Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Holocaust Torah

The Holocaust Torah

Apr 13, 2015  |  by 
217
SHARES
The Holocaust Torah
How did a survivor who wouldn’t buy a ticket to Israel afford to commission a Torah scroll all by himself?
“Join us for a Holocaust Torah Dedication.” The synagogue e-mail caught us by surprise. Our congregation is very small. Everyone knows each other and we’re aware of any looming celebrations months in advance. Besides, dedicating a new Torah scroll is a huge event. We’d just been part of a mammoth, two-year fundraiser for a new scroll at our kids’ school that took years of planning and the participation of scores of families to make that dream a reality. How could there be a similarly large undertaking in our own synagogue without us being aware of it?
Torah scrolls are painstakingly hand-written by specially-trained scribes. It can take a year or more to complete one scroll; consequently, commissioning a new Torah scroll is very expensive and it’s common for an entire community to band together to raise funds for it.
Mr. Friedman with the author’s son
“It’s Mr. Friedman’s Sefer Torah,” our rabbi responded when we called to ask how we could help. I thought of Mr. Friedman, an elderly member who came to synagogue every morning. With his neat demeanor and old-fashioned manors, he’s a beloved fixture in the community. Our rabbi explained that as a Holocaust survivor himself (he was an inmate at Auschwitz and Dachau), Mr. Friedman commissioned a new Torah scroll to commemorate his parents who were murdered by the Nazis, and his late wife, who was also a survivor.
My thoughts flew to a conversation I’d had with Mr. Friedman in synagogue just a few weeks before. Nearly all his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis, and his wife’s family had met the same fate. One of his only living relatives was an elderly sister-in-law in Israel who’d been blessed over the years with a large family of many children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. Though they spoke sometimes on the phone, he recalled, they could never visit. The cost of a plane ticket was prohibitive.
How did a man who couldn’t afford to buy a plane ticket to Israel commission an entire Torah scroll all by himself?
As the day of the Torah dedication drew near, other families begged Mr. Friedman to be allowed to help. Eventually, our requests wore him down. He consented to allowing his friends and fellow congregants to raise funds for the Torah mantle and crowns that would decorate his new Torah, and to throw a party in his honor. He was adamant on one point though: the fundraising for the Torah itself was entirely his own. “It’s my project,” he said, “and I don’t want any fuss.”
The day of the dedication dawned cold and brisk. As friends and congregants milled around, music began to play. A member drove Mr. Friedman slowly up to the synagogue driveway, tightly holding the Torah scroll. With difficulty, he got out of the car and held the Torah in his arms. As friends held a chuppah – a wedding canopy – over, him, Mr. Friedman laboriously walked up the drive. Just as he’d refused all help in funding his donation, he was now resolved to carry the Torah into the synagogue himself.
“I don’t want to give a big speech,” he’d already declared, but as he deposited the Torah in its home in the sanctuary, a sob escaped him and echoed through the room, more eloquent than any discourse. The Torah, dedicated in memory of his murdered parents and of his wife, was finally home.
A few months later, Mr. Friedman became ill and I called to see if I could stop by with some food. As he buzzed me into his small apartment, I looked around, taking in the modest furnishings and asked him about his parents. He showed me two black and white photos – his mother, wearing an old-fashioned wig, looked young, barely out of her teens in hers. Their names were Menachem Mendel and Raizel. Mr. Friedman talked about them tenderly. They were charitable, honorable, religious people – broad-minded and kind.
When the Nazis took his father away, a young Mr. Friedman found out that he’d been secretly supporting many other families through the years. His father’s last whispered instructions to his son were to continue this tradition, and bring them tzedaka each week.
“I always wanted to do something to honor their memories,” Mr. Friedman once told me about his parents. I gazed around at his humble apartment, at the worn cuff of his jacket, and asked him what had been puzzling me for months. “How did you save the money to buy an entire Sefer Torah all by yourself?”
Mr. Friedman glanced at the photos of his young, vibrant parents. “I’ve been saving for this Torah my entire life,” he whispered.
It is difficult to properly memorialize the countless Jews murdered in the Holocaust. In one synagogue in Chicago, one family is remembered each week now when a brand-new Torah is lovingly unrolled and read. It took decades of hard work and self-denial. But thanks to one elderly, unassuming survivor, the memory of his parents – and of his wife – has at last come home.
Mr. Friedman could use your prayers for a refuah sheleima. His Hebrew name is Mordechai Aryeh ben Raizel.
217
SHARES

at

Beneath a Scarlet Sky: Italian Heroism in the Holocaust

Jan 26, 2019  |  by 
178
SHARES
Beneath a Scarlet Sky: Italian Heroism in the Holocaust
A bestselling novel is reminding readers of real-life cases of Italian heroism in the face of danger.
They are stories that need to be told. As the Holocaust recedes ever further into history, it’s more imperative than ever to record history, ensuring we have the testimonies of those who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.
Recent years have seen a number of bestselling books about the Holocaust. One of the most celebrated recently is Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan, which is currently in production to be a major television movie starring Spider-Man hero Tom Holland. The book has been a runaway bestseller, reaching the top of Amazon Charts, and has been translated into ten languages. The story it tells is of a remarkable Italian hero who helped Jews escape the Holocaust. While fiction, it has some true components, and mirrors the real-life heroism of hundreds of Italians who risked their lives to help Jews.
Mark Sullivan first heard of the man on whom his fictional hero is based in 2006. Somebody mentioned a 79 year old man in Italy who said he’d helped rescue Jews. Fascinated, Sullivan placed a call to the man, Pino Lella, in Milan. “I understand you’re an unsung hero,” Sullivan said.
Mark Sullivan, left, and Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Lella
“I no hero. I’m more of a coward,” Lella replied.
Sullivan flew to Italy to interview Lella and the pair collaborated on the resulting book for ten years. At first Sullivan wanted to write about Lella’s exploits in a work of nonfiction, but he was unable to: few or no witnesses remained who could attest to Lella’s actions, and he found few official records of Lella’s accounts. Instead, he wrote a fictional book that draws on many of the stories Lella told him. Sullivan has estimated that “90%” of the adventures in his book are true.
The fictional Lella in his novel works for the Italian resistance and helps lead dozens of Jews to safety in Switzerland over the Alps. The fictional Lella joins the German army and becomes driver to a high-ranking Nazi official – all the while acting as a spy for the partisans. In the book, Lella works to hide Jewish refugees, including a young sick girl whom he rescues from a cattle car taking Jews to a death camp. The novel records adventurous tales of derring-do.
Incredibly, real life events were often just as dramatic, as real-life Italian heroes worked to save Jews. About 80% of Italy’s Jewish population survived the Holocaust, in part due to efforts of Italian partisans and sympathizers who risked their lives to help and shelter Jews. Here are three real-life, incredible examples of Italian heroes who helped save Jews from the Holocaust and whose actions rival any fictional account.

Gino Bartali: Renowned Athlete and Secret Hero

He was Italy’s greatest athlete: a two time winner of the Giro d’Italia, Italy’s greatest cycling race, who’d also won the Tour de France in 1938. Yet when Gino Bartali, an Italian Catholic from the region of Tuscany, returned home from the Tour de France as Italy’s greatest hero, he pointedly refused to dedicate his victory to Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had recently stripped Jews in Italy of their citizenship and forbade them from working in the government and in many other professions. Bartali disagreed with Mussolini’s racism, and courted reprisals by snubbing Il Duce as the wartime leader was known. He was denied racing opportunities, and considered persona non grata for his anti-Fascist stance.
In 1943, Nazi Germany occupied the northern and central regions of Italy and began rounding up Italian Jews and sending them to concentration camps, Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa, the Cardinal of Florence, sent word to Batali with a top-secret message. The Archbishop was part of a clandestine network of people offering safe passage and protection to Italy’s Jews. Did Batali want to join them, risking death and torture to help Jews? Batali didn’t hesitate; he joined the network and started working to safeguard as many Jews as possible.
Batali’s fame as a cyclist gave him the perfect cover. He quickly had a special bicycle made that was fitted out with hollow areas in the frame and handlebars in which he could stow secret documents. Batali started cycling this special bike all over the country delivering top secret documents. When questioned, Batali explained that he was merely training. In reality, he carried forged identity papers made in the network’s secret printing presses, giving Jews new identities that helped them escape Italy. The job was incredibly risky: Batali was arrested in Florence and questioned by the head of the Fascist secret police. At one point he lived in hiding in the town of Citta Di Castello in Umbria while German forces searched for him to question him about his suspicious cross-country rides.
In addition to his courier services, Batali also courted danger by hiding his Jewish friend Giacomo Goldenberg, and Goldenberg’s family, in an apartment Batali owned in Florence. “He hid us in spite of knowing that the Germans were killing everybody who was hiding Jews” Giorgio Goldenberg, Giacomo’s son, later recalled: “He was risking not only his life but also his family. Gino Bartali saved my life and the life of my family. That’s clear because if he hadn’t hidden us, we had nowhere to go.”
Bartali never spoke of his wartime heroism; his remarkable story only became known after his death in 2000. He was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2013.

Prof. Giovanni Borromeo: Hiding Hundreds of Jews in Plain Sight

Distinguished physician and professor, Dr. Giovanni Borromeo was the director of the renowned Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome when World War II broke out. He was a devout Catholic and father of young children who’d been a military hero during World War I. Although he had everything to lose by helping Jews, when an employee of the hospital, Dr. Vittorio Emanuele, came to tell him he was working under a false name and was secretly a Jew, Dr. Borromeo assured the frightened Jewish doctor that his secret was safe.
Fatebenefratelli Hospital was across the street of Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, in which Nazi forces forced the city’s Jews to live after they invaded Italy in September 1943. Secretly, Drs. Borromeo and Sacerdoti began transferring Jews into the hospital – especially after October 16, 1943, when Nazis began mass arrests of Jews. In all, about two dozen Jews were ushered into the hospital, ad Dr. Borromeo had a perfect explanation: they were suffering from a mysterious, and highly contagious, new epidemic: “K Disease”.
K Disease was accompanied by horrible coughing fits, which seemed to intensify whenever Nazis entered the hospital looking for Jews. Terrified of becoming infected, the Nazis would retreat, leaving patients suffering from K Disease alone. Some Germans wondered if the dreaded sickness Dr. Borromeo spoke of might be Koch or Kreps disease, which are real ailments. In reality, Dr. Borromeo’s “K Disease” stood for the dreaded General Albert Kesserling, who fought Italian troops in North Africa and oversaw massacres of Allied troops in Italy.
Fatebenefratelli Hospital
Whole families found refuge in the hospital, including the Jewish Tedesco family, who later told the world about Dr. Borromeo’s bravery and kindness. Claudio and Luciana Tedesco, their parents and their grandmother all found refuge within the hospital walls. In May 1944, German forces raided the hospital. The Tedescos recalled how doctors instructed them to cough loudly whenever Germans were near. Tragically, the Nazis arrested six Polish Jews who were hiding on a hospital balcony, but the rest of the Jewish “patients” were left untouched.
In 2004, Yad Vashem recognized Dr. Giovanni Borromeo as Righteous Among the Nations for his role in saving dozens of Jews.

Maria Agnese Tribbioli: The Mother Superior Who Saved Jews

Maria Agnese Tribbioli was the Mother Superior at the Firenze Convent on Ferragli Street in Florence when war broke out. Together with a loose network of other Catholic leaders, especially her friend Cardinal Elia Della Costa, Mother Maria decided to take action when Jews and other Italians began to be deported. She decided to use her convent to shelter Jews and political dissidents, and to liaise with other Catholic officials to plan and implement a network of safe houses across Italy.
Mother Maria Agnese knew her activities could have deadly consequences if Nazis ever realized her convent was sheltering Jews. She never told the other nuns the identities of their guests, only calling them “homeless refugees” and explaining that they needed hospitality and aid. Several Jewish families hid in the convent. The convent had a kindergarten which some of the Jewish children attended.
Years later Cesare-David Sacerdoti, an Orthodox Jew who hid in the convent with his brother and mother (his father hid elsewhere in the city) testified to the Mother Superior’s bravery and kindness. He remembered her stroking his head during kindergarten, looking kindly at him but saying nothing. When nuns complained to Mother Maria Agnese that Cesare-David refused to cross himself, she simply told them to leave him alone and explained that the trauma of leaving home to attend school in the convent was to blame.
Cesare-David’s father was able to visit the convent a number of times to receive news about his wife and sons. At least once, Nazis tried to break into the convent to search for Jews, but Mother Maria Agnese was able to convince them to leave, explaining that searching her convent would violate its holy sanctity.
On November 27, 1943, Nazis forces did force their way into a nearby convent, where they discovered many Jewish women hiding with their children. Mother Maria Agnese worried that her convent would be raided next. She ordered all her nuns to remain locked in their rooms, then coordinated with other Catholic officials to find new safe houses for the Jews she’d sheltered.
In 2009, Yad Vashem recognized Maria Agnese Tribbioli as Righteous Among the Nations.
Pino Lello concludes Beneath a Scarlet Sky by musing that he’s proud of his wartime activities helping Jews and declaring “we must have faith in God...and in a better tomorrow”. The bestselling novel depicts extraordinary bravery and offers a realistic-seeming account of Italians’ bravery. Thanks to the real-life activities of these and hundreds of other Italian heroes, thousands of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust. Their inspiring histories should never be forgotten.
178
SHARES

at

A Holocaust Love Story

A Holocaust Love Story

Jan 25, 2016  |  by 
789
SHARES
A Holocaust Love Story
A powerful true story of Jewish heroism.
Rabbi Yosef Wallis, director of Arachim of Israel, talks to Project Witness about his father, Judah Wallis, who was born and raised in Pavenitz, Poland.
While he was in Dachau, a Jew who was being taken to his death suddenly flung a small bag at my father, Judah Wallis. He caught it, thinking it might contain a piece of bread. Upon opening it, however, he was disturbed to discover a pair of tefillin. Judah was very frightened because he knew that were he to be caught carrying tefillin, he would be put to death instantly. So he hid the tefillin under his shirt and headed for his bunkhouse.
In the morning, just before the appel [roll call], while still in his bunkhouse, he put on the tefillin. Unexpectedly, a German officer appeared. He ordered him to remove the tefillin, noted the number on Judah’s arm.
At the appel, in front of thousands of silent Jews, the officer called out Judah’s number and he had no choice but to step forward. The German officer waved the tefillin in the air and said, "Dog! I sentence you to death by public hanging for wearing these."
Judah was placed on a stool and a noose was placed around his neck. Before he was hanged, the officer said in a mocking tone, "Dog, what is your last wish?"
“To wear my tefillin one last time," Judah replied.
“The officer was dumbfounded. He handed Judah the tefillin. As Judah put them on, he recited the verse that is said while the tefillin are being wound around the fingers: "Ve’eirastich li le’olam, ve’eirastich li b’tzedek uvemishpat, ub’chessed, uv’rachamim, ve’eirastich li b’emunah, v’yodaat es Hashem – I will betroth you to me forever and I will betroth you to me with righteousness and with justice and with kindness and with mercy and I will betroth you to me with fidelity, and you shall know God."
It is hard for us to picture this Jew with a noose around his neck, wearing tefillin on his head and arm – but that was the scene that the entire camp was forced to watch, as they awaited the impending hanging of the Jew who had dared to break the rule against wearing tefillin.
Even women from the adjoining camp were lined up at the barbed wire fence that separated them from the men’s camp, forced to watch this horrible sight.
"Yidden, I am the victor. Don’t you understand, I am the winner!"
As Judah turned to watch the silent crowd, he saw tears in many people’s eyes. Even at that moment, as he was about to be hanged, he was shocked. Jews were crying! How was it possible that they still had tears left to shed? And for a stranger? Where were those tears coming from? Impulsively, in Yiddish, he called out, "Yidden, I am the victor. Don’t you understand, I am the winner!"
The German officer understood the Yiddish and was infuriated. He said to Judah, "You dog, you think you are the winner? Hanging is too good for you. You are going to get another kind of death."
“Judah, my father, was taken from the stool and the noose was removed from his neck. He was forced into a squatting position and two huge rocks were placed under his arms. Then he was told that he would be receiving 25 lashes to his head – the head on which he had dared to position his tefillin. The officer told him that if he dropped even one of the rocks, he would be shot immediately. In fact, because this was such an extremely painful form of death, the officer advised him, "Drop the rocks now. You will never survive the 25 lashes to the head. Nobody ever does."
Judah’s response was, "No, I won’t give you the pleasure."
At the 25th lash, Judah lost consciousness and was left for dead. He was about to be dragged to a pile of corpses , after which he would have been burned in a ditch, when another Jew saw him, shoved him to the side, and covered his head with a rag so people didn’t realize he was alive. Eventually, after he recovered consciousness fully, he crawled to the nearest bunkhouse that was on raised piles and hid under it until he was strong enough to come out under his own power. Two months later he was liberated.
"I saw what you did that day when the officer wanted to hang you. Will you marry me?”
During the hanging and beating episode, a 17-year-old girl had been watching the events from the women’s side of the fence. After liberation, she made her way to Judah. She walked over to him and said, "I’ve lost everyone. I don’t want to be alone any more. I saw what you did that day when the officer wanted to hang you. Will you marry me?”
My parents walked over to the Klausenberger Rebbe and requested that he perform the marriage ceremony. The Klausenberger Rebbe, whose Kiddush Hashem is legendary, wrote out a kesubah[marriage contract] by hand from memory and married the couple. I have that handwritten kesubah in my possession to this day.
789
SHARES
at

Holocaust Suitcase Packs Stories of Survival

Holocaust Suitcase Packs Stories of Survival

Oct 14, 2017  |  by 
68
SHARES
Holocaust Suitcase Packs Stories of Survival
Paula Gris’s childhood ended at age three.
Paula Neuman Gris’s 75-year-old blue suitcase is an old friend. It accompanied her from her childhood home in Czernowitz, Romania, to the killing fields of the Holocaust to a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and across the ocean to America.
The suitcase held necessities and secrets. The journey began in 1941 when all the Jews of Czernowitz received the dreaded order to pack two bags and be ready to leave in two hours. It was part of the Romanian government’s directive to “cleanse the Earth” of Jews.
The blue suitcase
A year previously, after the Russians had occupied her hometown of Czernowitz, they seized her father, Simon Neuman, a men’s haberdasher, as a slave laborer. “They arrested my father because he was a capitalist. They had their own political agenda. He was imprisoned. At that time, my mother was pregnant with their second child,” Paula says in an Aish.com interview.
Her mother, Etka Neuman, would leave three-year-old Paula alone every day to visit him in prison and take him food. Then Simon disappeared with 10,000 Jewish men whom the Russians deported to Siberia. What became of him from there is unclear.
Meanwhile, Etka bore their baby. Anti-Jewish laws and a curfew were in force. Jews couldn’t be admitted to public hospitals and weren’t supposed to leave their homes at night. However, Etka went into labor at night, so she risked her life and sneaked out onto the street to reach her Jewish midwife.
“My memory of that night was she left me alone – probably saying, ‘I love you, I have to leave now.’ She locked the door and went away. My memory was standing frozen as a three-year-old little girl, looking at the doorknob all night long. It was probably the beginning of a long period of experiencing terror and fear and the sense of helplessness,” recalls Paula.
Her mother made it to the midwife’s where she spent the night. The next morning she wrapped up her new baby in a blanket and walked home.

Childhood Ends at Age Three

Paula declares that her childhood ended at that point. “I became my mother’s partner until the end of the war in protecting and keeping that child alive.”
One-quarter of a million Jews died of execution, disease and starvation in Transnitria.
Her mother managed to obtain an exemption written by the town mayor and allowing them to remain in the ghetto for nine months after the order came in November 1941 to transport Jews to the Romanian-administered territory called Transnitria, what Paula describes as the largest killing field of the Holocaust. One-quarter of a million Jews died of execution, disease and starvation there.
November was the coldest month on record in years and many Jews piled into cattle cars froze to death in transit. Waiting nine months for the transport in June when the weather wasn’t cold would give her baby sister Sylvia a better chance of survival.

The Last Time I Cried

Paula remembers the little blue suitcase’s role. Her mother was allowed two suitcases, but needed one hand free to carry Sylvia, so she took just one suitcase packed with photographs, documents, diapers, a towel and soap. In the corners Etka stuffed money and jewelry with which to bribe officials if necessary and they left home.
Paula Gris
“I’m sure I must have said, ‘Can I take my blanket? Can I take my bear?’ Instead, I had to carry a soup can. I think that was probably the last time I cried,” says Paula.
Suitcases remain etched in her memory from the eyes of a child. She recalls masses of people pushing toward the transport to Transnitria. Running, she held onto her mother’s skirt. “You had to keep moving, otherwise you’d get trampled.”
With her mother performing backbreaking forced labor for the war effort in the rock quarries of Transnistria, Paula was the sole caretaker of her baby sister during the day. The girls learned to hide and stay quiet in the vacated hut they occupied. Fear and hunger left them with no energy to play, with one day blending into the next, unbroken by birthdays or holidays.
“I don’t remember very much of it except sheltering my sister, waiting in an abandoned house for my mother to come back, not crying.”
“There was a very long darkness. I don’t remember very much of it except sheltering my sister, waiting in an abandoned house for my mother to come back, not crying, being a caregiver to my sister, being as grown up as I could possibly be, which means trying to stay brave.”
Immediately after returning home from work every night, Etka would wash the girls’ clothes in a stream. As Paula explains, “Cleanliness was medicine for us, keeping off bedbugs and lice. After that my mother nursed her baby. The three of us slept in a cot together.”
The family survived like that for two years, with little food and no medicine. Paula learned to delay gratification. If she had a slice of bread, she never ate it all at once. Had the Germans not retreated from the Russians, she doesn’t believe her family would have been able to hold out much longer under the lash of Nazism and Romanian anti-Semitism.

No Fairy-Tale Ending in Liberation

Their troubles were far from over after liberation. “When we went back to Czernowitz and discovered there was no one left, no one to help us or to rejoice at our return, it was a very difficult time. We lost many things in the war. Most of all we lost who we were. We had been treated like animals.”
Her mother had kept alive the hope of reuniting with husband. But he never came back and was presumed killed. So she and her two young daughters lived in a displaced persons’ camp in the American Zone of Occupation in West Germany for seven years before emigrating to the United States in 1951.
Paula yearned to blend in as an American and cast off the cobwebs of her past. She quickly learned English and applied herself at school. Her mother maintained a strong sense of Jewish identity for them all. Paula worked as a junior counselor one summer at a day camp in Pleasantville, N.Y., run by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. She met a senior counselor named Bill Gris who was a rabbi’s son and her future husband.
“The real reason I married him was I loved the smell of his family’s home,” she says jokingly. “It was clean in a way we immigrants never managed to get. The food was delicious; his bubbie did all the cooking. His bubbie loved me, so she heaped plates high for me.
After Bill finished Army duty, his and Paula’s suitcases would come to rest in Atlanta when he took a job there. Meanwhile, Sylvia would become a wife, mother, photographer and artist who now lives in upstate New York.
Paula’s children
Paula began reclaiming her prewar memories at the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in 1981.
“That was the most incredible homecoming for all of us survivors. All of us had the same feeling: that God had put his Hand in the fire and had pulled out seeds to reseed the Jewish world.”
She also reclaimed her tears upon hearing “Hatikva,” the national anthem of Israel that promises a future for the Jewish people. Tears also well up when she hears young Jewish children singing songs of hope. A grandmother many times over, Paula appreciates the Jewish people’s optimism and resiliency, building families and contributing to the world after seeing the worst in humanity.
The blue suitcase traveled around the world during her childhood and beyond until it landed in a glass display case at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, where Paula is an educator. She and her husband, Bill, have lived in the community 60 years and she continues to tell her story to make a young Romanian girl’s voice heard.
68
SHARES

at
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *