My son shouted ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ across a pool and I’ve never been prouder

A lot has happened in recent years to make many Jews wary and afraid of openly displaying who we are, especially when travelling in Europe. 

We have all heard the stories. Jewish tourists are verbally abused and physically assaulted while doing nothing more provocative than eating an ice cream in an Italian square, lying on a beach in Spain or sightseeing in France or Greece.

These stories inevitably change how we behave, making us look around before doing or saying something that identifies us as Jewish, tucking our Magen David into our shirts, and making sure not to speak Hebrew.

So there I was this weekend, lying in the sun in the Algarve, trying for a few days to put work, family and community troubles to one side, when suddenly I heard my 11-year-old son Eli shouting across an otherwise tranquil resort pool: “AM YISRAEL CHAI!” Loudly, very loudly.

My first reaction was probably the reaction many Jewish parents would have today. I looked up, looked around, and checked for negative reactions. Then I saw why he had shouted it. There was another young boy in the pool, his age, a complete stranger, and around his neck were two letters: Chet and Yud, Chai, Life.

That was it. Eli had seen another Jewish child, and without hesitation, embarrassment or apparently a single thought about whether anyone else might object, he wanted him to know, “I see you; I’m one of you. You’re not alone.” The boy was French; he spoke no English. Eli speaks no French. None of that mattered, because these two boys discovered they shared a language nonetheless.

Three words. Am Yisrael Chai – The people of Israel live. Three words that carry an extraordinary weight of Jewish history.

For generations they have been whispered, spoken, sung and shouted in moments when our continued existence could never simply be taken for granted. They have been words of defiance in our darkest hours. Words spoken when Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, murdered or told that our identity was something to hide. Three words echo and reverberate through our history, carrying an underlying note of loss because we have so often needed to say them precisely when others were trying to ensure they would no longer be true.

Rabbi Leslie Hardman, the British Army chaplain, spoke those words amid the unimaginable evidence of what had been done to our people upon entering Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after its liberation. In 1965, Shlomo Carlebach turned them into songs for Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain, forbidden from freely practising the faith and culture that generations before them had refused to surrender. And decades later, an Israeli prime minister visited the villa at Wannsee, the house beside a Berlin lake where educated men had once sat around a table and planned the industrial extermination of European Jewry, the Final Solution. In the visitors’ book he wrote just three words: Am Yisrael Chai – The People of Israel Live.

There could scarcely be a greater act of defiance, but the circumstances in which those words have so often been spoken have obscured what they actually say. They are not words about death; they are words about life. They are not a lament for those we have lost; they are a promise made by those who remain, a declaration that Jewish life continues and that Jewish identity survives.

Suddenly that history was playing out in the most wonderfully ordinary way imaginable. Not the liberation of a concentration camp, not to point the spotlight on Soviet persecution or an act of defiance at Wannsee. Just an English Jewish boy and a French Jewish boy in a swimming pool in Portugal, and three words crossed the water between them. Am Yisrael Chai.

My generation has learnt a degree of caution and learnt to fear and to calculate whether this is the place to let people know who they are. Eli calculated nothing; he saw a silver chai worn around another child’s neck and shouted. No fear, embarrassment or permission sought. Just recognition, connection and pride, and that is why I have never been prouder of him.

Jewish continuity has never simply meant that our children exist; it means that they know who they are and that they recognise one another. For generations, Am Yisrael Chai has reverberated through our darkest moments as an act of defiance. But listening to my son shout it across that pool and watching another Jewish boy respond, I heard something else.

I heard joy, pride, and belonging. I heard a common language stretching across countries, generations and centuries. I heard the sound those three words were always supposed to make.

Not simply: “Despite everything, we survived.”

But: “Look at us; we live, and we thrive.”

Thank you, Eli, for reminding me of the difference, for inspiring me, and for giving me confidence that our future is in strong hands.