Connections

Posted at 4:00 PM, Friday, May 2, 2008

The year cycle swings round and round, and so Yom HaShoah--Holocaust Remembrance Day--has come again. Last night, the Adelaide community had its annual observance, this time at the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation. Five survivors were on hand to light candles to memorialize the six million Jewish lives lost. Regina Zielinski, who had lit one of the candles last year, is currently in Poland as an official guest to mark the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Martin Spitzer, a partisan fighter and forgery artist during the War, died just a few weeks ago and was sorely missed. A piece of his extraordinary story is told on the "book of life" section of the website of Adelaide's Jewish museum. Karen Finch, an Adelaide native who is still a Beit Shalom member even now that she lives in Sydney, was the guest speaker. As an educator at the Sydney Jewish Museum, she has the opportunity to participate in a nineteen-day seminar at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem earlier this year. She spoke in particular of an extraordinary morning she and the other seminar participants spent with Hannah Goslar, a Dutch Jew who happens to have been Anne Frank's best friend.

Today, an article by me was published in the "Australian Jewish News" to mark Yom HaShoah. I had noted that by a happy coincidence, the start of Pesach fell on the same date as the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Indeed, part of the observance of the 65th anniversary was to include a Passover seder held in Warsaw, conducted by the chief rabbi of Poland, and attended by the Polish prime minister. I wrote the article three weeks ago just as Regina was gearing up for her big trip, and I can only hope that things turned out as planned!

The phone rang this afternoon as I was making challah and chicken soup for Shabbat. A heavily accented voice on the other end identified himself as Sam Spitzer, calling from Sydney to talk with me about my article. He wanted to make sure I knew the story of Rosa Robota, a young Jewish woman who managed to smuggle enough gunpowder into Auschwitz to blow up one of the five crematoria. He instructed me to read everything I could about her, and then expect a call from him next week to discuss her. Sam Spitzer himself was a partisan in Slovakia during the war who was instrumental in having a gate in Sydney named in Rosa Robota's memory. We made a delightful connection over the phone, when I learned that his granddaughter is engaged to marry a very lovely young rabbi in Sydney named Paul Jacobson. Shabbat shalom!