from the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

From the desk of …                    

 Rabbi Barry Schwartz

    

SPRING AWAKENING

The signs of spring are everywhere. I never cease to marvel at the rebirth of the Earth, from the flowers and trees to the profusion of new life. We tidy up the garden, move out the plants, and hang up the hummingbird feeders. The hibernating species shake awake and the migratory types wing their way back. And as Jews we celebrate our spring holidays.

By the time you read this, our great spring festival of Pesach will have passed over. Pesach celebrates not only spring awakening (in a nice coincidence it corresponded with Earth Day this year), but the rebirth of our people to freedom. If our biblical ancestors were to drop by they would recognize our holiday celebration with little problem. While the fifteen steps of the seder and the Haggadah have evolved over time, the essential story and symbols have remained unchanged. Passover, as essentially a home holiday, is the most widely observed of the Jewish holidays, by a long shot.

The same cannot be said of the biblical festival that follows “a week of weeks” later-Shavuot. Though it celebrates the first harvest and the momentous giving of the Torah at Sinai on the fiftieth day after the Exodus (and like Pesach was the object of a national pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem) today Shavuot is not well marked in the non-Orthodox community. Yet it is when we read the Ten Commandments and the beautiful Book of Ruth. Our Confirmation Class will uphold that tradition at our service on June 10 (7:30 pm). Celebrate the holiday and support our wonderful teens who dedicate three years after bar/bat mitzvah to this accomplishment.

Our biblical forbears would certainly not recognize two other special days that mark spring in the Jewish calendar, because they commemorate two epochal events of the 20th century-the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Yom HaShoah falls this on May 5 (there is a community ceremony in Fair Lawn that evening) and we will include appropriate music and words at our Shabbat evening service on May 6. One week later is Yom Ha’Atzmaut-we gladly celebrate the 68th birthday of modern Israel at our Shabbat evening service on May 13.

The Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel happened within the lifetime of older members of our community. But the passage of decades dims the memory for the generations that follow. There is no substitute for directly hearing from and seeing the eyewitnesses to the tragedy and the triumph. In the same way that I feel sorry that my children did not know my immigrant grandparents, and learn first-hand what it took to leave Eastern Europe and rebuild their lives in America, so we will face the challenge of the Holocaust and Israel’s founding moving from living history for us to “ancient” history for our youth.

As the most successful example of keeping memory alive, perhaps we can take a clue from the Passover seder. What new rituals can we create for the spring holidays that will enlighten and endure? The genius of the Jewish holidays is how they link the cycle of the seasons to the cycle of our history. In this age of environmentalism and globalism, as world citizens, but as bearers of ancient wisdom, there is much to ponder and to celebrate.

Maren Friedman's Yom HaShoah Story

This year, Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, began on the evening of Wednesday, April 15, and continued to the evening of Thursday, April 16. In conjunction with Yom HaShoah, we held a special Shabbat service here at Congregation Adas Emuno on Friday evening, April 17, at which time congregant Maren Friedman spoke about her experiences in Germany. We are very fortunate that Maren was willing to share her remarkable, and altogether unique story with us here on our congregational blog. Here it is:

When I meet someone new, it often goes something like this: 

1. Where  are you from?…  New Jersey.  

2.  No—I mean where are you really from—I notice a slight accent—I mean where were you  born?  Answer: Germany. 

3. When did you come here?—1951. How old were you?—12 .

4. If the person is Jewish and is not sure if I am Jewish, what usually follows is, "Ohh," with a hesitation and a slight moving away. They become leery. I have come to recognize to understand this distancing. In the Jewish community, Germany still has a history to deal with and so I have come to learn that I must use words and references that quickly identify me as being Jewish. It is very important to me to be identified as Jewish and not German.  This generally leads to the next question. 

 5. Where were you during the war? And then, always,  

 6. How did you survive?

Sometimes the question is very casual and if I don't know the person, I just answer, "We were very lucky."
 Sometimes, however, the question comes out of a genuine interest to understand, as well as a real surprise that some Jews really did survive in Germany without being in concentration camps or in hiding for the duration of the war. 

When I was asked to speak tonight for Yom Hashoah, about my experience, I said, "Sure." After all, I have spoken to schools as part of Holocaust education programs. My friends certainly know my history. But each and every time the telling is hard and the stomach gets tied into knots.  However I know my story is unusual since I have never met anyone else who survived. So here goes. 

My parents were married in 1930 and neither family was happy with the marriage.  My father was Gentile and his family were certainly not pleased. Even though this was before the Nazies were in power, anti-Semitism existed. 

My mother was Jewish, so her family certainly had their fears about her marrying a non-Jew. Although some of her family was observant, her own parents were assimilated Jews. My grandfather was a Zionist who emigrated to Israel in 1936. His brothers who felt that his fears of the Nazis were exaggerated held the mistaken belief that Jews would be safe in Germany .  They all ultimately perished. 

During the early years of the Hitler regime, my mother told of the difficulties that she as a Jewish woman encountered. She could not go to the movies or out to any public places or events. She was limited to staying in the house and was only able to shop in certain stores that catered to Jewish   customers. Most of all, she remembers the fears about her aunts and uncles who were being deported.  She always remembered that while she was in the hospital giving birth to me, no one came to visit. When she started to ask questions, she was reassured by the nurses and cautioned not to get herself upset lest it would affect her or her baby.  I was born on November 11th, 1938, and Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was November 10th. Jewish homes and storefront windows had been broken and it really signaled the beginning of strong anti-Jewish actions. 

My grandparents and her brother had emigrated to Israel in 1936, and her sister left for Sweden on one of the last ships out of Germany, in 1937. As I said before, no one else of her family survived. 

My parents had their conflicts as a result of their mixed marriage. His brothers and mother did not welcome my mother in their homes. Of course my mother's restrictions frustrated my father, and he often pursued some of his own friends and interests, leaving her alone with her children,  feeling alone, angry, and scared.  My sister, who is seven years older than I, remembers their frequent fights and my mother crying much of the time. 

After my father entered the military, my mother, sister and I were really left to our own devices.  Money was very tight and her restrictions, limitations and fears increased constantly. Kiel, where I was born, was a small town at the end of a canal which connects the Baltic and North Sea. It is a ship and submarine building town in Northern Germany. Mom grew up in Kiel, and according to her, everyone knew her. She recalled being called to the Gestapo for questioning. But since no one had brought any complaints against her, and she had not broken any rules, such as shopping. in non-Jewish stores or going out beyond the curfew, she was released and told to go home. 

I had the usual bouts of childhood disease and remember my father coming home on furlough. I remember not wanting him to leave and his losing his patience and giving me a severe spanking on the Railroad Station Platform. Parenting in those days was very different than it is today, and my father was a typical German father who believed in spare the rod and spoil the child. 

My own memories really begin around the time of 1943-1944. As the bombings increased, the children in Germany were being evacuated. My sister had been sent with her school into the safety of the countryside, but her headmistress called saying that she could not stay because the Gestapo was visiting the school and her being Jewish was too dangerous. 

We were bombed out in 1944, and I was hospitalized with a severe concussion. Here again my mother talked of telling the doctor that we were Jews, and that his response was, "She's a child and I'm a doctor and that's all that matters." After we were released from the hospital we fled into the countryside and found shelter at a farm, but again only for a short while until the farmer realized we were Jews and had to leave.  

After our return to Kiel, my mother worked in a forced labor camp, a fish factory, but was able to come home at night. At that time one of my father's brothers helped us replace blown out windows in an abandoned apartment where we were able to stay. My father also came home on furlough and helped gather the few remaining pieces of furniture from our bombed out apartment.  

While my mother worked, my sister took care of me during the day and our lives in many ways were like that of our neighbors. There was no food, no clothing, no water, heat, nor sleep. I only remember wearing what we would call warmup suits all the time. Since the threat of air raids was constant, one never undressed because if the sirens came on, signaling an attack, we had to run to the shelter. The shelter we used had just recently been extended with a new emergency exit and a children's wing at the end near the door. This was to be used specifically for mothers and children.  One night a bomb had fallen outside the shelter and people were screaming to get in.  When the door was opened, gas from the exploded bomb seeped into the shelter asphyxiating everyone in the children's wing. Since my sister and I had come to the shelter on our own, without mom, we had been told to go the the new children's wing. However, my sister, who whiled away the time making figures out of the clay dirt available at the emergency exit. insisted that we stick to that end of the shelter. She also said that since our mother was used to us being by the emergency exit, that she would look for us there if she was let go from the fish factory. My sister's love of modeling saved our lives in that we all escaped through the emergency exit which had only been completed the week before. I  still remember the sea of empty carriages parked before the entrance. 

 Other memories are like all war memories. Fear, bombings, sounds of sirens, burned out buildings and rubble. And running.  Running, running, always running,  and I remember just not wanting to run anymore. Our skin was covered with scabs and blisters from phosphate bombs. 

As far as a sense of having a Jewish identity is concerned, I remember that towards the end of the war, my mother was getting dressed and I said to her, "When we win the war..."  She stopped and stood absolutely still, held my face in her hands. and said, "If the Germans win the war, we will all perish."  That was my first sense of being Jewish and that being Jewish was different and dangerous. 

As I said before, Kiel was heavily bombed out during the was because it was a ship and submarine building town. Also is was strategically situated at the Baltic end of the canal which links it through Hamburg and then Bremen into the North Sea and of course England, France and the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, it was a primary target and 80% destroyed. I recall at the end of the war that the munitions dump was blown us before the Allied Forces arrived. People crying in the shelter when the announcement came that Germany was defeated and that Hitler was dead. And then the soldiers, American and English coming in with candy, gum, chocolate, stockings, and cigarettes. 

Slowly, with the aid of the Red Cross and HIAS we were put in touch with my family in Israel and the US, who sent not only mail, but also M&Ms, and care packages with milk, flour, and clothing. 

After the war, many camp survivors came to Kiel. It was then that we learned first hand of the horrors of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and other camps. They were emaciated and needed help and time to heal and recover. HIAS, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was involved in helping.  From them I also learned for the first time about Jewish things such as food, language and holidays, because of course there was none of that during the war whatsoever.  

My father, who had been captured by the Russians and been a prisoner of war in Siberia, returned to Kiel in 1949. I had yearned for his return and had the fantasy that now that the war was over and he was home, all would be well. That was not the way it turned out. My parents had grown apart and divorced in 1951. 

My mother, sister, and I emigrated to the US through the Displaced Persons Quota in 1951. 

My first memory of the US was arriving in New York harbor early on a June morning and seeing the Statue of Liberty. A ferry came by and my thoughts were that I wanted to be just like those people on that ferry. 

We were meant to go to Cincinnati but my aunt agreed to be responsible for us to keep us here in New York.  

I entered school in the 7th grade, and learned English from a girl who spoke Yiddish, and therefore understood German. She translated whole sentences for me, and I repeated what she said. I also learned, as I said at the  beginning, that America and particularly the Jewish community was understandably afraid, angry, and rejecting of anything German.  I had been the "Dirty Jew" in Germany and suddenly found myself in danger of being identified as German in New York. 

Growing up without any knowledge or training in things Jewish, still leaves a void in me. It's a lack of history, without  memories of holidays, family, and tradition. They simply aren't there. 

There is also a sense of guilt which many survivors struggle with.  I know we were meant to be on the next transport when the war ended. But fortunately the war ended before that happened.  The struggle to accept the Gentile part of my heritage is still ongoing.  I know that according to Jewish Law I am a Jew because my mother is Jewish, but I also know that many in the Jewish community do not trust  the Germans. I share that distrust.  However I am a little of both, and that isn't always easy.  

So, there is no clear  answer as to how I survived.  Perhaps it was because I am a mischling, a designation made up by the Germans to describe a child of a mixed marriage. Or because my father was in the military and did not divorce my mother, or perhaps as my mother said, "The laws were carried out by people and not all people are evil.  

Perhaps it was just plain mazel... 

I only know that I survived, and I have come to be okay with that. 

I had wanted to marry someone who was a full fledged Yankee with a large family. Instead, I married a wonderful man who is also a German Jew, who came to New York with his mother before the war.  While we have different memories, there is a common thread that I think helps us understand one another in a profound kind of way. 

We have two daughters, one of whom married a non-Jew,  but all of our grandchildren were raised and identify as Jews, and that is very important to us. 

I only wish them a world that is different than the one I grew up in. 

I wish them peace and freedom from persecution. 

—Maren Friedman

A Survivor's Tale

In honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is one survivor's tale, TELLING JOKES IN AUSCHWITZ: 







This short documentary, produced and directed by Sandi Bachom and Mikal Reich, is a winner of the  Current TV/IFP Festival, My Hero Film Festival. The description reads:

In 1944, Werner Reich was in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and under the supervision of the infamous Josef Mengele, a.k.a. "The Angel of Death." Werner was one of the "Birkenau Boys,"a group of 96 kids arbitrarily singled out by Mengele to be kept alive as slave laborers. They were spared it seems, because of a bad joke.

In the midst of darkness, we affirm light. 

In the midst of devastation, we affirm life. 

In the midst of ignorance, we affirm memory.

Holocaust Remembrance

Sunday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it was observed by Jews all around the world, including a very moving ceremony held at Congregation Adas Emuno.

A friend of mine, Pier Marton, who is a filmmaker and faculty member at American University in St. Louis, and someone who frequently lectures, writes about, and exhibits artwork on the subject of the Holocaust, shared the talk he gave on Sunday out in Missouri with me, and with his permission, I would like to share them with you:

I start with a quote by one my father’s favorite writers, the Nobel prize winner, Romain Rolland:

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.


My name is Pier Marton, I was born and grew up in Paris, five years after the war.
My parents' stories of survival are stories of resistance.


The odds and the times were against you two, but between luck, being politicized and smart, you both managed to make it.


Papa, in 1937, you left Budapest, Hungary for Paris, to establish your second studio of the artistic Modern Revue, which was to have offices in Budapest, Paris and New York. You advertised your artwork in Esperanto (the language which means “one who hopes”, created by another Jew, Dr. Zamenhof, an ophtalmologist from Bialystok, a man of great vision). 

You had designed some stamps with the star symbol for Esperanto. You hoped Esperanto could become the universal language of the future, to eliminate like communism, the injustices and the misunderstandings between people.


It needs to be clear, there was no such thing as “The Holocaust”, we spoke of “the war” throughout my childhood.


I remember you telling me, I was possibly 8 years old, about the bullets flying by your head as you were waiting for the German convoy that you were to ambush, right from the rooftop of that last building you moved into, to escape arrest.


That’s the building I grew up in, where we lived below the roof, in an artist’s studio that had been vacated because it was too close to a munition factory, and in danger of being bombed.


I remember being amazed by looking at the sawed off metal bars by the window in the loggia, the small room where we all slept  and where one could not stand up because of the low ceiling. 

If someone was going to arrest you, the escape route was clear: it would take a second to lift off those metal bars. To a casual observer they looked normal, but if one looked very carefully, black paint was hiding the cuts. They remained there throughout the 21 years I spent in that apartment: reminding me of the need to have both vigilance and an escape route.


At another time, you told me that the police interrogated you and that they released you.


You also spoke of hearing the police going through another apartment you had lived in, Rue Daguerre, as you were walking up the stairs.


I remember seeing that photograph of you with the medal you received upon the liberation of Paris.

But you did not expand, I had to fill in the many gaps.


One cannot ever know the life of another, do we even know our own lives?


Many years later, in a book by the famous Spanish writer, Jorge Semprun, strangely enough, there was a character with my name, as Semprun describes a resistance network in my own street.


As a curious child, going through the closets I did find a book, the most horrible book I was to ever look at, with piles of mutilated and sawed off bodies, collections of tattoed skin [I let youimagine the rest].

It established for me the need for solid documentation of human rights abuse. 

THERE, was one of the loudest screams emanating from these pictures, a sound that says in the most urgent manner, WAKE UP, something terrible was happening, and IS CONTINUING TO HAPPEN. 

OPEN YOUR EYES, even if it is difficult and painful.


From time to time, we visited that family in Freiburg. You had hidden the father, Henri, a German deserter. But we did not speak about the past, we were in the present.


Later, the puzzle came together further when the letters you had mentioned, “FTP-MOI” became those of the notorious network, mocked by the Nazis in the famous Red Poster, characterizing the resistance as Jews, foreigners, and communists - which in your case was completely true. 

Those 23 who were arrested and executed by the Germans were immortalized by the famous French song, L’Affiche Rouge.

====

Maman,  

Your trust in people was repeatedly broken. It might have started  as a kid on a tramway car in Kiskunfelegyhaza, the small town in Hungary where you grew up, when you had asked a stranger for the time. He had answered: “I don’t have to tell Jews the time”.


You did not volunteer much, you did not want to talk about any of this ever. I think you wanted for us to walk straight, trust the world. 

You did not speak much, but when you spoke, you meant it. 

You would say: "Alles ist halb so wichtig/everything is half as important” which you attributed to Ernst Toller, the left-wing Jewish playwright.


Like for most children of survivors, WHAT WAS NOT SAID had the most impact.


One could say that we received the war, like our mother’s milk, through our body (the transfer was not through words). 

Our history books and our lessons: how we all breathed, how we walked, and how we used our brain... and even how we smiled. We became specialists in the topic. Our bodies were the place where we heard the stories.


We had to know what to ask to get answers. That’s how you told me that you had to step over so many cadavers when walking on the streets at the liberation of Budapest.


For the sake of time, I will ask you to read the stories which are described on the panels outside in the lobby.


These are stories I heard for the first time as my mother spoke to a TV crew when we were both in Salt Lake City for the opening of my video installation “JEW”.


The message was clear: work for the public good and do not trust the powers that be... a politics of non-politics.


THE PEOPLE WHO DIED AND THOSE THAT SURVIVED WHILE BEING ATTACKED FOR BEING DIFFERENT, THOSE ARE THE RESISTANCE FIGHTERS, THE HEROES.


AND THE RESISTANCE, THE RESILIENCE THAT WAS THEIRS IS NOW OURS.

For more information about Pier Marton, you can take a look at his websites:   http://artsci.wustl.edu/~marton and  http://piermarton.wordpress.com.