most frustrated of all. He loved his country, but he disagreed with her politics. He can't come to terms with the fact that he died in a war that he feels was badly handled by his superiors. After this play was first performed, some of the audience complained that this soldier was anti-Israel and disagreed with his views. This though is one of the main points of this play, to challenge us to remember real people, our people, though it may sometimes be uncomfortable to do so.

SOLDIER 4

This soldier is truly inspired by what he lived through. He is a characterisation of that famous photo of Israeli soldiers standing by the Kotel (Western Wall) just after it was recaptured. His feelings reflect those of much of world Jewry at that time.

LIVING SPOKESPERSON (at the end)

The play tries to make us reconsider the way we experience Yom HaZikaron and the spokesperson embodies this. In Israel today there are many soldiers with many different perspectives. This is also true for all Jews in the world. Caring for our people means accepting them even though we might disagree with them, and even if they don't accept us. What unites us as a people is deeper, bigger and more essential, than what divides us.

Remembering real people

Each of the soldiers in the play is a complex personality. They are not just nameless soldiers who fought in the various wars. Each had personal feelings about what they did and how they felt about it. The characters in this play are fictitious but they represent many of the different attitudes held by Israelis. On Yom HaZikaron we should try to remember the soldiers as real people with their own emotions and aspirations.

More information

There are two previous chapters of The Jampacked Bible which deal with specific wars in Israel's short, but turbulent, history. Independence Day (1:7) describes the background and battles of May 1948 that were a part of the establishment of the State of Israel, and Real Jerusalem (1:10) gives an account of the Six Day War of 1967 as well as its immediate and long term consequences.

The Seventh Day

There is an excellent book about the Six Day War, though it could be about many others, because it deals with the basic elements of war itself, with the way that ordinary people feel about killing and about the fact that they or their families might be killed. Soon after the end of the Six Day War a group of young soldiers, some of them still in their teens, decided that they had to learn what the war had really meant to them. "We felt the need to hear each other, to talk to each other," one of them said, "to explain to ourselves what had happened to us in those six short days that had lasted so long. " The book is called "The Seventh Day: Soldier's Talk about the Six Day War" and gives an unparalleled picture of how Israelis feel about making war, or peace, with the Arabs. Extracts are available from Makor-AJY head office (phone Lisa on 020 8446 8020) and can be used as readings, or as the basis for a discussion.

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