The woman in the photo looked like the years had taken a toll on her, but there was special spark in her eyes. The text on the back of the photo noted that the year was 1926.
The rest of the writing was in Yiddish, the language spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe. Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters. Some of its words come directly from Hebrew, while others derive from German.
Some of my cousins and I were looking at this photo at a gathering after my mother’s funeral in 2004. We could read the woman’s first name inscribed on the back of the photo: Hene (Chanah in Hebrew, Hannah in English).
The last name was eluding us until I examined it more closely. I realized that it read “Karol.” We knew then, for certain, that we were looking into the face and eyes of our great-grandmother, who lived in Lithuania, and may have died soon after the photo was taken.
In the 1960s, I was first learning about the Holocaust, the systematic extermination by the Nazis of 11 million people, including six million Jews, in Europe during World War II. My parents told me that they didn’t know of any relatives who were victims of the Holocaust.
I thought that was true until my exploration on a genealogical website connected me with a woman living in Jerusalem who had left Lithuania in 1991. Via email, she told me that she was also a descendant of the Karols from one particular Lithuanian town. We were distant cousins.
It was the first time I realized that I had relatives who had remained in Europe during and after World War II. I would imagine that there were family members who died there as well, perhaps at the hand of the Nazis.
I am not sure what life was like for Hene Karol in Lithuania, but it definitely wasn’t easy.
About a year ago, my wife Rhonda and I attended a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish in New York City, a production directed by Academy Award winner Joel Grey.
I imagined, while watching and listening to the songs and dialogue presented in the language of our Eastern European forbears, that the musical approximated the life of my ancestors: simple, difficult, and marked with moments of joy and celebration.
The Karols’ Jewish community, like others nearby, may have endured attacks like the one portrayed in the wedding scene in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Those demonstrations of violence and murder came to be known as pogroms. They were nothing but a baseless outpouring of pure hatred and fear.
Tragically, the Holocaust took that earlier violence and hatred to an unimaginable extreme.
On Monday, January 27, 2020, I watched the live stream of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation (by the Soviet Army) of the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, located in Poland. From my living room at home, I joined in reciting the traditional mourner’s prayer.
There have been survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps among my congregants throughout my rabbinate. Their persistence and their faith have always been an inspiration to me.
To carry on their legacy, and that of my family, I will continue to do all that I can, along with partners throughout the community, to combat hatred and to preserve freedom and peace in our precious world.
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