L’an prochain a Jerusalem.

For millenia, every Passover seder has ended with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

I read that phrase in French for the first time today in the haggadah used by Jews in 1941 who were sent to to a French internment camp.

That hagaddah is among the archives at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum.

The museum has few records of the role of the French national railroad during the Nazi period.

However, one memorandum summarizes a meeting attended by railroad officials on July 15, 1942, the day before the mass arerest and deportation to Auschwitz of 13,000 Jews.

“It will be very important to get all these details – the whole picture of what the railroad did,” commented Shaul Ferrero, a senior archivist for documentation from France.

—

“To have a city where 40% of the people are new immigrants, that is the Zionist ideal,” Mayor Benny Vaknin of Ashkelon told me at lunch.

“How does this compare to running Jerusalem?” I asked.

“There you have eight deputies. It keeps your coalition together,” the Mayor replied.

“Lincoln used that theory when creating a Cabinet of his band of rivals,” I responded.

—

Over the years, I’ve explained my bills in many settings – before committees in Annapolis, at neighborhood meetings, and in my Legislation classes.

Never, until today, before nine people whose parents were transported to their death by the French national railroad.

They asked some questions more than once.

Most urgently, “What do we have to do next?”

I simply replied, “No other state will have to pass such a bill, if the company complies with the Maryland law. All you will need to do is turn on your computer. The records will be there.”

I was emotionally drained when our hour together ended.