“Time and tide wait for no man” and as the years tick by the generation that helped create the modern State of Israel and who suffered the early decades of poverty and wars are inevitably fading away.

On Sunday morning my wife Paz’s much loved grandmother ‘Safta’ Sonya passed away a week short of her 95th birthday. To have lived to such a ripe
old age is something to be celebrated, and although all the family are saddened by her passing, her recent years of ill health and the blight of Alzheimers Disease are at an end. We remember her, like so many of her generation, with pride and much affection – a lovely little lady (she was only 4ft 6ins in her later years), who had a heart of gold.
 
Sonya’s story in many way mirrors the experience of so many of the older generation of Israelis. Born in Poland while World War I was still raging, she grew up in the town of Zakopane in the south of the country where her family ran a small hotel and greeted guests who came especially in winter  to sample the excellent skiing the town had to offer, situated as it is at the  foot of the Tatra Mountains. When the Nazis took Poland in late-summer 1939 life changed completely for Sonya and like so many other hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews she suffered the trauma of losing most of her family - her parents died in Auschwitz. Her brother, Lolek, was confined in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto before also being transferred to Auschwitz, but he survived, later making his way to Israel where in later years he became one of the country’s first skiing instructors with the development of the resort in the Golan on Mount Hermon.
 
Sonya and her husband however managed to escape and flee to the East, moving from place to place as the Nazis swarmed all over the territory on
their way to try and conquer Russia and remaining in continual pursuit of as
many Jews as they could find. It was in Uzbekistan that she eventually found safe haven together with a number of other Jews who made the perilous flight across borders and eventually reached Samarkand, where in 1943 Paz’s father, Dan, was born. The Muslim community of Samarkand gave sanctuary to the Jewish refugees, (a fact too easily forgotten in light of the difficulties with radical Islam these days), and Sonya and her young son survived there until the war ended.
 
When the extent of the extermination of Polish Jewry became clear in the aftermath of the war the overwhelming majority of Polish Jewish survivors
understandably felt they had nothing left to go back to, being fully aware of
the complicity of many of the local Poles in the murder of their Jewish communities. Many headed to the US, to South Africa, and many others went to Palestine which was still under the British mandate. Sonya however chose to go back to Poland and made her home in Warsaw, where she remained until 1956 when a new wave of anti-Semitism swept the country and she felt that this time she had to leave.
 
Having decided to make a new life for her family, (which now included a second son, Efraim), she was persuaded by her husband to go on ahead  with her boys to Israel while he wrapped up their affairs in Poland. This she  did, only to find that her husband would never join them, deciding instead to abandon her and his sons and begin a new life for himself with a new partner, leaving Sonya in a foreign country with no money, no home, no friends, and unable to speak the language. That she overcame terrible financial and personal difficulties and managed to support her sons, (Dan went to live on a kibbutz and Efraim stayed with his mother), by making clothes and later being a costume designer for a number of Israeli theatres, working immensely long hours for poor pay, was a huge credit to this tiny, but very big-hearted and determined lady.
 
Amongst the family, stories of Sonya are legend. Locking herself in the toilet at Heathrow Airport on a connecting flight to the US to visit her younger son and being unable neither to get out nor to explain to those on the other side of the door what had happened as she spoke Polish, moderate Hebrew,
German, Russian and Yiddish, but no English, whilst on another occasion assuming there was no proper food in America, she flew directly to LA with a bottle of her favourite garlic olive oil in her hand luggage only to inadvertently forget to fasten the lid properly. Half an hour into the 14-hour journey the passengers started to complain about a pungent smell in the cabin and it took some time before the sweet little lady was revealed as the culprit!
 
I always found her to be great fun, and amazingly (when considering the terrible trials and tribulations she had been through), an eternal optimist. Whenever asked about what she would like she would always state ‘Rak briut’ – just good health – and she always took my teasing in great part as I always asked her to stand up and then feigned shock that she already was! When my family first met Paz’s, my abiding memory of the evening is of
being unable to find my mother, then spotting her out on the back lawn with
Sonya who was giving Mum a lesson in Sonya’s beloved Tai Chee, the pair of them standing on one leg each and wafting their hands around slowly and deliberately through the night air.
 
To pass her on the street no one could possibly imagine what this tiny lady had lived through and achieved, but in many ways Sonya’s life was not so different to many of her generation whose suffering and fortitude in coming
from post-Holocaust Europe, or those from the Arab lands from which so many fled for their lives in the 1950’s, helped establish this country and provide a place for Jewish people to live without fear of repression or persecution. 
 
Time is running out for Israelis to enjoy these last few years with Sonya’s generation, and those still with us should be truly appreciated and cherished for their many achievement against all the odds.

I’m afraid to say that last year I was uncannily close to the money with my predictions for the region so this time hope that one or two of my expectations are not realised for reasons that will soon become apparent.  Anyway, I’ve been busy polishing my crystal ball with the last can of Mr Sheen left since my emigration here nearly five years ago, and here they are my five predictions for Israel and the region in 2012.
 
1 – The simmering antagonism between secular and religiouIsraelis highlighted by a number of notable incidents in recent weeks looks set to come further to the boil and provide a headache for the authorities over the  next 12 months.
 
Regular followers of this blog will know that I have many an axe to grind with certain sections of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community here in Israel, many of whom I perceive as being disloyal and workshy, sponging off the state without giving anything back. That is not to say however that this is the case with all who dress in black, and I strongly condemn any unprovoked and unwarranted verbal and physical assaults that have been committed by secular activists. I would very much like to see those representing the ultra-Orthodox community speak out with a louder voice in condemning similarly unprovoked aggression on secular members of Israeli society before the situation escalates and might eventually get out of hand.
 
I fear that, (as is so often the case), the moderates on both sides and the voices of reason will be drowned out by those with a vested interest in stoking the flames of resentment.

 
2 – I fear that Iran may very well engineer some type of altercation with Israel following the embargo being placed on the sale of Iranian oil by the EU and others, if not directly, then with their proxy militias, Hamas in Gaza, and Hizbollah in Lebanon. Such an escalation would then give Iran an excuse to drag Israel into the blame game for what would certainly be a massive rise in the cost of crude oil per barrel, a situation that could result in world financial markets being put under even more pressure than is already the case.

 
3 – The arrival of the first gas from the Israeli fields discovered a few years ago off the Mediterranean coast will move very much closer as Israel for the first time in its 64 year history is on the verge of being self-sufficient in the energy department. Having been reliant on foreign oil for so long, Israel set out some years ago to develop alternative energy sources.

The discovery of the world’s second biggest natural gas deposits in Israeli waters, the rapid growth in more efficient solar technologies, together with Shai Agassi’s revolutionary fully electric cars and the network of electric refuelling stations his Better Place organization has established throughout the country, will go a long way towards giving Israelis more self-confidence that they can eventually rid themselves of their reliance on oil from countries such as Egypt, whose pipeline into Israeli has been bombed by Islamist radicals and disrupted at least a half dozen times since the fall of Mubarak.

 
4 – It pains me to say it, but despite my prediction that the coalition government led by Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu would fall during 2011, the signs are that the alliance of Likud, the Russian Immigrant Party, the remnants of the Labour party and the religious parties such as Shas and others, does likely to hold together at least until the end of 2012. What seems equally certain is that the slow erosion of the independence of the judiciary and other issues connected to freedom of the press etc will remain one of the hottest local topics and sources of heated debate and protest in the year ahead. 

 
5 – And finally, although the final figures have yet to be officially declared there is little doubt that 2011 saw the largest number of tourists visiting Israel since the state was established in 1948. Despite the often unflattering portrayal of the country by many branches of the mass media it is reassuring to see that so many people are still able to think for themselves and continue to come here to enjoy the unique nature of this tiny, but remarkable land. 
 
Significantly, it appears that the biggest rise has come in the number of Christian visitors to the Holy Land who have become increasingly  supportive of the Israeli people and their struggle for survival often against  hostile neighbours. I also found it particularly touching that amongst those  Christian visitors to the country the highest number come from none other than Germany, a lesson that hopefully other nations might learn that after the terrible persecution of their Jewish population two generations before, Germans want to support Israel and are proud to have overcome the initial negativity felt towards them here and have made Israel one of their most popular tourist destinations. 
 
Despite Israel being a far from cheap place to visit I anticipate that with improving tourist facilities and infrastructure and better standards of service year-on-year, the number of tourists visiting the country in 2012 will break all previous records.