by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

April 30, 2009

Faith in the essential humanity of mankind was the greatest weakness of many of those who endured the Holocaust, but it was also their greatest strength, said Adrienne Cooper on April 21, speaking at the annual Yom Hashoa commemoration at Kean University.

The event, held in the Wilkins Theater on the Union campus, was hosted by the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey’s Jewish Community Relations Council and Kean’s Holocaust Resource Center. It was organized by their Yom Hashoa Observance Committee, chaired by Marcy Lazar and Clara Kramer. The theme was “Fighting Back.”

Cooper, a Yiddish singer and executive officer with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, served as presenter. She opened the program with a tribute to all those who resisted the Nazis, citing both recognized heroes like the Bielski brothers, whose group of partisans saved some 1,300 Jews (and who were the subject of the recent film Defiance), and prominent doctor Janusz Korczak, head of the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, who chose to go with 192 children to the Treblinka death camp. Cooper also honored the thousands for whom mere survival — even just for a short while — amounted to an act of resistance.

“Their courage will be remembered for untold generations to come, as they are remembered today,” she said.

Kean president Dr. Dawood Farahi said, “The advantage of history is that it heals things; its disadvantage is that it forces you to forget. Tell the story of the Holocaust to your children, to your neighbors, to your friends, and ask them to do the same,” he told the audience.

That call was reiterated by Dina Cohen, a member of the NJ Commission on Holocaust Education, who conveyed a message of support from Gov. Jon Corzine, and after her by speaker after speaker.

As has become the custom at such events, six candles were lit in memory of the six million Jews killed. Those lighting candles included Rachel and Jessica Bielski, granddaughters of Zus, one of the Bielski brothers; Simon Kaplan, a liberator with the United States Army; Bielski partisan Rozalia Wodakow; and survivors Ernest Kaufman, Mollie Sperling, and Eva Yungst.

Sperling told her own story; high school student Cara Levinson spoke for Kaplan; the others were represented by a family member.

Roz Moskowitz-Bielski, Rachel and Jessica’s mother, described her late father-in-law and his warm, forthright way. He spoke very little about the lives he and his brothers helped save, she said, “but with each passing year, more and more stories sprung forth from survivors, describing him as ‘our hero.’”

Molly Sperling endured a death march that killed many of her companions. “I survived by sheer luck,” she said. “Why did I survive? This is for God to answer.”

Cara Levinson related how “Si” Kaplan, a college boy from the northern United States, found himself shipping out in the largest convoy ever assembled by the American army. He was injured at the Battle of the Bulge and was still out of action when his fellow soldiers liberated the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp near Nordhausen in Germany. What they described to him, he said, “was beyond anything you could imagine.”

‘A chance to fight back’

Seymour Wodakow read the story of his mother, Rozalia, who joined the Bielski Brigade after half her family had been killed at the start of the war. “I remember always being tired, cold, and hungry,” she wrote. She eventually immigrated to the United States in 1963, went on to work for the United Nations, and is now the great-grandmother of three.

Renee Kaufman related her father Ernest’s story. “He didn’t regard himself as a survivor,” she said, “because he had a chance to fight back.” He was captured after Kristallnacht and held at Buchenwald for four weeks, but was released on the promise that he would leave Germany. He arrived in America in 1939 and joined the U.S. Army, becoming one of its “Ritchie Boys,” who were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland in intelligence and psychological warfare. He retired from the army in 1948 with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

Eva Yungst’s story of survival was read by her granddaughter, Erica Hochman, whose late mother was NJ beauty queen and Holocaust Commission member Hela Young. Yungst, having survived the concentration camps, returned to her hometown after the liberation feeling empty and desolate, asking, “Why were we punished like this?” But she and her husband came to the United States in 1956, said her granddaughter, and made a good life for themselves and their children.

Music, readings, and prayers completed the program. For the sixth consecutive year, the Lower School Choir from Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union, led by director and music educator Rina Maimon, sang. Sael Abecassis, the Central federation’s Israeli emissary, and Andres Chang, a participant in the federation’s survivor/teen twinning program, gave Hebrew and English readings for Yom Hashoa V’hagevura (Holocaust and Heroism Day). Cantor Steven Stern of Temple Beth O’r/Beth Torah of Clark and philanthropist and survivor Sam Halpern recited prayers at the gathering.

Mingling with other participants and audience members after the event, Si Kaplan had two very special encounters: One man came up to him to tell him he was among those liberated by Kaplan’s division. “It was very touching,” Kaplan said. He also compared notes with Ernest Kaufman, and it turned out that the two men — each with his own segment of the U.S. Army — had crossed paths in the Hurtgen Forest, on the border between Belgium and Germany, the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the war

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Long lines for survivor’s story

PRECEDING THE Yom Hashoa commemoration at Kean University on April 21, Clara Kramer, chair of the Holocaust Resource Foundation, signed copies of her book, Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival, alongside her cowriter, author Stephen Glantz. The book, based on the diary she wrote as a teenager 65 years ago while she was in hiding, was published a year ago in England and came out last month in the United States; translations are planned now in numerous other countries.

Kramer beamed at the long line of well-wishers buying her book. “This is my community,” she said. “But yesterday I was signing books at a library in Manahawkin, where they used to not allow Jews to live, and there was a long line.”

Glantz said that getting to know Kramer during their three years of working together was a life-changing event. “She’s an extraordinary person,” he said. “Some of it was very hard for her — having to go back over the details of what happened — but she kept saying it’s not about her; it’s so others will know what happened.”

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