This Is Not Fauda, This Is Real Life

In the 19th century, the German-Jewish artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim created a painting titled Die Jahrzeit, a scene of a Jew preparing to recite the Kaddish on the date of his parent’s passing. The scene was not set in the synagogue or at the cemetery. Rather, we see a minyan, a Jewish prayer quorum, that has come together in Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. These are Jewish soldiers who have fought for Prussia; the Jew reciting the mourner’s prayer is wearing a pickelhaube, the spiked helmet of the German military. The Germanness was, in part, the point: Oppenheim sought to reflect the patriotism of the Jewish soldiers, their willingness to fight and die for the Vaterland. The painting was created with the hope that it would encourage the embrace of Jews in German society. There is, with the hindsight of history, a very painful irony attending the artwork today.

At the same time, Oppenheim was making a powerful point: that the Jews of Prussia would continue to mourn and remember their predecessors, as Jews. The pickelhaube, which the soldier has no doubt been wearing throughout his time at the front, creates a noted contrast with the tallit, the prayer shawl, he has donned to pray in accordance with the traditions of the past. And the fact that his fellow Jews—all soldiers like him—have committed to coming together to form the minyan in order to facilitate this act of faith transforms the scene into one of Jewish faithfulness, loyalty, and love.

By setting this scene in a war zone, Oppenheim also allows us to remember that the Kaddish—a faithful declaration and prayer for the further sanctification of God’s name—reflects not only the memory of those who have passed but faith in the face of mortality itself. As the soldiers gather in an abandoned French home, the man leading the service faces an empty picture frame because the family that fled has taken the painting that it housed. The glass of the frame has a bullet hole in it; as he recites the prayer, the soldier is, visually, staring death in the face. His fellow Jewish soldiers also reflect the experience that war has wrought. One of them is a medic who seems to be meditating on the wounds and deaths he has seen; another cannot stand for the prayer because he is too injured to do so. As they pray together, allowing one of them to remember the passing of his parent, they are also pondering a possible state of affairs in which they no longer live. Throughout all this, their faith remains: The recital of Kaddish continues.