Shir Tikvah President

During the last two weeks of March, Rochelle and I traveled to Europe to see her relatives in Paris and Berlin. We had not seen them in four years. It was wonderful to see so many people that we love. But, it is always a sobering experience because the families were so indelibly affected by the Holocaust.

Our first stop was Paris. Two first cousins, Mina and Lydia, live there with their families. Combining their families there are twenty-three cousins. Mina and Lydia’s parents were siblings of Rochelle’s mother. They had moved to France in the 1920s from Poland. Lydia, Mina, their parents and siblings had survived the war as hidden Jews in central France. This story we knew. What we didn’t know was the full story of the Jews in France. They took us to the Museum of the Shoah. There, on marble slabs in the courtyard were the names of many Jews who had been killed by the Nazis in France or had been sent to one of the death camps in the east after 1942. Seventy-six thousand French Jews were killed during the war. The names of two of Mina’s husband’s siblings were on the wall, as were the names of one of my mother-in-law’s brothers, his wife, and daughter.

Despite Hitler, today, Mina and Lydia’s families are part of 600,000 Jews who live in France. Most, however, have Sephardic roots (meaning they came from northern Africa). They openly practice their Judaism; many belong to synagogues. But, they also live with a greater sense of anxiety about the future than we do as Jews here in the U.S.

From France we flew to Berlin. Rochelle’s half sister, Lizza, her husband, Yasha, and their family, adding up to ten people, live a different life. Lizza and Yasha arrived in Berlin thirty years ago. They were originally from Lithuania. As children, they had survived the war. They married, had two kids, and moved to Israel in 1971. In 1975, they moved to Berlin. In the 1990s many more Jews from the countries of the former Soviet Union also moved there. Today there are about 80,000 Jews in Germany. But under the Soviet regime they could not practice their Judaism and so few do today.

In Berlin today, there are more and more sites devoted to remembering what the Nazis did. A new "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" occupies a square city block, one block from the Reichstag building. There is a Jewish Museum which chronicles Jewish history in Germany since the Middle Ages. There is an outdoor set of pictures and story about the Nazi secret police and their horrors at the sight of the old SS headquarters. And there are now small metal plaques with the names of Nazi victims set in sidewalks thoughout the city in front of apartments where these people once lived. Our relatives in Germany also live with a greater sense of anxiety about being Jewish than we do here.

That Rochelle’s parents’ families have survived is amazing. To visit will always be to share the present with them, but also to remember the past. As Jews we can never forget.

B’shalom,
Barry