Jeannette Wolgust’s testimony at Beit Haverim

November 18, 2015

Jeannette Wolgust was the guest of Beit Haverim, a Jewish LGBT association, at its premises in the rue Fénelon in Paris, just a few days after the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis.

The audience sits around her and listens to her testimony. Then, as if impatient to go further, the questions come thick and fast. As often (she says), many people recall their own recent family history or what it evokes for them. Fundamental questions arise, often mixed with current events. The question of passing on memory comes first. Themes such as identity, resistance, and also love: Odette and Moussa, Jeannette’s love for Odette and Moussa, her friends at Jeanne d’Arc, her little brother, her parents… resources far stronger than hatred. The psychological mechanisms: fear, abandonment, confusion (of identity) and trauma. The Righteous, as well as Odette and Moussa, are the subject of many questions. They fascinate.

At a time when our political leaders readily appear in the media, how could those people have kept silent, or said that they had only done their duty at the time? How strongly Moussa’s words at the Senate in 1995 resonate today.