George Wolf : A Different Observation of Yom Hashoah at Congregation Habonim
When history, extraordinary individuals and the latest in informational technology meet, amazing and heretofore unknown facts can emerge and throw a wholly different light on past events.
April 11th was Yom Hashoah, a widely observed Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, which had come to its painful end sixty-five years ago. Secular and religious events took place in many synagogues and Jewish community centers across the land. Besides speeches from their leaders, most also featured talks by survivors or survivors’ kin, from horrific descriptions of unimaginable suffering to a simple one-sentence statement by a 7-year old that his great-grandmother perished at Auschwitz.
The dictionary defines “survivor” as anyone who has lived during a certain period and remained alive in any kind of condition, good, bad or indifferent. The period in question was the ascendancy of Hitler and his Nazi regime in Germany, his relentless persecution of Jews, the expansion of his lethal pursuit by war of aggression over the entire European continent, and finally his all-too-successful murder of much of
Europe’s Jews, often with the willing assistance from local Gentile populations, or at least with their silent disinterest . Some, particularly German Jews, survived by realizing the danger early and getting out of Germany and later Austria, as it too became part of the German Reich. Unless their families had even earlier connections in America, getting to the U. S. was not easy and extremely limited, as was access to the United Kingdom and its Commonwealths Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Other survivors managed to get out of areas occupied or conquered by the Nazis in the nick of time or through some fortunate turn of fate. Some managed to hide, spending years in cramped, cold, unbelievably difficult conditions, helped by local righteous Gentiles. Most, however, got caught up in the slave labor and killing machine, organized with Germanic efficiency and thoroughness, and very few came out alive.
So it was that the congregation Habonim, on the West Side of Manhattan, founded by German Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, had one of their members organize a Yom Hashoah event. Professor Susan Prager’s father, a refugee from Germany, was publisher of the “Aufbau”, a prominent German-language newspaper and an early member of the congregation. Susan Prager, a sociology professor retired from Brooklyn College and now teaching at Touro University, likes to range across the world in her vacation travels, and while in Istanbul, Turkey, unexpectedly came across some DVDs about Jews and the Holocaust. Turkey is not normally associated with saving Jews, it is not part of Eastern Europe which was most affected by Nazi depredations, and its language is unfamiliar to most European Jews. It has its own small, native Jewish population, mostly of Sephardic background, whose ancestors its sultan had invited when the Inquisition pushed them out of the Iberian peninsula in the 15th and 16th centuries. All this information was news to Professor Prager, and she decided to use it as a novel and different angle in Habonim’s Day of Remembrance event.
There is an organization in New York City, The Blue Card, which today is the only Jewish charity that exclusively aids severely impoverished and disabled Holocaust survivors. It was founded in 1934 as a self-help organization in Germany, to help Jews who were losing their means of livelihood under the newly enacted racial laws. It was reorganized in America in 1939 to help recent refugees and after the war focused on the survivors who came out of the camps or out of hiding and were in poor physical, mental and financial shape. Of the roughly 122,000 survivors still living in the U.S. today, a surprising 25% live at or near the official poverty level. The Blue Card provides aid to 1,700 of the most needy ones in the form of monthly stipends, cash gifts on birthdays and Jewish holidays, emergency monies for dental care, rent, or other needs, vacations, emergency electronic response systems, hearing aids, vitamins and more, to let them know they are not forgotten and allow them to live out their years with some measure of comfort and dignity.
Some of the organizers of The Blue Card and their descendants are current members of Habonim and thus are quite familiar with it. George Wolf, a refugee originally from Czechoslovakia, and a retired apparel manufacturer, is its current marketing director. Offering help with the Yom Hashoah event by providing a survivor as a speaker, was not what Prof. Prager needed. “What do you know about Turkey in connection with the Holocaust?” she asked. The answer had to be “nothing”, and inquiries among Wolf’s colleagues in the Jewish non-profit field did not elicit anything either, except the suggestion “try Google”. And lo and behold, there was a ton of information on Google, most of it pointed in the direction of Professor Arnold Riesman, a retired scientist and a survivor in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the expert par excellence on the subject.
Professor Arnold Reisman, an expert in engineering and fluid dynamics, and a prolific published writer, retired from Case Western University in 1994. Born and raised in Poland, his father managed a heroic and extremely dangerous escape from the German invaders with his family to the Soviet Union, and after difficult times there and a long journey eventually landed in the United States. From 1999 to 2003,
Prof. Reisman was Visiting Scholar in Turkey, at both Sabanci University and the Istanbul Technical University. To his surprise, he discovered two separate Turkish involvements with persecuted Jews during the Hitler times, unfamiliar to most Western students of the Holocaust. While a number were familiar with the sinking of the refugee ship Struma in the Black Sea off the Turkish coast, caused by a Soviet torpedo, there was a second such ship, also torpedoed by a Soviet submarine with almost total loss of life. There was an exchange on Turkish territory of 233 Jewish prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen camp for German nationals interned by the British in the Middle East. Turkey also offered unhindered transit to some 20,000 Jewish refugees escaping Hitler’s grasp who had destination visas to Palestine and beyond.
However, the biggest news was the number of German Jewish academics, scientists, artists, and others invited to Turkey starting in 1933 and continuing through 1941, to help modernize Turkish society, its science and education, its cultural connection to Western Europe, by the government of Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the founder and first president of the modern Turkish state, and after his death in 1938, president Ismet Inonu. With their families, these invitees totaled several thousand saved. Still less known was the involvement of a number of Turkish diplomats who, mainly in Vichy France, saved Jews facing deportation and almost certain death from under the noses of the Nazis by spreading diplomatic protection to Jews with any kind of Turkish background, and in fact any Jew who asked for it, with or without such background. These diplomats acted individually, without official permission for their activities, even ignoring contrary instructions and at the cost of their careers. Prof. Reisman estimates that about 3,000 Jews were saved this way, and having written several books on this subject, is lobbying to have these brave diplomats recognized as “righteous Gentiles” by the Yad Vashem foundation in Israel.
At Susan Prager’s invitation and with the support of Ms. Mehves Sonmez representing the New York Turkish-American community, Prof. Reisman came to New York from his home in Shaker Heights, to present at Habonim his fascinating and largely unknown story of Turkish rescue of Holocaust victims in great detail. He was followed by Leon Abudaram, a member of the congregation who was born and grew up in Turkey, who spoke eloquently of the life of Jews living there. Habonim’s Yom Hashoah event, with approximately 100 congregants in the audience, was also attended by George Wolf, who gave a brief, who reminded the audience of the plight of many survivors, and a succinct account of The Blue Card and its current activities, including fielding marathon teams and a Simcha project in conjunction with the Anne Frank Center USA. A lovely buffet and reception followed the presentations.