Moishe Rotrib, who lived in Lodz. Poland, was 10 when he died in the Holocaust. Betty Konijn, of Amsterdam, died in the Nazi extermination camp Sobibor on July 2, 1943, at the age of 12. Neither child lived long enough to celebrate becoming b’nai mitzvah.
But the memory of Moishe and Betty have been rekindled recently in Milwaukee through The Wisconsin Remember Us Initiative, a new program through which b’nai mitzvah children are matched with children who died in the Holocaust.
Benjamin Levey, 13, of Bayside, remembered Moishe Rotrib on Saturday, May 24, as he stood before his family, friends and congregation at Congregation Shalom. Moishe’s memory was represented on the bimah by an empty chair, draped in a tallit, and containing a prayer book and Chumash (Torah).
“It was a very visible symbol. It was very emotional and very personal for everyone in the congregation,” said Shalom’s associate rabbi, Joseph Prass, in a telephone interview with The Chronicle.
The congregation has been incorporating this project, informally, into its b’nai mitzvah training for several years, according to Shalom’s Cantor Karen Berman. Berman said she was moved by the sincerity and passion of the project’s founder, Gesher Calmenson, when he called her with the idea.
In addition to the empty chair, the name of the child who is being remembered is spoken when saying Kaddish during the service and he or she is noted in a brief sentence explaining this matching, Prass said.
Benjamin told The Chronicle that he included several sentences about Moishe Rotrib in his d’var Torah and remarks.
The occasion of “b’nai mitzvah is an emotional moment and when a child has just a few words to say, they can be very powerful and moving. You can teach a 13-year-old about the importance of remembering the victims of the Holocaust, but what I’m seeing … is that the 13-year-olds are teaching the congregation that these individuals won’t be forgotten,” Prass said.
Benjamin, who heard about this opportunity from a friend who participated in the “Remember Us” program, said his parents and rabbi encouraged him to include this act of remembering in his bar mitzvah.
But he requested this match with a boy from the hometown of his great-grandfather “because it was the right thing to do,” he said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle.
Until this spring, Milwaukee’s participation was limited a few individuals at two area Reform congregations. But beginning in May, the program reached most local Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform congregations.
Calmenson visited Milwaukee in mid-May and presented the project to eight congregations and the Milwaukee Jewish Day School. The rabbis, cantors and educators he spoke with offered many suggestion for expanding and deepening the project.
Though Remember Us was designed for children, at least one adult bat mitzvah has been drawn to it.
Cindy Levy, 49, of Congregation Emanu-El of Waukesha became a bat mitzvah last June — Emanu-El’s first adult bat mitzvah, as far as she knows — and she chose to connect with the memory of a child of the Holocaust because she wanted to add as much meaning as possible to this important spiritual transition that she had waited so long to make.
Raised in a large Reform congregation where there were usually three b’nai mitzvah every Saturday, Levy said they were never for girls. With her daughter scheduled to become a bat mitzvah next June, Levy decided she wanted to do it first.
In a recent telephone interview, Levy told The Chronicle that she learned about the Remember Us Initiative while preparing for her bar mitzvah.
Rabbi Steve Adams, Emanu-El’s spiritual leader, had given her some programs created by past b’nai mitzvah at the congregation and, among them, she found mention of a child who died in the Holocaust who had been matched with an Emanu-El bat mitzvah several years earlier.
That young woman was the first from the Waukesha congregation to participate in “Remember Us,” according to Adams and Levy.
“I thought it would be a fabulous component [of my bat mitzvah] to remember a child of the Holocaust,” Levy said. And among the descriptions of children Rabbi Adams had received from the Wisconsin Remember Us Initiative, Levy “found a 12-year old Dutch girl from Amsterdam … Betty Konijn. “My grandmother’s maiden name is Cohen and I thought that was a good match,” Levy said.
The act of remembering is sacred in Judaism and Levy feels she has the experience to appreciate its spiritual power.
“As an adult I’ve lost my grandparents. I know what it’s like to feel that you’ve lost someone and I know what it’s like to remember someone, because every year, especially on their yahrzeits [anniversaries of their deaths], I remember them.
“When the rabbi says, at [the] Yizkor [service on Yom Kippur], ‘We remember the six-million,’ it’s a wonderful feeling to put a name to one of those six-million [Holocaust victims].”
Another part of the beauty of holding Betty Konijn’s memory close on that important day, Levy said, was that she was sharing her bat mitzvah, spiritually, with Konijn, who never had that opportunity.
“Having waited so long, it felt very nice to share that,” Levy said.
An emotional encounter
Calmenson, 72, the founder and director of “Remember Us,” told The Chronicle about his inspiration and goals for the project in an interview at our offices in the Helfaer Community Services Building, while he was visiting Milwaukee recently.
Part of the “long and complex story” that led Calmenson to create Remember Us, came with an insight that struck him during a 2001 visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.
He was there as part of a Jewish education program he was involved in during his second career as the synagogue education director at Congregation Ner Shalom, in Cotati, Calif.
In the Valley of Communities, an exhibit that includes a visual representation of the hundreds of Jewish communities that were wiped out under the Nazi domination of Europe, Calmenson experienced his first real emotional confrontation with the Holocaust.
“I had never [before], somehow, emotionally or intellectually, dealt with the fact that I was a Jew in the age of the Holocaust. It was almost … encapsulated or like an abscess inside me,” he said. But, immersed in the Holocaust at Yad Yashem, he was stunned by his disconnection, he said.
Then, “when I started looking around I realized, both as an educator and as somebody active in the Jewish community, that what was true of me was true of most of the American Jewish community. That we’ve never really actually engaged [the Holocaust] on a deep emotional level and that we’re all, in a sense, traumatized by this experience that happened in my lifetime.”
After his return from Israel, the change that had taken place in Calmenson caused him to look at his students in a different way.
“There was one little boy, particularly, every time l looked at him, this shadow came up for me … [the understanding that] this is the kind of child who was eliminated. How could it possibly be that such a child was eliminated? I … couldn’t come to grips with it.”
Calmenson felt that “what was needed was to somehow, [during children’s early lives], bring them to a Holocaust encounter that would make them stronger. It wasn’t a matter of getting information; it was a matter of becoming empowered through the facts of the Holocaust.”
Calmenson said that for all of the good work the museums and education programs are doing, there is “no deep personal connection that children are making, therefore they are not really being prepared to be the carriers of this information.”
Another motivating factor for Calmenson is his view that American children have so little understanding of even recent historical events.
“Across the whole American landscape, history itself is becoming more and more remote from our children,” he said. “They are becoming more and more disconnected from our recent past. I think it’s a crisis in the American education system.”
And at the same time, the survivors, who “ have been the principle contributors to putting a human face on the Holocaust,” are dwindling.
And the information that Calmenson is thinking of is not to be taught just as history, he explained.
“The purpose of Holocaust education is not to educate about Holocaust history. The purpose is to cultivate a response based on the moral content of the events. Anybody can teach 1933 to 1935 but how do you cultivate a moral change and a moral responsibility based on that information. It’s a very different agenda.”
To explain his feelings about how an emotional connection with this significant Jewish historical experience can happen, Calmenson described a scene he observed in which a little girl asked a survivor, “How did it feel to have your hair cut?”
“That was the level [at which] she could understand the Holocaust,” he said. Somehow we have to find a way to connect with the children “at their level, on their terms and in their language” and one way to do that is to connect them with the children of the Holocaust.
“That became the seed of the idea” for Remember Us, Calmenson said. And these thoughts together with the model of “twinning” with Soviet Jews that was practiced among b’nai mitzvah in the U.S. prior to the outpouring of Jews from the former Soviet Union, all came together to begin to produce “Remember Us.”
Calmenson founded the project in 2003 and there are now some 250 Reform and Conservative congregations involved, across the country. “The Orthodox community has vetted it, Calmenson said, “but we haven’t had enough people to start it there yet. We did produce a version of our materials [for Orthodox children] and we have developed well-written materials addressing students, parents, and teachers.”
Calemenson had initially “canvassed” the Wisconsin community and received support and encouragement, especially from Shalom’s Berman and Rabbi Ronald Shapiro, the congregation’s spiritual leader.
Shapiro connected him with the Helen Bader Foundation, which was willing to support the project locally, on the condition that Calmenson establish a local base.
That part fell into place with a chance meeting between Calmenson and Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, in a private home in California last year.
Since then, the MJCCR and the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning have joined with Remember Us and the Helen Bader Foundation to establish and administer The Wisconsin Remember Us Initiative.
Loading ...