Staircase to Heaven

Is there anyone who does not imagine the moment of their death? Who is unaware of their steady march to the endline? By suppressing and denying death, Westerners overlook the positive side of death anxiety. This ethnography fills this lacuna by describing a colorful and rich "death culture" among survivors of Holocaust and war who endure their last palpitations of life in a Tel Aviv old-age home. Unable to suppress the consciousness of end-of-life, the protagonists climb a "staircase to heaven" among different fields of existence. Resourcefully they transform their anxiety and suffering into paths of choice—comforting each other, filling their days with acts of respect and unity, and replacing all-consuming individualism with social existentialism and Judeo-Christian religious ideas. This book holds us up to an existential mirror that bridges old and young, a geriatric institution and a concentration camp, and natural death and tragic death induced by terrorism.