Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

Shamor VeZakhor – safeguarding and remembering

This week’s parashah, VaEtchanan, includes a repetition of the Aseret Hadibrot/The Ten Utterances, with one notable difference.

In Shemot/Exodus we read Zakhor/Remember the Sabbath day to keep it sacred/set apart
and here in Devarim/Deuteronomy we read Shamor/safeguard the Sabbath day to keep it sacred/set apart.

Recently, our students were confronted with the question of whether we can remember if
we do not safeguard that which should not be forgotten.

Survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home spoke with our Year 9 elective class, Freedom and Responsibility, about the childhood taken from them as victims of the Stolen Generation. While some survivors felt the Home should be “razed to the ground and ploughed under” as the only fitting response to the evil and abuse that had taken place there, the prevailing voice maintained, for the very same reason, that the site must be preserved.

Safeguarding the site perpetuates remembering for those who suffered and of those who perpetrated or were silent to their suffering.

The Home, now listed as a heritage site, received grants totalling $200,000 to repair and maintain the buildings, to create a healing centre and, hopefully, a museum and educational centre, as well.

Entering the Boys Home gate, the stolen children “were prevailed upon to forget who they were”. In 2012, a group of former Kinchella boys officially handed over one of the gates to the National Museum of Australia, reminding us that neither they nor we should forget.

Judaism believes that truth-telling and healing is only possible when the past is safeguarded so wrongs can be redressed and our collective remembering can make for a new narrative.

In 2012, Aboriginal Elders with part of the gate from the Kinchela Boys Home that was sent to the National Museum.