What a young mother wrote to an anti-Semite Who told her to "go back to Euope"

 

by Bruria Efune

I got told to go back to Europe. I’m not from Europe. But the Twitter warrior didn’t care, and just ranted on about the Jews leaving “Palestine” alone, and going back to wherever they came from.

So let’s talk about this. Where are the Jews from?

Take my family for example. I’ll start at an easy point: My grandparents on my dad’s side are from Iraq. We don’t have any family left there, because they were all either chased out, or murdered for being Jewish. Family records show that despite on and off persecution, they had lived there since the Babylonian expulsion, over 2,000 years ago.

My mom grew up in Argentina, where her parents were born. Most of their parents trace back to Ukraine, which they had fled during the 1918 pogroms that killed tens of thousands of Jews. It’s likely that many of them were previously from Spain, but had fled the Spanish Inquisition. One of my mom’s grandparents was not from Ukraine - he had fled Morocco, also due to pogroms targeting the Jews. Argentina was a relative safe-haven, despite antisemitism and discriminatory laws against them.

Now for my husband’s side, his grandparents are mostly Holocaust survivors, or escapees. On his mom’s side, his grandmother grew up in Vienna. At nine years old, she escaped to England with her sister on the kinder-transport. Her parents were murdered by the Nazis. She kept a family tree, tracing her ancestry back to the Maharal of Prague, a direct descendant of King David.

My husband’s father’s mother was also from Vienna. Her family managed to escape to France, where for four years of her childhood, she hid with her family in an attic, and then alone with her sister in a nunnery. When the war was over, she met a young man who had escaped Latvia, and asked her to join him with his family in South Africa. His last name was Yefuneh, since his family were descendants of the biblical Calev ben Yefuneh, but immigration officials in South Africa didn’t appreciate that, and anglicized it to Efune.

So here’s the thing, antisemites. You know where we’re from. You always did, and that’s why you always chased us out of wherever we tried to find peace.

We never forgot it either. For millennia, all my ancestors, all around the world, prayed the same prayer every day. No matter where they were, they faced Jerusalem as they prayed to be able to return in safety one day, soon.

Because we’re from Israel. Jews are indigenous to Israel. We belong in Israel.

The Romans may have burned down our Temple, renamed our land, slaughtered our people, and exiled most of the survivors into the diaspora, but the fire never stopped burning in our heart; we always painfully remembered where we belong.

And now we’re here. And I can assure you, we’re here to stay.