As an old hag who marched in the women’s lib parade 40 years ago, it seems to be that today’s youngsters just don’t get what our bitter battle for basic human rights was like. We had bosses putting their hands up our skirts with impunity (and that did happen to Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she first got married and worked in a social security office in St. Louis, as well as to me and thousands of others.) Equal work was not equal pay and is not to this day.

Men are still in charge because some young women think that feminism means you can sell yourself like a sex object and that women’s manners are disgusting, so men don’t take most of us seriously. And the serious ones they dismiss with sexual comments like “she needs a little” or “she must swing the other way.” etc. When I see it around my community, I want to pull my hair (whatever is left of it) out of my head.

Face it. With a few exceptions, MEN HATE STRONG WOMEN, and thanks to the post feminists who never understood what we were fighting for, they are busily, legislatively and religiously, taking away our rights.

There are those of us who helped our families live better lives by contributing our incomes, sometimes more than one income, to the rest of the family and we did it while putting up with constant abusive or insulting behavior from men….and the author seemed to denigrate those kinds of women. Just the other day, my mother said to me, “You always wanted to be a man.” which is what the author seems to say about old time feminists like me.

No. I do not want to be a man. I grew up with a twin brother in a haredi household. I wanted to be treated with the same respect and humanity and equality in learning and observance as he. And I soon discovered that the reason men are the way they are is because their mothers and fathers and teachers never bothered to tell them that women are valuable and have rights.

Mom is cooking, doing the dishes, the laundry, and running the house, including getting someone to mow the lawn, etc., while also holding down one or two jobs or even running a small business, while dad sits and complains that she’s not good enough, the kids are too noisy, helping them with homework is not his job and he’s too tired to do the dishes or take out the garbage, ’cause he had a hard day at work. Compared to running a household, let me tell you that work in an office or retail store is easy. Been there done that with millions of other women. But there are Jewish women trapped in even worse situations.

Some female members of my family are not permitted to attend school where secular subjects and English go beyond 9th grade. College has been verboten. Women are not permitted to drive or go to an event on their own, birth control is forbidden. So are computers and smartphones.

The sex stories are outrageous. There are a goodly number of concubines and there are also child molesters who got away with it for decades–stuff swept under the rug which is now exploding. Four guys just were let off the hook for trafficking a young Hasidic girl with emotional issues, and possibly more than that… Right now I am dealing with a woman in Brooklyn whose son is one of those molested kids who became a druggie. Her husband is abusive, and she is struggling to get out. She needs money to support her kids, and because she has no education, she has to go out and literally beg. How can I help her? Where are her sisters? They rejected her because she is no longer Orthodox. She has become an atheist. Where can I find the money for her? Answer: I can’t, certainly not by myself.

That’s the part the feminists forget about. And it’s not just the silence on the molestations. The turnout on behalf of women who are agunot is pitiful. Women are more than half the population. Where are the pro-active Feminists? Are they afraid of losing their jobs if they speak up? Are they too busy arguing feminist philosophy while the house burns down?

Yes, strong women scare most men. When we call for Halakhic reform they call us nuts, crazy, dismiss us like flies on a horse. And then they lie about the rules. Like the agunah situation, which can, indeed be fixed, since halakha, according to the Talmud, is supposed to be adjusted to meet community needs. Then there’s the bit forbidding women to wear talit and tefillin. Not true. It’s a chumrah created by chauvinists which has ZERO to do with halakha, and is based on the fact that the Remah and Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg thought women were arrogant.

Where are our Devorahs? Why are women buying into the misogyny? The Haggadah states: “AT psach lo”–The feminine You–”You teach them.” It’s a woman’s job to teach her children to respect women and allow them to explore their full potential for the benefit of their own lives. Take from texts that which uplifts women and forget the Aishes Chayil stereotype.

Teach your children how to be. And don’t let them watch trash TV and think real life is like that. It’s only a weapon of mass distraction so that they don’t even think about what really matters–whether it’s making a relationship work, being a decent and moral person (you hardly see that on TV) or paying attention to politics. And paying attention to politics is vital.

Politics in this day and age is very, very personal, especially for women, as people, by the millions, are being kicked out of their homes in their old age, jobs disappear, wages keep falling, expenses keep going up. The Republicans make a concerted effort to stop any jobs bill and real help to homeowners, while cutting education to the bone, preventing women from getting equal pay for equal work, seek to control their uteri, and let insurance companies deny half the population proper medical care while hospitals are charging people $3,000 for a $300 test, or big pharma charges $1090 for 90 pills of Nexium, a heartburn pill. We dare not remain silent in the face of these issues, because they lower the quality of our lives and roll back everything we fought for so long ago.

Here’s a hard and fast rule about Judaism (and I guess real life), as per Herman Cohen, who got it from the prophets: “If it’s not just, ethical and reasonable, it’s not Judaism.” And from its inception, it is a religion with constantly evolving rules. That doesn’t mean we go backwards.

You want things to change? Start with your own children, and don’t make someone like me feel that the battle we fought and won so that you young women can do whatever you want…don’t, just don’t make me feel that it was a total and complete waste of our time.

The post A Note to post-Feminists who just don’t seem to get it appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

So why is it that fewer and fewer Jews care about Israel? Maybe it is because they don’t like what they see in a host of Israeli policies, from making nice with some of the vilest governments in the world to treating refugees from genocide like criminals. It is something that is hard to wrap your head around. As hard as trying to understand how rabbis in New York refuse to let victims of child abuse dial 911 without their permission.

Who are the people throwing rocks through black-owned shop windows in Tel Aviv and setting fire to Eritreans in Jerusalem? People who were educated in the Land of Yad Vashem? How many billions did we spend trying to teach people how to live together and prevent genocide? As Jews and as a Jewish community, we yell “hate crime” every time someone looks at us cross-eyed, denies the Holocaust, or paints a swastika on a wall, including at Yad Vashem in early June. In the meantime, we Jews treat each other, our children, and the strangers among us like we are less than worthless.

Did the Six Million die for nothing? They had faith in a free, democratic and ideal state of Israel that would be the salvation of the world. Ani Mamin they sang in the Ghettos and camps. Hatikvah was on their lips together with the Shma as they went to the gas. We sing those songs on Yom Hashoah along with the Partisaner Hymn and Kaddish.

Where is that land of Israel, the land of Jewish values and ideals? Today it’s a place where Israeli government officials tell the big lie about North Africans, and prevent their own people from protesting peacefully. Government officials said that these refugees from genocide are raping Israeli women, giving them AIDS, and are a cancer on Israeli society. And they are deporting them back to their countries of origin with ugly rhetoric and violence reminiscent of Kristallnacht.

The ideal Israel in our souls, the Israel of blue skirts and embroidered blouses, of campfires and idealism, only exists in our imaginations. As a student of history, not bubbeh mayses, the story of the birth of Israel, the story of how the Jewish community behaved before, during and after the war in Mandate Palestine, in Europe, in America, in community after community–except for a handful of people who put themselves on the line in the attempt to rescue Jews–is not a pretty story.

The fictional Ari Ben Canaans of Exodus and the Rabbi Michoel Wiessmandls were rare characters. The Israeli right wing murdered the man who saved my mother and thousands of others during the Holocaust. To this very day, the behavior of the established Jewish communities in the secular and denominational world is shameful–from the treatment of the North Africans, including Ethiopian Jewry and women in Israel and everywhere else where they are forced to sit in the back, not drive, not go to school, etc.(in the organizational Jewish world there is equal work, not equal pay and glass ceilings) to the decades of covering up child abuse and domestic violence everywhere. And if anyone tells you that women in Judaism are free, look them in the eye and say “Agunot.”

The typical American Jew looks on, aghast, as Israel self-immolates in front of Diaspora Jewry, and Diaspora Jewry faces its own house of horrors. So much for being a light unto the nations. So much for the lessons from the Holocaust. So much for Jewish values. How the hell did we become the monsters we teach our children not to be. How can we, just four generations after the Holocaust, remain silent in the face of our leaders’ moral bankruptcy? How can we tolerate it when a Jew calls another Jew a Nazi? How can we tolerate it when our own people behave the way they do?

Maybe Jewish values died with the Six Million. Maybe that’s when Jewish leadership died. Elie Wiesel once said, “Jeanette, don’t wait for leaders. Be your own leader.”

Listen to Wiesel. Speak truth to power. If you don’t like what you see in the Jewish community, don’t wait for someone to lead you. Pick up a phone, post something to facebook, make your voice heard. Protest and demand the end of hypocrisy. Be your own leader.

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The post I.B. Singer Festival in Warsaw appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

I was the senior in the bunch, and David Peel, a real hippie who hung with John and Yoko back in the day (and was singing Tevye’s greatest hits), was one person who asked me why I was there, as did a struggling freelance journalist. They both looked pointedly at my gray hair and my grandmotherly physique.

“I am here because when things were circling the drain, the banks wouldn’t renegotiate our mortgage. The credit card companies hiked their interest rates. My husband got sick and lost his job. And the co-pays on drugs have become obscene. My Nexium went from $30 for 90 pills to $640+ on a co-pay. Full price for that formerly $30 bottle is $1080. That’s why I am in Zuccotti Park. I marched against Vietnam in 65 (and married a Viet Nam vet). I marched in the Women’s Lib Parade in 1970, because my Orthodox Jewish husband refused to grant me a Jewish divorce for seven long and bitter years. I marched on behalf of Soviet Jewry and for the State of Israel. Now I am marching for me.”

In bankruptcy and foreclosure, after paying every bill for 21 years, we lost a state tenant in our investment/retirement home in Arizona and lost the house. Then clients bailed on us because they had no money, others canceled projects because of investments with Madoff and other shaky stuff. Now our home in New Jersey is underwater.

We write books, we edit books, we print books. We are a necessary niche market business. But the trustee for U.S. Bankruptcy court will not allow us to sell the books we print for our clients, let alone our used books, and is demanding $21,500 for the books I need to do my work, for the mementos of a full and not-boring life, for my beloved Brooklyn Bridge collection, and my Judaica. That’s why I go to Zuccotti Park and exercise my first amendment rights.

If anyone missed what the media says about people like me and my son Dan—they are saying we are young (I wish), smelly, nasty, ignorant know-nothings who do not believe in the system, we are criminals, etc. You really have to see the Jon Stewart take on this to see what they say about people like you and me. CLICK HERE.

We are not who the media says we are. We know who we are. We are those who struggle just to keep it together, to rescue something from everything we had ever worked for. And those of us who have parents watch them in the last days of their lives as they suffer along with us. And trust me—it is infinitely more difficult when those elderly parents are Holocaust survivors.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Isaiah speaks for God, who essentially says, “Who needs you to fast and say all these prayers of repentance and offer me all of these sacrifices if you don’t take care of your widows, your poor and your orphans?”

That’s why it is precisely on Yom Kippur that I am with my son in Zuccotti Park. It is precisely here that I can, with a clear conscience, ask for forgiveness for selfishness, apathy and pride. I want people to understand that it’s not just about ATM fees and interest rates; it’s about human beings who are just like you and me. It’s about millions of Americans who are teetering on the edge of the abyss, and nobody out there with the means, the power and the vision wants to step forward and give us the help we need to survive as our American dreams turn into nightmares.

I knew it a long time ago, but you cannot, like Isaiah, be a prophet in your own hometown. Check out youtube.com. On May 1, 1979, Ayn Rand, the grand diva of the free market, was a guest on Donohue, who at the time had the only intelligent talk show on TV. My sister-in-law and I were in the audience. I wore a white dress and had long, black curly hair and big glasses. I was eight months pregnant with Dan, my son who called for Yom Kippur services at Occupy Wall Street. Rand and I had a knock down drag out with Donohue as referee, and it dominated the show. For Rand, it was all about keeping whatever you make, charity is a waste and it’s not the government’s job to protect anyone or give them a leg up, and how dare Donohue allow her to be attacked by hippies!

For me it was quite the opposite. When Donohue explained to me that according to Rand, corporations will do the right thing, I said that I didn’t believe that. “The more money you have,” I said to him, “the more power you have.”

Now, if anyone on Fox Not the News cares to show up at Kol Nidrei services at Occupy Wall Street, I would be proud to answer any questions intelligently. But I have learned, again, through bitter experience, that Fox never lets reality get in the way of Fox facts.

The post WHERE THIS JEW BELONGS ON YOM KIPPUR appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

ORTHODOX ENDS, UNORTHODOX MEANS
The Role of the Vaad Hatzalah and Agudath Israel during the Holocaust
By David H. Kranzler

“The Orthodox were flexible in their approach and were thus able to adapt to conditions of ‘total war’ more readily than other Jewish groups…apparently it set the pace for other groups.”1
Professor Aryeh Tartakower (World Jewish Congress)

In this essay, the term “Orthodox” refers to two small Jewish organizations based in the United States: the Agudath Israel (The Agudah) and the Vaad Hatzalah. The Agudah, a branch of World Agudath Israel, began its work on refugee and immigration matters in 1938 in response to requests for rescue from Austria and Germany. It concentrated on obtaining sponsoring affidavits and visas for Orthodox Jews in occupied Europe. But it handled all requests that came its way, including those from the non-Orthodox.2

Read more here.

The post David Kranzler’s Orthodox Ends, Unorthodox Means from the Goldberg Commission Report, 1985 appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

View from the parking lot

Majdanek was opened on October 1, 1941 as a P.O.W. camp, became a death camp and was captured intact by the Red Army on July 22, 1944.

Where we were

You had to be blind.

I sat in the back seat of the bus, behind Isaac and Karen. Charley was upfront with other folks from his hometown, Detroit. He and I had gone to Bergen-Belsen in 1985 together to protest when U. S. President Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg to lay a wreath on the graves of the Waffen S.S.

When we pulled out of Warsaw, only a few of us knew each other, and I huddled near the window, feeling alone. Camera in hand, I was waiting to see what I could see from the window of this time capsule, a rocket shaped bullet of a bus that sped through the countryside. You could glimpse a bit of antisemitic graffiti scrawled on the walls, but not as much as expected. (I saw more in London in 2000 than I saw on the way to Lublin in 2011.)

Once we left Warsaw city limits, it was as if there were no suburbs. We went from city to country in a heartbeat. Little hamlets lined the two-lane road, until we came to little towns, where the road signs at the major intersections pointed to Reszow, Chelm, Bialystok, Wroclaw (Breslov to the Hasidim of Reb NaNaNa Nachman) and back to Warsaw.

Fields and forests on the way to Lublin

.

A glimpse of the woods where the ghosts live

This is not the way to literary Chelm

We arrived in Lublin, a crowded city, and Agnieshka pointed out the castle on the hill. It was the same castle where Eta Wrobel, one of my favorite and feisty survivors, was held by the Nazis and then escaped into the woods. (Eta was a partisan from Lukow, who’d been betrayed for forging work permits and other papers.)

The Castle/Prison on the hill

Gateway to Hell

It looked like we were the only busload of “tourists” in the place. A handful of people, speaking Polish, passed us by. I wandered off by myself. I didn’t like group pictures, and having listened to so many stories, seen so many photos (all in black and white of course), I didn’t think I really needed explanations of how a death camp worked.

I wandered into the disinfection showers, and pulled out a little prayer book I had “neglected” to give back to Isaac, who carried a few copies. I thought this would be as good a place as I could find for the moment, empty but for me, so I could whisper a few psalms for the health of my cousin, Libbie, in Jerusalem. Her dad had asked me to say prayers over the graves of our “great” ancestors—the “Gedolim,” the generations of religious leaders of the Jewish people for centuries before the Holocaust. As far as I was concerned, all those who were murdered in this terrifying place were Gedolim.

Disinfection

One Murdering Place of two

Where our people tried to live

Soon Charley (from Detroit), Isaac (from Boston), Karen (from Pine, Colorado) and the others walked in with the guide. We were led from the showers to two gas chambers—one run on diesel fuel and the other on Xyklon B. These were no underground gas chambers. They were right there, near the entrance to the camp. Welcome to Majdanek, welcome to the death factory, we have nothing to hide.

Tears ran free as we recited El Moleh Rachamim and Kaddish. It wouldn’t be the last time, not in that place or in others.

We moved on to the barracks—did I need to know the numbers? These barracks were not shades of gray, they were in trendy “earth tones,” which gave me a dose of cognitive dissonance. (That was going to happen a lot to all of us on this trip.) How many bodies were squeezed into each bunk? What rained down on you from the pallet above if its inhabitant did not live through the night? The stench would have been unimaginable, and the stove, the only source of heat, looked incredibly inefficient, so that people would freeze in the winters. The ventilation was minimal, so that people would suffocate in the summers. (The day we were there, the temperature was hovering in the 90s. and the sun was brutal.)

The gray gravel crunched underfoot and when we looked back, the massive monument looked smaller and less overbearing.

But we were nearing the crematorium, and the town of Lublin looked down at the camp with its implacable façade. I looked at Charley. He looked at me. “Do you watch HGTV?” I asked. “House Hunters International,” he said. “Rooms with a view,” I said. “Do they get a discount? Move to Lublin and get a view of rolling green fields? Beats me.”

What does it take to live here?

A place to pray

Inhumane Water Heater

The crematorium was ingenious. It was in perfect condition, as if you could go back to business on demand. The ovens were spotlessly clean, not an ash to be seen. The energy generated by them was used to heat water for the camp and officers’ quarters. Some asked what they used for fuel. “Coke,” said the guide.

“The real thing,” I murmured to myself, bitterly. Charley heard me and gave me a poke. “Let’s say Kaddish,” I responded. And we did.

As we were leaving, Charley and I looked out the back door of this place that was hell, at the blooming flower beds, in the bright sunshine, as the city’s windows stared back at us blankly, with the castle on the hill behind them.

So tastefully done.

I walked over to the “flying saucer” and looked down at tons of ashes and bits of bones. All that was left of those who passed through the gates of this place in my face was this pile of human remains, whose souls we could feel floating around us.

The Ashes of Our Families

We said Kaddish once again, I prayed for Libbie, and we left for the city to look for some hope.

The post RIGHT IN YOUR FACE appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

Most Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson! A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1941 to 1945 underscore just how much was known—and how much could have been attempted during those difficult years. Sometimes vilified at the time, Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.

The only documentary to draw on both existing filmed interviews with Peter Bergson, Not Idly By provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European Jews and describes the Bergson Group’s determined efforts to fight the Holocaust. This notably included the fiery 1943 production We Will Never Die by Ben Hecht and Kurt Weill (Madison Square Garden, Hollywood Bowl), presented extensively for the first time in the documentary. Yes, this is a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s. Isn’t it about time we gave further though to that side?

Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-294-8301
Ticket Sales $15 general, $10 CJH, AJHS members, seniors, students
Further information: Not Idly By – Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

Timely?

Fresh Headlines From the Crypt: ‘Bomb Auschwitz,’ Says Golda; FDR: No Way, by J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward, Sept. 5, 2011
Pierre Sauvage’s response to the attack on the Bergson Group that is at the heart of the article:

Yes, Roosevelt was good for the Jews—the Jews of America. And yes, bringing a reluctant country into the war was a major Roosevelt accomplishment. And yes, to be sure, American Jews then did not have the power and self-confidence we acquired later.

But let’s start by being candid about the American response—and the American Jewish response—to the massacre of the Jews of Europe: we here all have skin in the game. We are talking, after all, about what our families did and didn’t do during that long crisis. The widespread and persistent eagerness to assert that “we didn’t know” and “we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known” is one measure of how powerful the taboo continues to be about the unacknowledged American experience of the Holocaust. J. J. Goldberg’s trivializing of the Bergson Group’s amazing determination to get the word out and to do something about it strikes me as merely a new attempt to keep the taboos in place.

As Peter Bergson puts it my documentary Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, “We couldn’t have stopped the Holocaust, we could have slowed the Holocaust, we could have made it an inefficient Holocaust. The people who made it efficient were the Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere were the [American] Jews.”

The fact is that we will never never know what might have been accomplished to rescue Jews in Europe since so little was attempted or even considered. For my part, I was born and sheltered in a tiny Christian area of France that defied the Nazis and turned itself into the very haven of refuge that America refused to be. My own life has thus taught me that collective will and action can be startlingly imaginative and dynamic even under the most trying circumstances. Where there’s a will, there is indeed often a way.

What the article also completely misses is that at this point, the discussion should be as much about us as it is about them. So many years later, are we at last willing to probe not only what happened here then, but our many evasions today about that experience? If we do not fully and forthrightly—and without smugness—acknowledge and dissect our share in past failures, are we not limiting our ability to act effectively in meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Belatedly Recognizing Heroes of the Holocaust, The New York Times, Sunday, Aug. 7 (on the Bergson Group)
Bergson Group Activists Recognized At Yad Vashem-Wyman Conference, The Jewish Press, July 27, 2011
Historians Debate: Could More Jews Have Been Saved?, Jerusalem Post, July 17, 2011, on the Bergson Group conference at Yad Vashem on July 15 (excerpts from Not Idly By were shown)

Pierre Sauvage also draws on Not Idly By and the work-in-progress And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille in his illustrated lectures Learning Hope From the Holocaust: The Challenge To Us Of Holocaust Rescuers, and Did We Fight the Holocaust? Varian Fry and Peter Bergson.
Upcoming: Syracuse University, NY; York College, PA; Memphis, TN; Denver, CO.

The post Save the Date: A note from Pierre Sauvage appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

My mother was furious. My friend’s mother forbade her to come altogether, and she obeyed her mother. But I was determined to go and my cousin in Jerusalem made it possible.

A few days after my trip was booked, I received a call from the North American Council of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and after an interview with Mr. Sigmund Rolat in New York, I learned I would be in Poland for 18 days—to learn about the country and to witness the I.B. Singer Festival in Warsaw while learning about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which sits atop what used to be the street where my mother and grandmother lived, in the Jewish Quarter that became the Warsaw Ghetto.

The welcome we received on Friday night in what I call the cocoon (the hotel that could be anywhere) was heartwarming. Stefanie Seltzer, the Federation president, opened the conference. The Israeli ambassador, Zvi Rav-Ner and American ambassador Lee Feinstein welcomed us, as did the mayor, really the President of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, along with Rabbi Michael Shudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, who was born in Queens, New York.

Stefanie Seltzer opens the Conference

Ambassador Feinstein was honest. He noted that Jews have a very long history in Poland, one that was complicated at times, in part because of Poland’s location in the so-called “bloodlands,” where great power competition too often brought out the worst in humanity. He described how the Jews found a home in a historically diverse and tolerant Poland, and established what was once the world’s largest Jewish community. He talked about how the Jewish people made vital and lasting contributions to Polish society and world civilization, including in the arts, science, and commerce. And of course, he explained how the Holocaust changed all that, and yet there were Poles who risked everything to save Jewish lives, giving Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 children, as the classic example of a Righteous Person.

U.S. Ambassdor Lee Feinstein

He said that our conference was helping Poland re-discover its heritage and talked about the growing interest among Poles in exploring this history and embracing Jewish culture, mentioning the annual Jewish festivals in Warsaw and Krakow, noting that the embassy is playing an active role in supporting this renewed cooperation between Poles and Jews. (It is no secret that Poland is a strong ally of Israel at the EU.) He mentioned Holocaust education programs and the renovations and restorations of synagogues and cemeteries. And he described how President Obama came to Warsaw, and paid tribute to the Ghetto Fighters. He also noted that the U.S. President visited the new museum that is “rising from the ashes of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw to teach future generations about this rich history.” And, he admitted, there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.

Part of that work took place in our workshops, where we met our 2G brothers and sisters in Poland, many of us for the first time. I was blown away by the courage of the Polish 2Gs, some of them who never knew their parents were Jewish, and some from mixed marriages, who grew up thinking and feeling they were apart from their society, and yet didn’t know why. Yet in their heart of hearts, they felt they were different, and at these meetings, finally felt as if they had found “a home.”

They told us that Jewish life was being reborn in Poland. For the first time in 73 years, they were able to talk about being Jewish. A.D., a psychologist and leader of the Second Generation movement in Warsaw, explained how after the war, their parents’ couldn’t understand what happened, and then were hit with the double-whammy of communism. Many hid their Jewishness as a result, and never spoke of it until communism fell in 1989. For the first time since the war, they thought they could tell their children who they really are.

The meetings were welcoming to those who thought they were lost forever—and that is truly the story of Polish Jewry today. While the community is a tiny fraction of what it had once been, for the first time, these people feel safe when they say they are Jewish. While some are discovering Judaism, others are discovering their Polish-Jewish history. They credit Pope John Paul II with doing more to fight antisemitism in Poland than anyone else, and while there is still antisemitism, as the older generation dies off, and the children become educated, it becomes less virulent, less effective, particularly in a global society. Poles are learning about Jews and Judaism, and are seeing that the Jews were an integral part of their culture and society, perhaps often separated, but part of Poland’s history for almost 1,000 years.

As one Polish 2G said, “We are discovering our Jewish roots, and the Poles are discovering Jewish Polish history. This creates a synergy…but while we are getting really good at seeing and fighting antisemitism because we have to, we are not so good at finding friends and allies. We need to find common ground.”

“Imagine how different the world would have been if we could have taught our children and grandchildren our heritage and legacy. We are like the hidden Jews of New Mexico, and now we have the unprecedented chance to change our future,” said another.

Some are discovering pride in their Judaism, while others just want to blend in. Another 2G talked about how he was born to be like everyone else. Now he deals with survivors every day, but says that was a choice that he made…and yet had no choice in making it, because he owes it to those who were murdered. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to be swallowed by the Holocaust. He feels like Ulysseys, who couldn’t deal with the souls of those who died. “There are too many stories, and some of them scare me, but I cannot come home. I hate going to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but I must go… Only my mother and grandmother survived and I hate to go to them with questions because of the looks on their faces…and still I try to extend my Jewish experience.”

A young woman talked about her father, who was in the underground. Her mother and grandmother survived, but avoiding talking altogether. Her father’s mother simply lied. But it was much easier for her to identify with her father, because he fought back instead of being trapped in the fear, shame and guilt that came from her mom. It took her a long time to be able to listen to the stories, and now she is discovering who she is.

These 2G/3G workshops also discussed the differences between those whose parents did not speak at all, and those who wanted their children to be their supporters, to use them as a tool for hating. It created complicated feelings when coping with their parents and was an important obstacle in the 2G acceptance and exploration of their Judaism.

A, who was born in 1947, was able to come to grips with her Judaism for the first time when she was 55 years old. She was self-motivated because she needed to find out who she was and accept her identity. It was hard for her to find herself in the shadow of the Holocaust, and she began with the story of her grandfather, who used to sing songs in Yiddish—and tell her he was singing old Army songs. He had a tiny Torah scroll that no one was permitted to touch, and she wanted him to read it to her. He said it did not contain stories for children. “If you hear them, when you are an adult, you will run away,” he told her.

Another woman was told as a child to forget Judaism, forget the Holocaust. She felt a pervasive loneliness, and was comforted by our presence. When she found out she was Jewish, she cried, and pleaded not to be told she was a Jew. Those fears and the feeling of being different ran deep, and it was scary. As one American 2G said to her, “It took something good to justify our survival, and if you want the third and fourth generations to be proud, you remind them that they come from a people who have perservered.”

In Poland, Jewish identity fluctuates. Many were raised in an environment loaded with high doses of antisemitism. As one Polish 2G put it, “It still exists, of course, and it depends where you live. Sometimes, when you tell your lifelong friends the truth, they treat you differently…it can be compared to other traumas, like those of mixed races who live in Zimbabwe.”

Yet on a personal level, they are finding each other and creating close, emotional bonds–just like the American and Israeli 2Gs did when they came together decades ago.

On Monday morning, the last day of Conference, those who attended the Yad Vashem ceremony to recognize the Righteous—Polish families who had risked their lives and families to save the lives of our parents, brothers and sisters—were reminded that good can triumph over evil, if people make difficult choices. The Israel ambassador, Zvi Rav-Ner spoke movingly and forcefully about those choices, and noted that there is a universal lesson in what these people did.

Israeli Ambassador Zvi Rav-Ner

“They made the right choices even though it was so painful… Today we honor those human beings that we have to respect and honor forever. ..Yet not everyone saved people and not everyone could, but there were those who made the honorable decision. When we ask why not everyone did that, [why] there were collaborators…when we put must also put this question to ourselves…would you have risked your own lives and the lives of your family to risk to save a neighbor or friend or even a stranger? These people have done it, and we are forever in debt to them and their families… The message for the future is universal—to prevent such situations anywhere, God forbid that we get into such situations… These people give us hope that we can still believe in people.”

Because I believe it is important to name names—victims, survivors, rescuers—to put a human face on the tragedies of the past, to bring understanding that these were just folks who found themselves in dire straits and made choiceless choices, I list them here. Survivors’ children often presented these awards to the children, grandchildren and relative of the rescuers, all of them now resting in peace.

Leo Hoffman presented the award to the son of the late Janina Bereska. Ewa Banaszczyk of Lodz, received the award for her late grandfather, Adolph Brauner. Lilka Rosenbaum-Elbaum presented the award to the granddaughter of the couple who rescued her family, Jadwiga and Adam Chorqzkiewicz. Mira Becker honored two sisters, Maria and Marianna Kazuczyk, and gave the award to their family members. Jozefa and Wilhelm Maj were honored with an award given to their adopted child, a survivor herself, Ida Paluch-Kersz. The daughter of Katarzyna and Stanislaw Swietlikowski, Maria Nadstawek, received the award for them, and a survivor’s daughter, Agnieszka Bater-Shupska, gave the award to the nephew of her parent’s rescuer, Agnieszka Troszka.

Some of the children of survivors recognize the rescuers of their families.

You will probably be able to find all their stories and many more on the Yad Vashem website, along with information on how to honor the righteous who saved your own family members.

And the next morning, a group of us left for Lublin and Krakow…code words for Majdanek and Auschwitz… more to come.

The post A Weekend in Warsaw appeared first on Jeanette Friedman.

Isaac and I have known each other since 2002, when we both attended our first World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust conference. (Yes, I got it wrong in my last blog, because many of the survivors were also hidden children, and after a while, all those acronyms get confusing!)

On Saturday night, Isaac and I pored over maps and realized that while it was on the map’s index, we couldn’t find it. It was right near the Warsaw Ghetto Fighter’s monument, but it seemed invisible, and we thought we should find a magnifying glass. Anna Doziuk, a new friend, saw what we were doing and came over to help. Anna heads up the brand new 2G group in Warsaw and is president of the Jewish Social Welfare Commission of Poland. She chaired an emotional 2G and 3G workshop that very afternoon, and was happy to assist. In fact, she drove home and came back with a bigger map, but we still couldn’t find it.

The Ghetto Fighters' Monument

Another view of the museum

Spielman at work

Me, Yvonne and Isaac recuperating from the hunt

Then she suggested we try “Mr. Google,” and so we did. But there were only a few tiny photos of number 35, and 8 Gesia, where my babby ran a pension, was nowhere to be found. (I have since received a photo of the house from Agneishka S. who was our guide in Krakow and Lublin.) We discovered, instead, that the Nazis had turned the bottom of the street into a prison camp toward the end. But nothing else could be found. The hotel staff tried to help us with google, too.

Isaac and I, joined by my roommate Yvonne Illich, set off in the morning to see what we could see. As we were leaving, Anna handed us a sheaf of information she had downloaded from the Internet. But I wasn’t hopeful. My mother had come to Warsaw at least a decade earlier in search of her mother’s grave, and didn’t find it. In fact, when I told her I was going to Warsaw, she shot at me in Yiddish, “Host eppes dorten farloiren?” “Did you lose something there?”

And I shot right back, “Yoh, mein Babbeh.” Yeah, my grandma.

She said, again in Yiddish, “I looked, I didn’t find it and neither will you.” So of course, I was even more determined find the grave.

Isaac, Yvonne and I walked out of the revolving doors and got into a taxi. Our driver’s name was Mariusz, and it turns out his brother lives in Linden, New Jersey, just a few miles from where I live. We asked him about Gesia Street and he said he knew precisely where it was. He took us straight to Rappaport’s Ghetto Fighters’ Memorial Plaza, where the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews was being built. “Gesia Street is under the museum,” he said.

“Better the fantastic new museum,” I thought, “than a parking lot or office building.” Just two weeks before I left, I had been asked to write for the North American Council of that very same museum! In fact, I was staying after the conference to learn more about it. I could only look at Isaac and Yvonne and shake my head, pull out my camera and take pictures.

At Rappaport’s monument, I also said a silent Kaddish for my uncle Yaakov, who had escaped from Treblinka, and came back to the ghetto to report what he had seen. He is a footnote in Ringleblum’s Diary and that is where I first found him on November 4, 1979, at the Zachor Conference in New York, a conference put together by Dr. Eva Fogelman, Bella Savrin and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg.

That was 31 years ago, and I remember calling my mother from a pay phone at the conference to ask about the footnote. She said it was her brother and told me that what he saw was recorded in Hillel Seidman’s Warsaw Ghetto Diary. When I asked her why she never told us about him, she asked me why I cared. How could I not? Then she told me he was killed in the first night of the fighting, with a rifle in his hand, on Seder night. Now I was more determined than ever to find his mother’s grave.

Mariusz drove us to the cemetery gate, and when we walked through, I was asked to hand over money…”But I am here to find my Babby,” I said, and could feel myself getting all farklempt. “You are looking for family?” said the toll keeper. “You don’t pay.”

Isaac, Yvonne and I began looking at the markers, and noticed they were very, very old, and that on our right, almost every grave belonged to a woman. But we couldn’t find it. I was afraid that she was buried among the mass graves, and went to look at them.

There, bigger than life, was a monument to the Eisner family and 1,000,000 children built by New Yorker, Jack Eisner, who died in 2003. He was survivor who appointed me to serve on the Goldberg Commission, which examined the role of American Jews in rescue in 1983. In 1985, He accompanied a group of 2Gs, including me, to Bergen-Belsen, where we protested Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg to lay a wreath on the graves of the Waffen SS. And I had other connections with Jack as well. It was all very strange, all very wheels within wheels…and I was growing frustrated and sad. Where was my Babby’s grave? The cemetery was enormous! I would never find it. My mother was right.

The three of us stood at the mass graves and said Kaddish. Finally I looked at Isaac, stole a line from Yentl, which I, of course, edited, and started to cry—“Babby, can you hear me? Babby can you feel me?” and sobbed in Isaac’s arms. Suddenly, his cell phone rang. As he reached into his pocket, he said, “I shut it off before I came into the cemetery. Let me see who is trying to reach me,” and pulled it out. But it was off. The three of us looked at each other, and looked at the sky. Could it be possible my 19th century Babby was sending me a 21st century message? Nah, I thought, that’s just too weird…but all three of us got the chills, just the same.

When we climbed back into the cab, Mariusz gave us a grand tour of old Warsaw and told us about his adventures with American and Israeli VIPS. We were playing Jewography and there were one degree of separation. But it didn’t help me find my Babby.

On Monday morning, another new friend, Miriam G., who is Orthodox and works with the Jewish Community, heard our story and told me to see Israel Spielman, the director of the cemetery. So Isaac and I had another adventure, met an Israeli couple and entered the cemetery just as a group of Israeli female teens were heading out of it.

Mr. Spielman was sitting at his computer, had payos like the Gerer mashgiach at the Marriott, and when I asked told me he was a Bobover Hasid. I told him our story, and he said stranger things have happened, and we can’t always explain them.

When I told him who I was looking for, the Parczever Rebbitzen, Ita Rabinowicz, he said we were related and that every time he’s in Boro Park, Brooklyn, he davens (prays) in the Munkascer Shul—which has the latest morning services in New York. I said that the rebbe was my first cousin, and that the services were so late because he’s had trouble getting up in time for morning services since he was a teenager—and my mother had to throw water on him to wake him up.

Israel Speilman works really hard at the cemetery. When our mutual friend, Zalmen Mlotek of the National Yiddish Theatre told me Spielman had catalogued about 43,000 graves, I told Zalmen that to date, Spielman has catalogued approximately 88,000 graves—as a labor of love.

Yasher Koach, Israel Spielman, Kol Tuv and a Gut Yohr—May you have the strength to continue this important work, may everything good come your way and, please, have a Shana Tovah.

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When they told me their stories, they were building word pictures in my mind. As I wrote what they described, those places seemed to be tinted in shades of gray or sepia. I was unprepared for the vivid, startling bright greens that were impressed on my retina.

Then there was nothing more to see, as the plane landed and I went through an airport that was no different (perhaps a little smaller) than the airports in the U.S, What was different was the language, but two hours earlier, I had changed planes in Frankfurt-Am-Main, where my father had been a student in the yeshiva. The language there was German, but everywhere, people spoke English.

On the first leg of the journey from Jersey to Germany, I sat with two high school students, two girls, one from Miami and one from Prince Edward Island. They told me they had studied the Holocaust and were told that antisemitism was alive and well in Germany. One wants to be an anthropologist and work in the Smithsonian. The other wants to open a 4/20 cafe in Holland. It was hard to keep a straight face!

The program they were in was created soon after World War II to promote racial harmony between nations–and their intention was to push the envelope if they had to in order to squash any racism they encountered.

I thought about the girls as my very Polish cab driver drove me to the Warsaw city center to the Marriott hotel, a Marriott like any other Marriott on the planet, except this one had a huge poster informing guests that the hotel was equipped with a special kosher kitchen. Even the Marriotts in New York and New Jersey don’t make such a fuss! It was unexpected.

The cab driver asked me why I had come to Warsaw. the Jewish star hanging around my neck was clearly visible, but I chose my words carefully. I said I had come to see the city where my mother grew up–in a pension (essentially a bed and breakfast) and reception hall owned by her mother–who died there of typhus in 1942.

Instead, as I looked at the wide boulevards and the skyscrapers in the distance, I said my mother had begun her journey in Poland, then had gone on to Slovakia and Hungary (where she was put on the Kasztner transport, but I didn’t tell him that), thence to Germany (to Bergen-Belsen, but I didn’t say that either), Switzerland, Palestine, France and finally New York. He thought that was funny, and them pointed to the Marriott. “Five more minutes, Pani!” he said.

And then the adventure began. I was attending the conference of the World Federation of Jewish Hidden Children & Descendants, where I was going to participate in 2G workshops. People came from as far away as Melbourne to attend. We came to figure out how we deal with our past in the place where it actually happened, and what we will do about it in the future.

Warsaw was a city rich with Jewish history, and Poland, until the Holocaust, was filled with the largest Jewish population in the world. It was a Jewish population that came from all walks of life–from sophisticated city dwellers to ignorant peasants, from the magnificently wealthy to the wretchedly poor, from communists to Zionists, to Hasidic dynasties and the anti-Hasidic Jewish scholars who despised them. Things have changed dramatically since then, but I only heard about it over Shabbos, in the different workshops, where the Polish 2Gs finally found the courage to come out and speak up.

But on Sunday morning, I was determined to leave the Cocoon and venture out into the city itself.

More to come. Pozdrowienia z Polski–it means greetings from Poland where the only word I can pronounce is Tak–yes.

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