Milwaukee businessman Henry Zaks last weekend traveled by himself to Washington, D.C., to attend events marking the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s tenth anniversary. Yet he didn’t feel alone.
True, his wife and grown daughter weren’t able to go with him. His own parents, survivors from Poland who had attended the museum’s opening, had both died since then — his mother just this year.
Nevertheless, Zaks looked at the crowds — more than 6,000 people attended, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report — and felt that “This is all family,” he told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. “We looked at one another as family…. It was a wonderful experience.”
Zaks was not the only Wisconsinite who attended and had the same feeling. Pnina Goldfarb, assistant director of the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC, noticed that at the various events and in the hotel lobbies and elevators, “perfect strangers were ready to talk about anything” with everyone.
“There was not that inhibition one finds in social situations,” said Goldfarb, who went with her daughter, Adena, 16, and her husband, Don Schoenfeld, and who met there her survivor parents, her two sisters and their husbands and children. “The conversations were fluid and easy between generations and within generations.”
The experience was somewhat “bittersweet” for both Goldfarb and Sandra Hoffman, president of Milwaukee’s Generation After organization of children of Holocaust survivors, who attended with her cousin, Rosie Neufeld.
“What was mainly important for me was the sense that this will be one of the last times there will be a major event like this,” at which survivors, their children and grandchildren can all be together, said Hoffman. “I felt I wanted to be part of it.”
Yet the overall feeling was “actually more sweet than bitter,” said Goldfarb. It was an “overwhelming feeling” to see the “sea of people from thousands of locations who kind of came out of the dust and have grown and multiplied and lived lives” and “the caring and the continuity.”
And her daughter Adena said the event made her truly understand that “I wouldn’t exist if these people hadn’t survived. I knew it, but I never saw it, it never hit me as hard as it did.”
The events included a dinner on Saturday evening. On Sunday, the participants had special tours of the museum, which was closed to the general public, a series of 30-minute lectures on topics ranging from memoir writing to genealogy, and an afternoon ceremony at which survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel spoke.
Hoffman not only was a guest at the events. She is also involved in an organization called Generations of the Shoah International, an online network linking children and grandchildren of survivors. She helped this organization run a breakfast and a cocktail hour independently of the main celebration at the museum.
Hoffman said that about 11 people from the Milwaukee area, survivors and children of survivors, along with people from their families, attended. She added that she met at the airport a couple from Sheboygan and another from Kenosha who were going to the event.
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