Rabbi Meir

This is a picture of my grandfather Simon Stein with his family in Latvia. That’s his sister Doba on the left, then his father, then my grandfather, then his mother, then the baby Bella, then the twins Nechama and Pesya. The little girl between her parents’ knees is his sister, Golda. His older brother, Avram is not in the picture and neither is his older sister, Rachel. I’m not sure why they’re not included. I only know that Rachel left home and moved to Russia where she got married. And Avram was married at 18 to a lovely woman called Tamar from a nearby Polish village. Here’s a picture of my grandfather with his father and his brother, a few years later. I don’t know when that picture was taken but it must have been before 1921, because his father died then. Three years later, my grandfather went to the army, and his mother moved with the rest of her family from Skrudalin to Dvinsk otherwise known as Daugavpils. She had a shop there and her young daughters went to school. When my grandfather came back from the Latvian army, he wanted to move to Africa with his young wife and his friends. Some of the sisters also wanted to leave Latvia. The twenties were hard years for Jews and it seemed like there were better opportunities in other countries. And this is where the story gets interesting… Not sure about what to do about her children’s wishes and her own fears about being left alone, she went to ask her Rabbi. She was fortunate that the Rabbi of Daugavpils was wise. I have a translated diary page from the youngest daughter, Bella, that describes the meeting between her mother, Gnesia Steinman and Rabbi Meir. ‘When everyone decided that they needed to look for a new happiness in their lives and leave, my mother went to a prominent rabbi. Rabbi Meir was the most respected among all the rabbis. She told him about all the desires of her children, and he told her “Dear daughter, let them go. It’s better to have children in a faraway country than nearby in the earth. I will bless them for happiness.” Mama came back from the rabbi pleased, and her children started getting ready. I want to say that the Rebbe had some knowledge of the future. He himself died from Hitler; he didn’t want to leave the city. He said: “the fate of others is mine too.” My mother died from Hitler, but we don’t know when or where. In Riga they brought many Jews from other countries, and they died there.” This is Rabbi Meir. He was the rabbi of Dvinsk/Daugavpils for 39 years. He was indeed very prominent and very wise. His thoughts formed the basis of a great book called Meshech Chochma. Apparently, he encouraged Jews to leave Europe, although he didn’t want to leave himself. He saw the writing on the wall for Jews and predicted the Holocaust. He said: "They think that Berlin is Jerusalem. From there will come the storm winds that will uproot them" But for the fact, that Bella writes that he died from Hitler, I wonder if this is the man that encouraged my Great Grandmother to encourage her children, including my grandfather to move to South Africa where my father was born, and where I was born along my brothers and sisters. All of my great grandmother’s children left one way and another and they all survived the Holocaust. Except for the one who stayed. Her oldest son, Avram was murdered along with his mother, my great grandmother, Gnesia Steinman, and his Avram’s wife and their son Eli, and their daughter’s Feigi, Bat Sheva, Bella and Pessie. His oldest son, Boris, survived. This is a picture of my great grandmother Gnesia, her son Abram and five of her daughters. This is a picture of my grandfather and grandmother and their friends, on the boat that brought them from Europe to South Africa in 1929. The boat was called the Gloucester Castle. He was 24 years old. Rabbi Meir died in 1926. If he is the Rabbi that advised my great-grandmother that it was better to have living children far away than dead in the ground nearby, I will consider myself blessed for happiness by Rabbi Meir Simchah of Dvinsk.

Seeing things

See the oldest boy on the right hand side? That’s my father’s first cousin and his name is Boruch. He’s standing with his brother and sisters, and their names are Esther, Shmuel, Pesa and I think the girl on the left hand side in the polka dot dress was called Bat Sheva.  

The children in the picture were moved to the Riga Ghetto with their parents three years after the photo was taken.

In 1941, the family were moved out of the Ghetto and taken to Rumbula Forest.  The children were shot there, along with their parents and 25,000 other Jewish children and adults.  Boruch survived because he was old enough to join the Russian Army.

I’m afraid I can’t read the details of what happened to them on the way to their deaths in Rumbula Forest because it is just too horrible. 

But maybe you can. Maybe you can explain how people can do this.  I try to understand because I think it will protect us from it happening again, but as many people as I ask, and books that I read, I still don’t understand.   I’ve heard the theory that the Nazis saw Jews as vermin; and less than human. 

But I don’t think that explains it.  Do these children look like vermin to you?  Do they look less than human?  

Do we really all see things so differently?  

In the middle is the children's grandmother, Gnesia. (She is also my father's grandmother)
The children's parents, Abram and Tamara, are on the extreme right.
They were murdered in the Shoah.
This photo was sent to me by Boruch's son, Simon Shteinman, who lives in Riga today.  

Beyond belief

Ark from Northern Italy from the 17th or 18th century, at the Jewish Museum in London 

If you’ve never been to synagogue on a Saturday morning, this is what happens:

The doors of the ark (like a cupboard) are opened and the Torah is taken out.  Then we read from the Torah.  Every week, we read a little more of the story.  This week it was about God promising Abraham to make his descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven.   Then we lift the Torah up in the air for all to see.   After we read, the people at synagogue look at the Torah and sing: ‘this is the Torah that Moses gave to the people of Israel’.  The Torah is then paraded around the community.   Some people kiss the Torah as it goes by.  And then the high point of the morning…just before the Torah is returned to the ark, we sing ‘it is a tree of life for those that grasp it…its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace’. Then the Torah is put back in the ark.

All over the world, for thousands of years, this drama has been played out.  The doors open, the Torah is taken out.  The Torah is read and put back and then the doors are closed again.  Like revolving doors, week after week, in communities everywhere, people expect that there will be a Torah inside the ark.

But it’s a magic trick really.  Behind the scenes, there’s a world of managers and scenery-shifters that ensure that every time the doors open the Torah will be there. In truth, the Torah doesn’t stay in the ark between services. 

My sister, Lisa, is one of the people involved in ensuring this drama plays out correctly.  After the service, she takes the Torah out of the ark and carries it to a double walled, steel safe where it is locked away, protected from vandals, thieves and fire.  Before the next Shabbat, it is taken out of the safe and put back in the ark.

She said yesterday she saw a little boy had missed his chance to kiss the Torah as it went by in the procession, so she let him kiss it before she locked it away in the steel safe.  She said his eyes lit up, with the magic of the moment. 

Next week in thousands of services, in thousands of synagogues around the world, we will once again open the doors of the ark,  take out the Torah, read from it, parade it around, kiss it, then sing ‘it is a tree of life for those that grasp it’.  No doubt we will cry.   Then we will put the Torah back in the ark.  Behind the scenes, it will be taken out and put in a safe place again.

Tonight in Pittsburgh there is a Torah scroll waiting in an ark in a dark and bloody synagogue. It wasn’t read this week, but next Shabbat; it will be taken out and read.  It will be kissed and paraded and put back in the ark.

And the story will go on

Torah scroll and ark at the Jewish Museum in London 

Things you don't tell your parents

Sometimes our children do crazy things that terrify us. But it can also be your parent who does the really risky things.  My mom told me about this time when she was young.  This is her story, in her own words: 

My mother, leaning on the car, starting out on her journey with two friends

 “In 1959, I hitchhiked to Israel from Italy.   I hitched with two other South African women; all in our early twenties.  We had started off in Italy but the price to go to Israel by boat was beyond our budget, which was when we decided to hitchhike.  I knew my parents would have worried so to hide what I was doing from them, I wrote a stack of re-assuring postcards for my parents and gave them to a friend to post at regular intervals. 

We started in Rome then we went to Greece and then to Turkey and then to Syria and then to Jordan and then to Jerusalem.  We hitchhiked the whole way.  

My mom on the right, pretending she can read a map

Some places we stayed a bit longer than in other places; we stayed for three days in Aleppo, for example.  What I remember about Aleppo was that we had a picnic with an artist there. We made friends quickly, and those friends drove us to Damascus and then onto Beirut. 

We stayed in Beirut for three days. What I liked best about Beirut was a famous restaurant called Les Caves Du Roy where I sang with the band. I sang a few songs and they offered me a permanent job, but I turned it down. I had places to go.

My mom, en route, on the extreme right, having a laugh

We hiked from Beirut to Amman with Datsun trucks.  People would also ask us where we were heading. Three English girls hiking in the Middle East was very unusual. We wanted to get out of Amman. It felt unsafe and unpleasant. There was nothing to stay there for.  The questions now became more personal about where we were heading. I made up a story that we heard in Palestine that there was an airport that would take us straight back to South Africa. We said we had planned to go to Saudi Arabia but every one warned us against that because of the white slave trade.  We had every intention of going to Jerusalem. We found a guy that agreed to take us there and then we found a place to stay in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem.  We went to see the sights. I only wanted to see the Wailing Wall.   The Wall looked like nothing special. It was just a wall and people were just going around their business in front of it. I knew I couldn’t go up and touch it or kiss it because I didn’t want people to know I was Jewish.

Mandelbaum Gate 

To get into Israel we needed to get an exit permit.  The interview at the office was a bit scary. The official asked us why we were going to occupied Palestine.  Then the Big Lie started about the airplane that went directly to South Africa. They wanted to see the money that would pay for our flight to South Africa.  I realized then that I was in trouble because I didn’t have any cash to show them that I could buy the tickets. But the other two women could.  They gave us the necessary permits and we were directed to the Mandelbaum Gate where we handed in the visas. We were very nervous. We did it very fast but I did take the time to look back. It was very emotional.  I could see the Jordanian guns pointing back towards the square towards Israel. On the Israeli side, there were no guns.  I could just see a playground and I could see children playing. I realised I was in a different place. It stopped being a game when I saw the Jordanian guns and the Israeli children on the other side.

On the other side, the Israeli security guard stamped my passport and gave me a visa for two weeks. I said no, I’m staying here.  He said: why would you want to stay here? At this point I started crying and told him I was Jewish. He whisked me off to the other interrogation room where they asked me about the route I had taken to get there. He was not friendly and very suspicious of me. I told them the truth about where I had been and he said to me if you were my daughter I would lock you up and throw away the key.   He gave me a visa for three months and said I had to report to the police every month.  The other girls went to the airport to fly back to South Africa, and I hitchhiked alone to Tel Aviv.

I had no job. I was quite lost at that time. I worked at a coffee bar, at a sheet music store. I taught English privately. I babysat. Then one day when I was babysitting, the woman told me about a physiotherapy course that sounded interesting. So I applied for that and got in.   Slowly, I started to build my life in Israel.   Years later a journalist asked me to tell my story but I refused. I felt foolish for the risks I had taken and for the lies I had told my parents.  I never told anyone the whole story of what happened until now"

My brother, me and my mom 

Three days in Frankfurt Am Main

I was working as a copywriter in an ad agency in New York. I was doing well. I had won an Emmy award for a commercial I had written. My boss had given me a book as a present. In the inside cover, he wrote: 'one day, all of New York will know your name'.

I had a job I was good at, friends, a little apartment, a cat and gym membership. I also had a green card and a shelves full of books I had collected from Shakespeare books, Strand books and even Barnes and Noble. I had a handsome, intelligent, hardworking boyfriend who lived in Germany. So I quit my job and said goodbye to my friend and gave away my books.

I got on a plane and went to live in Germany where I had no friends and no job.  In retrospect, it seems like a bad decision.

My handsome boyfriend picked me up from the airport and took me back to his apartment. It was in an industrial area behind the train station. It had fluorescent green sofas and a wall-to-wall carpet to match. There was no mat under the carpet so it felt hard underfoot. There was no fridge. There was tinned meat and beer in a cool box. There were no shops around or bookshops and restaurants like in New York. Then the handsome boyfriend went back to work.

He said he didn't want to get married. I said I did. I needed to because I didn't have a visa to work in Germany.  I wanted to marry and have children with him. That was my plan.

On the day I arrived in Germany, he came back from work very late. The next day, he went back to work and I went back to the airport to pick up some boxes I had sent from New York. It was tricky finding my way around that part of Frankfurt airport because I couldn't say much in German.  But I managed, and I came back to his apartment with the boxes in a taxi. I was brave, but not brave enough.

A week after I arrived, he had a business trip for a few days in Berlin. I wanted to go with, but he thought it wasn't a good idea because he would be working very hard. So I stayed alone in Frankfurt in his apartment with the green sofa and hard floors, behind the train station. I stayed alone in a city where I didn't know anyone. And couldn't really speak the language. So I did what I usually do in those situations. I drank a lot of brandy and Coke. I wrote and I cried. The  drunker I got, the more it hurt and the worse I wrote.

It was like that for three days.

Now when I think back to that scorched earth time, I wonder why I didn't gather myself, pack my stuff and take a taxi to the airport. I could have bought a ticket back to New York or to Cape Town. Why didn't I? I could have ended that pain.  Why didn't I leave. Why did I think I had no options?  I was the woman who had won awards and who had retrieved her boxes alone from Frankfurt airport. I wish I had been brave enough to have left then. I wish I had been imaginative enough to see a different future for myself.  I imprisoned myself with a picture of the life I wanted at any cost.  I stayed and I stayed. I wish I could tell that crying, drunk, lonely woman to get up, pack up and get a taxi back to the airport.   I want to tell her she is worth more. I want to tell her that there is some shit that you don't have to take. But even now I don't know where to tell her to go once she gets to the airport because she is really can't go backwards, and there is no future yet. I see her scanning departure times for London, New York, Cape Town and not knowing where to go.

So I stayed, and I waited for him to come home. And he did. We got married and had three children.  It took me another 26 years to figure out where to go and how to get there, but I finally did it. I live with my youngest daughter now, in a tiny house in London. I have a lovely job, kind friends and full bookshelves. I'm still working on the gym membership.

A town called Luck

Tomorrow night, on Wednesday 11^th April, for Yom HaShoah, I am participating in the Yellow Candle project that helps remember individual lives of the six million Jewish people who were murdered in the genocide we call the Holocaust.   

I took a candle at random from the hundreds given out at shul on Sunday morning.  

All it said on the little card was this:

Remembering Perla Kardasz of Luck

 Who perished at Luck

 1942

Aged 8

I wanted to know a little bit about the child I was remembering, but this is all I could find out about Perla’s life.  She had two parents who were called Jacob and Tzippora, and a sister called Nechama.  

Her parents must have had enough money to put a pretty bow on her head and have her picture taken when she was around two, and that picture was kept by her aunt, along with details of her address, and when and where she was murdered.  

I looked up the strangely named town called Luck, and I found out how Perla died.

Luck was a town in eastern Poland that according to a Polish census of 1931 was 48.5% Jewish.

On August 19 1942, 17,000 Jews were rounded up by Nazi Orpo police and local Auxiliary police over a four day period.  They were assembled in the town square and taken by trucks to the Gorka Polanka forest.  They were shot into the prepared trenches.   Local residents were required to help dig the trenches beforehand and to bury the bodies afterwards.   Thousands of Jewish men, women and children were executed at point blank range.  

Among them was a little girl called Perla Kardasz.

Testimony given by Perla's aunt

A German Orpo policeman near the mass grave at Gurka Polanka after the murder operation

I don’t care about Harvey Weinstein

Leah Vincent wrote recently in the Forward about ex-Orthodox women who must learn to say no.  She understood that the dance of dealing with sexual advances from men was complex, and has to be learned in the real world.   I learned about this dance early on in my life, and so I am not shocked by Harvey Weinstein.  Or any of the taxi drivers,  professors, colleagues, relatives,  friends or strangers that propositioned me,  masturbated in front of me,  tried to rape me,  ogled me,  fondled me or honked at me.   What surprises me is that people are shocked when it happens. Their desire for retribution surprises me.   The energy it mobilises in the Twittersphere and the ensuing virtue-signalling, hand-wringing and demonizing surprises me.  

I don’t think I’m the only woman who had an uncle who hugged her too closely.  Or went to the beach as a teenager and saw a man masturbating behind her.  Or who bathed in the beautiful hot springs in Pamukkale, and saw another wanker in action, his eyes fixed on me and my friends.    I’ve had a relative that wanted to be touched, a client that tried to force me to have sex, a friend that fondled my arse and a licenced English cab driver in London ask me for a blow-job.    

I have hundreds of these stories and I bet most women do.   I don’t know if Orthodox women in thick, black stockings and long sleeves get honked at in the street by men in cars, but I know that I get honked at, whistled at and told to smile, whatever I wear.    The men that do these things are not monsters.  They are often kind, interesting, generous and talented human beings, and I try not to limit my world to people who never offend me.  I don’t see myself as a victim.

There’s a beautiful Rabbinic concept describing two worlds of Halacha, the b’diavad world meaning after the event or what happens in the real world, and the hatchilla world meaning every that happens beforehand in the ideal world.  In the ideal world, no woman would have to deal with sexism,   and men and women would live and work together in mutual respect.  But in the mixed b’diavad world I live in, women have to learn to punch, duck and dive, pick their battles, and to believe they have the right to say no.  There’s another thing about the b’diavad world; I only have so much time and energy to focus on the issues that truly bother me.   The problems of white, privileged, educated women who want to become actresses are not top of my list. 

The real crime is that there are millions of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa who will never see the inside of a classroom.   The real victims are poor women.  Two thirds of the girls in Niger are married before they are adults.  Half of the women living in Haiti’s capital city slums have been raped.   Four and a half million destitute and powerless women around the world are trafficked for sexual use.  In Trump’s America, women’s reproductive rights are under assault, with particular impact on poorer women.   These are the issues that enrage me.  I care deeply about a woman’s right to choose, to be educated and to be free.  I’m too busy to care about Harvey Weinstein.