As a child, Susie Fono lived in Budapest, Hungary, and survived both the Nazi takeover during World War II and the Communist regime that followed.
She came to Milwaukee as a refugee in 1956, and has told her story to many Jewish and non-Jewish groups in this community and beyond.
After German forces occupied Hungary in 1944, when she was seven years old, Fono said it was not possible for Jews to go to synagogue, and her family celebrated Shabbat and the holidays at home.
In a telephone interview July 24, Fono recalled that before the war, the family would gather at the home of her maternal grandparents — who later died in the Holocaust — for Shabbat, Passover and the High Holidays.
The meal on the eve of Rosh HaShanah included chicken soup with cream of wheat dumplings, challah, chicken, beef paprikash (a traditional Hungarian beef stew), she said, and concluded with a chocolate kugelhopf.
Before Yom Kippur, she remembered her grandfather “twirling a chicken over our heads,” part of the ritual of kapparot, a custom in which the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl, traditionally performed before sitting down to the last meal before Yom Kippur begins.
Fono recalled the pre-Yom Kippur meal starting with chicken soup, and goose for the entree. “Dad was in the grain business, and got geese from farmers,” she said.
After the war, the family gathered at her parents’ house for the holidays, and they all went to synagogue together on Yom Kippur, where men and women sat separately and dressed in dark colors. Friends joined the family in breaking the fast at home, as Fono said they still do today.
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