By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – There had been a community-wide commemoration of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, the day before. but on Monday night, in the surroundings of the synagogue that has been home to the New Life Club, Holocaust Aurvivors held another, more intimate remembrance service.
Prayers and readings were preceded by the showing of the documentary Blessed is the Match, a biography about Hannah Senesh, the Palestinian Jewish heroine who was executed by firing squad following a failed attempt to rescue Hungarian Jews.
Senesh had grown up in a middle class family in Budapest and had immigrated in 1939 to British Mandatory Palestine to learn agriculture and to work on a kibbutz, convinced as she was that Jews must establish their own nation if ever they were to live free of the discrimination and race hatred they were suffering in Europe. But working on a kibbutz was not contribution enough for Senesh (Szenes in Hungarian); she wanted to slip back into Hungary to persuade the Jews there to resist and to save themselves.
With other Palestinian members of the British Army (“Israelis” was not a term yet coined), she parachuted into Yugoslavia in 1944 and prepared to cross into Hungary, which had been ruled by indigenous allies of the German Nazis. However, before the crossing could be effected, the Germans marched into Hungary. The mission was aborted, but Senesh, hoping to rescue her mother, crossed into Hungary anyway. Before crossing the border, She wrote the poem in Hebrew that would give the documentary its name and would provide a theme of the evening.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Senesh was captured in civilian dress at the border, and the British military radio that she carried was discovered. She was taken to prison, tortured, and even subjected to threats that her mother would be executed if Hannah did not reveal the whereabouts of the other members of her unit. Eventually, at age 22, she was executed by firing squad in a Nazi prison, even as her mother waited in a commander’s office to plead for her daughter’s release. Ironically, the mother whom she came to rescue survived the Holocaust, but Hannah did not.
Called by her comrades “Israel’s Joan of Arc,” the body of Senesh, a poet and patriot, was brought to Israel a few years after Independence. She was honored in ceremonies over the length of the country, and was buried with other parachutists at the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem.
In a reading of an Abba Kovner poem during Monday night’s remembrance service, the survivors at Tifereth Israel recalled people like themselves who had been persecuted, interned, and brutalized by the Nazis, while also recalling “they, the strong of heart, open-eyed, (who) freely offered up their lives–but were unable to bring salvation.”
As has become a custom at Yom HaShoah ceremonies, six candles were lit symbolizing the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis by firing squads in the streets and forests, and by starvation and poison gas in the concentration camps. Lighting Monday night’s first candle was Gussie Zaks, herself one of the subjects of a local Bonnie Bart documentary, Our Survivors: Their Lives and Legacies, in which her life in Poland and near death at Bergen Belsen was recounted. That film also told the stories of German-born Hannah Marx (who sat nearby in the Tifereth Israel sanctuary and later helped light the sixth candle) and Ben Midler, who after surviving numerous concentration camps fought in Israel’s Independence war.
The second candle was lit by Eve Gerstle, now marking her 97th birthday. Pictured on the cover of the program for the community-wide commemoration with an unidentified student of San Diego Jewish Academy, Gerstle is the last known Jewish Survivor of the German city of Wiesbaden, which over the years has honored her on several occasions.
More candles, more Survivors, each with a dramatic story of perserverance. Their lives were not the fast-burning matches of a Hannah Senesh, but rather those of long-burning fuses which now, 66 years after the end of the Holocaust, keep the memory of the Shoah illumined.
Candle 3 was kindled by Helen Berlin, Anna Ritter and Erna Frank; Candle 4 by Margaret Benedict (a 2nd-Generation Survivor); Candle 5 by Norbert and Sallie Sheinok (who also read one of her Holocaust poems); Candle 6 by Hannah Marx and Gerhard Maschkowski, and Candle 7 (for the children who perished ) by Jack Morgenstern, the son of Gussie Zaks. (The day before during the community Holocaust commemoration at the Lawrence Family JCC, Morgenstern had been given the honor of introducing a color guard from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.)
As Sandee Ruckersberg read about the feelings of guilt that some survivors have, “You are still obsessed with the atrocities of the past…. (and) .. sometimes regret… that you survived,” one’s thoughts returned to the documentary about Hannah Senesh. What must her mother have thought in the years that remained to her? And what about her brother, Giora, who also had made his way to British Mandatory Palestine, and raised his family there?
A poem by Sallie Sheinok provided a possible answer: In the shadow of the flames, Survivors and the rest of the Jewish people have taken an oath in the name of their dead parents, siblings and children, to never let the sacred memory of the 6 million be scorned or erased.
Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal, who led the service which also included the chanting of El Moleh Rachamim and the recitation of Kaddish, commented that he found meaning in the fact that Osama bin-Laden, architect of the 9-11 attacks on America, had been killed by American forces on Yom Hashoah the day before.
Bin Laden and his followers had helped to stir vicious anti-Semitism in current times. More hate crimes are committed against Jews and Jewish institutions in the United States than against Muslims, he said. Hatred against Israel and Jews runs even deeper in other parts of the world, such as in Egypt, where while while covering the recent revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak from the presidency, CBS correspondent Laura Logan was raped by a mob brought to a fury by a rumor that she was a Jew.
The generation of the Survivors is passing. Each year there are fewer to attend such commemorative services, Rosenthal said. At Monday night’s ceremony, there were 40 people-Survivors, friends, and family members. Rosenthal said the Survivors deserve to be honored for living proudly as Jews, for fighting anti-Semitism, and for showing that despite all that had happened to them, life was still worth living
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com