Tunnel of Hope: Escape from the Novogrudok Forced Labor Camp by Betty Brodsky Cohen; Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House; © 2024; ISBN 9789657-801291; 655 pages including appendices; $33.39.
SAN DIEGO – Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Donald Trump and one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, may not have ever existed were it not for the daring escape by his grandmother Raya in September 1943 from a forced labor camp run by the Nazis in Novogrudok in today’s Belarus.
Author Betty Brodsky Cohen researched the fate of 227 prisoners who participated in a mass escape through a surreptitiously built tunnel. Her mother, Fanya Dunetz, was among 133 who survived raking machine gun fire and made their way to the Bielski Brothers’ partisan encampment in the Naliboki Forests. Kushner’s grandmother, Raya Kushner, whose husband took her surname, was among those who made it. So was his great-grandfather Zeidel Kushner.
There were four previous massacres of the Jews of Novogrudok, a city located about 90 miles southwest of Minsk, and the neighboring village of Skirdlevo, according to author Cohen.
The first massacre occurred on December 8, 1941, when between 4,000 and 5,100 Jews were rounded up and executed in the Novogrudok marketplace by the Nazi occupiers in what was then Poland. Among the victims in Skirdlevo was Raya’s eldest sister, Esther, a recent college graduate. Her family watched her being dragged to her death
The second massacre came on August 7, 1942, in Novogrudok’s Pereska ghetto, which was created after the first massacre. Approximately 5,500 men, women, and children were transported to the nearby village of Litovka, where they were executed and buried in a mass grave.
The third massacre came on February 4, 1943, when nearly 500 Jews in the Pereseka ghetto were shot and thrown into a pre-dug ditch.
The fourth massacre came on May 7, 1943, when 250 prisoners at the Novogrudok work camp, including Raya’s mother (Jared Kushner’s great-grandmother), Hinda, were led away to their murders about a half mile from the ghetto.
That’s when Raya, her brother Chanan, sister Leah, and father Zeidel joined the cause of the tunnel diggers led by Berl Yoselevich. The women’s jobs were to smuggle dirt from the tunnel in bags hidden under their coats and spilled into attics and empty rooms. Younger men like Chanan, nicknamed Chonie, were in charge of digging the tunnel, which grew to a distance of slightly more than 682 feet. Although all Novogrudok inmates suffered on starvation diets, they nevertheless shared their rations with the tunnelers who dug at night after their regular work shifts. The diggers needed the calories.
On the evening of September 26, 1943, a dark, stormy night in which an electrician among the prisoners cut the power to the camp’s searchlights, the prisoners lined up according to an assigned order and crept to the tunnel’s entrance. Chanan. Number 76, was fatally shot while making his escape. Zeidel, Raya, and Leah were Numbers 143, 144, and 145 respectively. They made it to safety.
Joseph Berkowitz and Raya were among 20 couples who later were married in a group ceremony in Budapest. She had known Joseph prior to the war. Joseph, who took the surname Kushner, had fled the Jewish ghetto in the town of Korelich and dug a pit in the woods in which he hid along with his sisters and brother. They hid there for nearly three years, with Joseph scavenging at night for their food.
Joseph and Raya secured visas to the United States, where they lived in Brooklyn and later in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Their children were Linda, born in a European displaced person’s camp; Murray, Charles, and Esther, the last two of whom were named for Raya’s slain siblings.
Charles, named for Chanan, followed his father Joseph into the real estate business. He is Jared Kushner’s father, who served a two-year sentence in a federal prison camp following his conviction in 2005 on charges of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. President Donald Trump, whose daughter Ivanka is married to Charles’ son Jared, pardoned Charles in 2020 and nominated him as ambassador to France in 2025.
Raya was widowed in 1985. In 1998, on the occasion of her 75th birthday, her grandchildren, including Jared, wrote tributes to her. Said Jared: “In being a Holocaust survivor, you have been through the worst of times, and yet, you are always compassionate to those who suffer misfortunes.”
Raya (who shortened her given name to Rae), Charles, his wife Seryl, and four children, including Jared, visited Novogrudok in1999. She commented: “We never dreamed that out of the ashes and rubble, we would survive to lead normal lives and see and build the next generation.”
The Kushners were just four Novogrudok escapees of the 227 whose biographies are set down in Betty Brodsky Cohen’s landmark work. Following the section on biographies, some of which are extensive and others just a couple of paragraphs because information was unavailable, Cohen includes an analysis of why the escape from Novogrudok was relatively successful and offers a tribute to the Righteous Gentiles who aided the escapees. She also deals with the Bielski Partisans, whose story was dramatized in 2008 in the Edward Zwick movie Defiance starring Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber, Jamie Bell and George McKay.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.