Yiddishe Mamas (43 page)
Authors: Marnie Winston-Macauley
The unusual meeting came about when Cambers and her fellow students wrote a play,
The Holocaust and Life in a Jar,
which won a History Day contest. They wrote to Sendler and developed a friendship, and donations financed their trip to Poland.
Capping their trip back into history, the students met a survivor, thanks to Sendler. Elzbieta Ficowska was five months old when a Sendler worker rescued her in July 1942. The rest of her family had died in the ghetto. Had it not been for Irena, she, too, would have perished. Ficowska showed the students a silver spoon that her parents had engraved with her name and date of birth that was carried out with her.
On December 2, 1993, when a brick was thrown through the window of a Jewish home displaying a menorah, the town of Billings, Montana (population 83,000), took action. Another
mother, deeply affected by the incident, phoned her pastor and the community immediately rallied together. Menorahs were seen in thousands of Christian, along with Jewish, homes. One store’s billboard read: “Not in our town! No hate. No violence. Peace on earth.” Eventually the hate crimes died down, but residents continued to support one another. In Billings, when the Jews cry “Never again!”—they’re not alone.
E
M
AD
, M
OTHER
, B
E
M
AD!
T
HE
H
ORROR
C
ONTINUES
…
“T
he Holocaust reached us here,” Faina Saltsman of Brooklyn told the Jewish Telegraph Agency. “My only child was taken from us. We have nothing left of him.”
In 1990, years after sixty relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, Saltsman, her husband, Alexander, and son, Arkady, immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. Arkady was a premier architect and he was on the 105th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. After he left a message for his wife, Zhanna, saying he was trapped, she never heard from him again.
On the first Jewish anniversary of her son’s death, Faina joined a march through Brighton Beach organized by the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe, and helped call out the names of sixteen Russian Jewish victims of September 11.
And she returned from that ceremony “destroyed.”
“
I am a Jew. My mother is a Jew
…”
These were reportedly the last words of Daniel Pearl, the thirty-eight-year-old
Wall Street Journal
reporter in Pakistan, before one of his terrorist captors stepped up behind him, slit his throat and then beheaded him on February 2, 2002. Pearl spoke for himself, yet in doing so, spoke for Jews everywhere.
Marine Cpl. Mark Asher Evnin, twenty-one, of South Burlington, Vermont, died in Iraq on April 3, 2003. The former
athlete was a scout sniper and the first Jewish serviceman to die in Iraq. On April 15, 2003, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that his mother, Mindy, received an emotional outpouring of sympathy from Jews around the world. “I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s because the war might help Israel. Maybe because my father was a rabbi. I don’t know, but it gives me pleasure.” His funeral attracted over 1,000 mourners, including Governor Douglas of Vermont.
Army Spc. Marc S. Seiden, twenty-six, of Brigantine, New Jersey, died in Baghdad, Iraq, on January 3, 2004, when his convoy was ambushed by the enemy who used an improvised explosive device, small arms fire, and a rocket-propelled grenade. His mother Gail told the Fayetteville, North Carolina
Observer
that Seiden was “a daredevil since childhood” and this eventually led him to join the army. “I always had to have twenty-five eyes on him.” She added that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were also part of his reason for enlisting. “He joined because he felt he had a duty. I didn’t understand it when he did it. I was angry at him because I knew what could possibly happen. But he felt like he could fight for his country and he wanted to. His unit was scheduled to come back only one month later.” Seiden was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for valor.
Agnes “Aggie” Cohen of Pennsylvania said at the funeral of her son—Michael Ryan Cohen, who was killed in combat on November 22, 2004, near Fallujah in Iraq—that initially she was angry her son was killed. Since that initial reaction, however, she’s been trying to understand what her son was fighting for. “Someone has to fight for those who cannot,” she said. “Someone has to say, ‘Enough. No more.’”
UR
H
OMELAND
D
uring the Nazi occupation of Paris an old, well-dressed French Jew entered the offices of a travel company.
“I want to buy a ticket on the next ship out of Cherbourg.”
“Certainly, monsieur. Where do you want to go?”
“… May I see that globe?”
“Of course.” The clerk placed the globe before the old man, who put on his reading glasses as he slowly turned the globe round and round. After a half hour he removed his glasses and sighed.
“Tell me… do you have anything else?”
I
n 1963, my family and I visited Israel. As a child, I recalled my amazement at being in a country where the vast majority of its people were Jewish. After forty years, my grandmother finally saw her family who had survived the war. Her first remark upon seeing them was, “Oy, you changed!”
The country at that time was perhaps the size of Long Island. My cousins Nomi and Moshe took us around. Moshe, with a tattoo on his arm, had survived Auschwitz, then fought for Israeli independence, as did Nomi.
When we went to Jerusalem, a divided city, there were Arab sentries guarding the border, which was maintained by barbed wire.
I was unused to the vagaries of war and life in Israel so I played around, testing the borders with a toe. Moshe pulled me back. “They’ll shoot you,” he bluntly explained.
It was absolutely remarkable to me what this young country had achieved: On the Israeli side of the border, there was green grass … life, and on the other side, there was … nothing.
Yet despite all the history, here, I felt safe and accepted, among my own. I knew that whatever happened, we had a homeland that would provide for me, for my children, and theirs, if need be. The Diaspora had ended.
“I
went to the Wall together with some soldiers … only a few hours earlier they had…. seen their comrades fall for its sake. Now, standing before the Wall, they wrapped themselves in prayer shawls and wept, and I, too, took a sheet of paper, wrote … ‘shalom’ on it and pushed it into a cranny of the Wall …one of the soldiers suddenly… laid his head on my shoulder and we cried together. I suppose he needed … the comfort of an old woman’s warmth.”
—Golda Meir, writing of her visit to the Wailing Wall, liberated on the third day of the Six-Day War in 1967
Ground breakers:
“OUR GOLDA”
G
olda Meir was the woman who would become the world’s third female prime minister (after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka and Indira Gandhi of India). She was born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev in 1898, the seventh of eight children born to Bluma and Moshe Mabovitch. Moshe immigrated to Milwaukee three years before his family but didn’t prosper. When his wife joined him, Bluma borrowed money and opened a grocery. She wanted Golda to work in the store. Golda, however, wanted to be a teacher and became an activist early. She was haunted by memories of pogroms and was determined to save Jewish children from a similar fate.
During a year in Denver, with an older sister, she discovered Zionism, her life’s passion. When she was nineteen she married Morris Myerson and they moved to Palestine in 1921. They had two children, Menachem, a cellist, and Sarah, a kibbutznik, but eventually separated.
In 1940, she was named head of the Histadrut’s (the major Jewish labor federation’s) political department. When Israel’s independence was imminent, as would be a war with the Arab
states, Golda was sent to the United States to raise funds for the Jewish armed forces. Meir so convincingly described the urgency of the Jewish cause that she raised $50,000—double the amount requested.
When statehood was declared on May 14, 1948, she was a signer of the Proclamation of Independence. In June 1948, Golda became Israel’s ambassador to the USSR, a post she held for seven years. She then served as Israel’s foreign minister for ten years and Hebraicized her name from Meyerson to Meir.
When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly in early 1969, seventy-one-year-old Meir, although ill with cancer, assumed the post. Her political approach was that of loving grandmother, a straightshooter who won over the world with a simplicity, candor, and warmth that belied her shrewdness and nerves of iron. Even though she and the Labor Party won the elections, she resigned in 1974 in favor of Yitzhak Rabin.
After her death on December 8, 1978, Anwar el-sádát wrote her children:
“I must record for history that she had been a noble foe during the phase of confrontation between us… I must mention that she had an undeniable role in starting this peace process…. She has always proved that she was a political leader of the first category, worthy of occupying her place in your history and worthy of the place she occupied in your leadership.”
Golda’s quotes:
“Let me tell you something we have against Moses. He took us forty years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.”
“We Jews just refuse to disappear. No matter how strong… the forces against us… here we are. Millions of bodies broken, buried alive, burned to death, but never has anyone been able to succeed in breaking the spirit of the Jewish people.”
And on motherhood: “At work, you think of the children you’ve left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself, your heart is rent.”
“I
have taught my sons to be good Jews … to battle for that which is right until the last breath, for man is duty-bound to fight for what he holds dear in life.”
—Rivka Gruber
When the Israel-Egypt peace treaty was signed in 1979, Rivka Gruber was among the dignitaries. Rivka, a pioneer settler in what was to become Israel, joined a Jewish Battalion. Her son, Ephraim, joined the Haganah and was killed two months before the establishment of Israel. Her other son, sixteen-year-old Zvi, was killed in battle against the Egyptians three months later.
Rivka went on to teach others in a remote region of Israel, helping to transform the area into a thriving sector.
Chief of neonatology at Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Zerifin, Israel, Dr. Michael Goldberg added another responsibility to his specialty of caring for newborn children. “Every mother who goes home with her baby,” said the doctor, “we give her a baby survival kit. This is a plastic tent with long zippers along the side, and its own air pump to filter out noxious agents. What has become normal in Israel is not normal in the rest of the world. This is life for us in Israel.”
“Death has cast a shadow over our lives,” sighed a weary Nava Barak, wife of Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. “This has become a country where parents bury their children,” reported Tim Boxer. In 2000, Mrs. Barak told media mogul Mort Zuckerman how she tried to console the wife of one of the two soldiers lynched by a mob in Ramallah. “She was married five days before the massacre,” Nava said. “She is pregnant. Her child will be born [without a father]. But we will prevail. We have no other land. We are one people with one history and tradition. Now we are one people under attack.”
Koby Mandell, thirteen, the oldest son of Sherri and Seth Mandell, and his friend Yosef Ishran, were killed on May 8, 2001. The boys were in a cave in the rocky countryside that surrounds the Mandell home in Tekoa, Israel.
Sherri Mandell has said, “We Jews have never honored cruelty. And we never will. True compassion means tempering kindness with strength. No ‘security’ fence can stop cruelty. … Justice demands that we fight for the lives of our children. We must insist that we are not cruel, even in war.”
Sherri Mandell, a director of the Koby Mandell Foundation’s Healing Retreat for families struck by terror, is the author of
The Blessing of a Broken Heart.
Although living with horror and grief, she also describes how she managed to return to life and find solace in a personal, spiritual search. Mandell says a part of her died along with her son in the cave that day, however, she decided to not just live with the pain but grow from it.
She refused to give in to anger and hate and become one of the “haters.” Revenge, to her, means they have won. And she determined not to let hatred tear her from the world and destroy her.
Mandell and her husband, Seth, a rabbi, have created a foundation in their son’s memory that supports, among other things, a free summer camp program for children who have lost parents or siblings. Camp Koby has helped hundreds of youngsters over the years.
In 2002, thirty-six-year-old Jonathan Joseph “J. J.” Greenberg, a rising star in Jewish communal service, died in Tel Aviv the night before Yom Kippur. The New Yorker was struck down by a car while riding his bicycle during a visit with his family in Israel. He was the beloved son of Orthodox Feminist leader Blu Greenberg and her husband, Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg.
He was executive director of the New York-based Jewish Life Network since its inception in 1995 and created such landmark programs as: Birthright Israel, the Makor center on the Upper West Side, the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, Synagogue Transformation and Renewal (STAR), and the Jewish Early Childhood Education Partnership. Jonathan and his father oversaw the national Hillel and the Jewish Heritage Program, as well as many others.
Right before Kol Nidre, visitors to his family home found his parents not just grieving but also comforting others and warmly recalling the impact their son had on so many.
More than any of his other extraordinary accomplishments, Blu Greenberg was perhaps most proud of her son’s humanity and love of family—he was an exceptional uncle to his fourteen nephews and nieces, always finding time for each of them.
