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In downtown Jerusalem, the non-profit known as Friends of Zion has a museum called The Friends of Zion Museum. In spite of its uninspiring name, it’s actually a pretty cool place, and worthy of a visit if you ever travel to Israel.
The building is several stories tall and uses high-tech exhibitions to walk visitors through a history of the Jewish people. There are about ten or twelve “rooms” you visit on your tour, each of them lasting about six or seven minutes, and in the first few rooms, everyone experiences the exact same storyline and features. Those early rooms focus more on the biblical history of the Jewish people, from God’s promise to Abraham up through King David establishing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The later rooms cover the more recent history of the Jewish people, from before Israel was re-constituted as a state, through the Holocaust, and up to the modern day. However, because there were so many cast members in this part of Israel’s story, the later rooms divide up tours into smaller groups of people in each room. In any given room, these three people might be watching one video clip while those three people watch another video clip, and so on. In the next room, this group might listen to one historical figure while the other three or four small groups listen to completely different world leaders. In other words, because of the sheer number of options, many people could go through the same museum and yet experience a vastly different tour.
In one of the rooms called “Lights in the Dark,” visitors are invited to choose any seat they’d like, and are then told stories of Jews who were saved by non-Jews during the Holocaust. At the end of that particular room’s presentation, visitors are told to hold out their hands, palms up, and at that exact same moment, 23 different beams of light are shot down from the ceiling to create the faces and names of 23 different Jews whose lives were saved during the Holocaust. As a result, each visitor sees a unique face and name in their hands.
Something happened in that very room in December of 2022 that was both magnificent and heartbreaking.
Emily Rotenburg, a young woman from Los Angeles, had traveled to Jerusalem for a wedding, and was preparing to fly home later that evening. Hearing about the museum, and needing to kill some time before her flight, she decided to take a tour. It didn’t hurt that she was Jewish, herself.
For the first few rooms, Emily went through the same experiences as everyone else in her tour. However, in the later rooms, she saw and heard things that were different from those taking the tour with her. When she came to the “Lights in the Dark” room, she picked a seat and began to listen to the stories of Jewish lives that had been saved by non-Jewish people during the Holocaust. At the end of the presentation, she extended her hands on cue and watched as an orange-colored beam illuminated her palms. There in her hands, Emily Rotenburg saw the name and face of a man she knew: Sigmund Rotenburg.
Her grandfather.
Emily immediately burst into tears. Her grandfather was 8-years-old when he was saved by three brothers from Belgium, all of whom were priests. The men hid Sigmund and his family for four years until the war ended. Years later, in 1980, the Yad Vashem bestowed upon Yosef, Louis, and Hubert Celis one of the highest honors given by Israel: the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
The truly fascinating thing is, Emily could have skipped the tour altogether. She could have chosen any other seat in that particular room. She could have even kept her hands in her lap! But God arranged everything about that day in such meticulous perfection to reveal His protection over her life and her family members’ lives.
And what was Emily’s reaction?“It was an incomprehensible coincidence. A miracle. I’m not one for afterlife beliefs, but anyone would see how unique that coincidence was.”
Emily reduced the entire set of circumstances to mere coincidence. She walked into the museum not believing; she walked out not believing, as well. How sad.
Click here for the online report.
