Where did you spend your last birthday?
At the beach?
With family and/or friends?
At a great restaurant, eating your favourite dishes?
My birthday is on July 2nd. (You need not remember this date but, if you do, my favourite food is sushi!)
I was, in South African terms, a winter baby, whose birthday was usually celebrated during the school holiday which, from a certain point, often coincided with Winter Seminar dates of Habonim Dror, which meant that many of my childhood birthday memories were absorbed into memories of blue shirts, seminar songs and sitting in circles with many other young Jews.
Three birthdays stand out.
The first, my 13th birthday. Not because of my Bar Mitzvah at the Shul in Somerset West (Herzl, do you remember it?), but because it fell very close to the Six Day War. I, for some strange reason, always loved public speaking and, just after the term began, I participated as a very young Standard 6 pupil – first year at Hottentots-Holland High School – in the school’s Public Speaking competition. It was just after my 13th birthday, as I delivered my speech called ‘Strike Zion’, that I realised that I was not of this place, and the journey to find my home began, ending almost nine years later to the day when I made Aliyah to Israel.
The second was in 1976. It was time to leave a deeply troubled South Africa, which had just sent me call-up papers to join the SADF to help prop up the Apartheid Regime and fight the fight against the Rooi Gevaar and the Swart Gevaar. There was no way I was going to do this! I was supposed to report for duty mid-July, so I began to make plans to leave. I decided to stay to celebrate my birthday, possibly for the last time with my grandparents, Simon and Rica Mankowitz. (My Resnick grandparents, Israel and Rachel Resnick, had died many years before this.) An emotional party on July 2nd in Cape Town with my beloved grandparents, my flight to Johannesburg on the 3rd, and on July 4th, my El Al flight to Israel.
Remember July 4th, 1976? The headlines from the New York Times to the Cape Argus via the Guardian, Le Figaro and Corriere della Serra were all supposed to be, ‘The United States of America celebrates its bicentennial’. Instead, they all were ‘The Israel Defence Forces rescue Jewish Hostages in Entebbe’. I celebrated my birthday together with the rest of the Jewish People, AND MANY OF OUR ALLIES, that day, when Israeli soldiers carried out a stunning raid on the Entebbe airport, to free our brothers and sisters from captivity. (Hopefully, by the time you read this, weeks after I write this, at home on the kibbutz, these lines will not fill us with sorrow as we think of our brothers and sisters still being held in Gaza.)
The third birthday was this one, my 71st.
Read the next sentence carefully. I am probably the only person in the world today who turned 71 in Treblinka. Yes, that is where I was on July 2nd 2025, guiding in Treblinka. Not on a beach. Not with family and friends. Not in a great restaurant. Guiding a great group of 14 people (including the wonderful Nokuzola Gillian Bikwana from the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre). Telling the story of what happened to us, the Jewish People, in one of our darkest periods, in a place filled with the worst evil some of humanity ever visited upon other people.
We visit not only to tell an awful story, but also to commit ourselves to work for good, for peace among all people, to insist that what we share as human beings far outweighs what divides us.
Where would I like to celebrate my next birthday, on July 2nd, 2026?
At home, on my kibbutz, Tzora, in Israel, with eight little people with me: Tamar, Naomi, Asaf, Yotam, Ronni, Noam, Ozzi and little Roytjie.
And then, two days after that, I will celebrate 50 years in Israel. ●
The Cape Jewish Chronicle wishes Julian Resnick a very happy 71st birthday!
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To a great madrick and teacher!