Category Archives: Jewish History

“A place for remembrance and reflection…”

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Dr. Michael Lozman’s dream of a permanent Holocaust memorial in the Capital Region of New York became a reality on December 1, 2025, when Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation establishing a New York State memorial to honor Holocaust victims and survivors. 

“With the first ever state-sponsored Holocaust Memorial, we are honoring the victims and survivors of the Holocaust while ensuring that all visitors have a place to remember and reflect on what the Jewish community has endured,” Governor Hochul stated in a press release. “New York has zero tolerance for hate of any kind, and with this memorial, we reaffirm our commitment to rooting out antisemitism and ensuring a peaceful and thriving future for all.”

Legislation S5784/A7614 directs the state Office of General Services (OGS) to oversee the design, programming, and location on the Empire State Plaza in Albany of the New York Holocaust Memorial. The memorial will join others on the Plaza that are special sites of remembrance and tribute, offering visitors the opportunity to reflect on issues that touch the core of our society.

The late Dr. Michael Lozman was an area orthodontist and a passionate advocate for Holocaust remembrance. Lozman began his quest honoring victims of the Holocaust when he turned his attention to restoring desecrated Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe and, in doing so, educating future generations about the atrocities of the Holocaust. Working with several US colleges, Lozman organized and led fifteen trips through 2017 that resulted in the restoration of ten cemeteries in Belarus and five cemeteries in Lithuania.

Around 2017, Lozman began his pursuit of building a Holocaust memorial in the Capital District in New York. He had forged a friendship with Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany’s Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger, who graciously donated two acres of land for the development of a memorial in Niskayuna. The gift from the diocese for a Holocaust project was the first known collaboration, for this type of memorial, between a Jewish community and the Roman Catholic Church. In 2018, Lozman founded the Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial (CDJHM). The board consisted of a group of individuals from the local community, including Scott Lewendon, Jean “Buzz” Rosenthal, Dr. Robin Lozman Anderson, Tobie Lozman Schlosstein, Warren Geisler, Gay Griffith, Howard Ginsburg, Judy Linden, and Linda Rozelle Shannon. “Michael was always grateful for each member’s sacrifice and sense of duty to the project,” recalled his wife Sharon.

Lozman’s initial concept for the physical memorial met resistance as being too literal a representation. Dan Dembling, an Albany architect, and Michael Blau, a theming solutions expert located in the Capital Region, were recruited to be part of the redesign effort that involved both the CDJHM and the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York. Many iterations later, the Town of Niskayuna approved Dembling’s design in June 2019.

The planned memorial, as envisioned by the board, consists of walls arranged in the shape of the Star of David. Visitors will be guided around the six-sided structure, where they will be connected to significant events that occurred during the Holocaust. The six columns in the center represent the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Initially estimated to cost $4.5 million, the board increased its fundraising efforts, but they were slowed down by the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2023, Lozman decided to step back and leave the board. He asked Dembling, whom Lozman considered very capable and enthusiastic, to join the board and to become its president. After careful consideration, Dembling agreed. “Michael set the groundwork for me to think big,” said Dembling in an April 2025 Zoom call. “He was excited to transition the mission to me.”

Faced with new estimates due to inflation to $6 million, the board began exploring other locations that could provide already established restrooms and parking. Dembling proposed shifting the location from Niskayuna to the Empire State Plaza. It was felt that it would provide an ideal place for students and tourists who were visiting New York’s capital city an opportunity to learn about the Shoah. To further emphasize its expanded audience, the memorial will be renamed the New York State Holocaust Memorial (NYSHM). As the official state-sponsored Holocaust memorial, it is expected to draw contributions from the estimated 1.6 million Jews and other citizens of New York.

On October 11, 2024, one year to the day when he had called Dembling to take on the presidency, Lozman died. Continuing his work, the board sought letters of support from government, religious, and private entities. Armed with over forty letters, the board approached local legislators to establish the memorial at the Empire State Plaza. Senator Patricia Fahy and Assemblywoman Gabriella Romero drafted companion bills for their respective houses. Lozman’s vision moved closer to reality when both houses passed the bills unanimously. Governor Hochul’s signature moves the project to the NYS OGS, which must work with an “organization that provides Holocaust education services and programs” to deliver the memorial. The next step in creating the New York State Holocaust Memorial is up to the NYS OGS. The new law charges OGS with selecting an organization to work with on the memorial’s final design and location on the Empire State Plaza. The CDJHM hopes that it will be that organization.

Sharon Lozman, Dr. Robin Lozman Anderson, and other members of the CDJHM board were at the signing. Sharon received the newly signed bill from Governor Hochul as a lasting reminder of her husband’s legacy.

Along with the physical memorial, the board also added components that further incorporate Lozman’s vision of education. Under the guidance of Evelyn Loeb, a longtime Holocaust educator, the CDJHM partnered with Echoes & Reflections, an international Holocaust education program, to create an innovative educational program, which will include a historical timeline of Holocaust events and NYS Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. In addition, the CDJHM will sponsor a fleet of traveling memorials that use the same online educational program and will travel the state to schools, churches, synagogues, and other community locations. Both educational programs are scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2026.

The Jewish Federation has been one of the many organizations that has supported the work of the CDJHM. At its annual meeting on June 17, the Federation honored three of its members. Dr. Michael Lozman was posthumously awarded the President’s Award; Buzz Rosenthal was also honored with a President’s Award; and Dan Dembling was awarded the Sidney Albert Community Service Award.

In a December 1, 2025, press release, Dembling thanked the governor for her signature. “Since our organization’s founding by Dr. Michael Lozman, we have been dedicated to creating a permanent space in the Capital Region to honor the victims of the Holocaust and educate future generations. At this time when antisemitism is so high and rhetoric is reminiscent of the Nazi era, the need to remember the Holocaust is critically important. As envisioned, this memorial will have statewide impact by helping to educate people about the consequences of prejudice left unchecked and hopefully inspire New Yorkers to stand up against hate in all its forms.”

“Michael planted the seed for all of this,” said Dembling. “His unwavering commitment to honoring the past ensures that the memories of those lost will continue to inspire and educate future generations.”

The Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization and is raising funds for the permanent memorial,  traveling memorials, and educational programming. Those wishing to donate or find more information can go to their website at https://www.cdjhm.org/ or email at info@cdjhm.org.

December 01, 2025- Albany, NY- Governor Hochul signs Bill to create a New York State Holocaust Memorial during a Hanukkah Reception at the Executive Mansion (Darren McGee/ Office of Governor Kathy Hochul)

Dr. Michael Lozman

Photograph of CDJHC vision of Holocaust Memorial courtesy of Capital District Jewish Holocaust Committee, Inc. Dan Dembling, President.

Photograph of group at bill signing courtesy of the Press Office of New York State Governor Kathy Hochul. Darren McGee, photographer.

Photograph of Dr. Lozman courtesy of USCPAHA. Tina Khron, photographer. https://www.heritageabroad.gov/dvteam/dr-michael-lozman.

Aunt Rose and Uncle Ruby by Frances Cohen

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The article below was written by my mother, Frances Cohen. It is part of Fradel’s Story, a collection of stories I edited and published in book form in September 2022.

I’m so lucky that my mother had lots of siblings. I was surrounded with lots of loving aunts, uncles, and cousins. Of all the relatives, I was closest to my Aunt Rose, Uncle Ruby, and their older son Elliot.

My first memories of my Aunt Rose were when I was very young as she spent a great deal of time with me. She made clothes for me and even sewed some of the clothes for my trousseau. After Bill and I were married, Aunt Rose taught me how to cook. As the mother of two sons, she treated me as the daughter she never had.

Aunt Rose and Uncle Ruby had a wonderful marriage that lasted almost a half a century. They met under very romantic circumstances. Rose worked in New York City in a factory. One rainy day, she was walking home from work and went into a restaurant on Delancey Street to get out of the downpour. As fate may have it, Uncle Ruby was her waiter. Visiting over coffee, Ruby told the poor girl, who was drenched and disheveled, that he was to be finished very soon for the day. Since he had an umbrella, he would be glad to walk her to her home, which was just across the near-by Williamsburg bridge.

When Aunt Rose arrived home, her mother saw how infatuated Aunt Rose was with this tall, handsome guy. Her mother invited Ruby to stay for dinner. That first dinner led to many other dinners. Vichna, ready to feed everyone, would serve herring, boiled potatoes with sauerkraut, and homemade cake and challah. The romance flourished, and they were married within the year.

Soon after they were married, Uncle Ruby lost his job as a waiter. It was the Great Depression, and restaurants did not need as much help. Aunt Rose and Uncle Ruby moved up north to join the family in working at one of the many Pearl’s Department Stores. Ruby eventually opened his own store, Ruby’s, in Brushton, New York

Everyone loved Ruby as he had a wonderful sense of humor. When one of his customers complained that the underpants she bought at his store had holes in them, Ruby said that those were for ventilation. Uncle Ruby hated the Yankees, and he rarely missed their game on the radio just to cheer on the opposite team. At family get-togethers in our home in Keeseville, he would often sneak out to his car, turn on the radio, chew on Chiclets gum, and curse out “those damn Yankees!”

Aunt Rose and Uncle Ruby lived happily in Upstate New York and, although the only Jews in the town, were beloved by everyone. When Aunt Rose died just before their planned fiftieth anniversary party, her funeral was held in Burlington, Vermont. Even though that was 100 miles from their hometown, all the stores in Brushton were closed for the day so that everyone, including the local priest and the minister with his family, could attend the funeral,

Ruby missed his Rose. When he got lonesome, he would put a sign in the window of his store that stated, “Closed for Jewish Holidays” and travel to visit his children and grandchildren.

Ruby lived until he was ninety years old. His funeral, which was held in Burlington, Vermont, was also hugely attended as he was beloved by all the family and the many friends he and Rose had made during their lifetimes. During his eulogy, the rabbi said, “Ruby was not a religious man, but he took more time off for the Jewish holidays than anyone else I ever knew.”

As I mentioned before, Ruby and Rose had two sons, Elliot and Sol. I was especially close to their elder son, Elliot. When things were bad during the Depression, Elliot would spend the summers with my family in New York City. I’m forever grateful to him for introducing me to my husband. Elliot was best man at our wedding, and he drove the car that we took from New York City up north after our honeymoon. It an unforgettable trip. I sat in the front seat with Elliot and Aunt Rose. Bill sat in the back seat with all the wedding presents, including a floor lamp that Bill had to hold for the eight hours. As adults, we remained very close and have spent much time together in Florida and up north. Elliot and his wife Florence were at our fiftieth wedding anniversary. After Florence passed away, Elliot remarried. We have remained very close to Elliot and his second wife Marty. In May 2010, I went down to Staten Island to celebrate his daughter’s sixtieth birthday. I sat with Elliot and visited as if we were still children.

I am very grateful for our relationship with Ruby, Rose, and their family. They very much enriched Bill’s and my life.

Photo of Fran’s aunts and uncles is from Marilyn Cohen Shapiro’s family photo collection. Both Ruby and Rose are standing in the back row. Ruby is second from left; Rose is third from left.

A Survivor’s Tale: Dutch Nathan

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Anne Frank, born on June 12, 1929, was the celebrated diarist who described her life while hiding with her family from the Nazis in an Amsterdam, Holland attic. After capture and deportation, she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in late winter 1945.The following story, first published in 2018, tells the story of another Jewish child who hid with his family in Holland during World War II and survived to share his story.

Anne Frank is one of the most well known figures from the Holocaust. But she and her family were not the only ones to go into hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis and their collaborators. While some Jews lived in the open with changed identities, others, like the Franks physically hid to avoid certain deportation and almost certain death. Dutch Nathan and his family were one of many who relied on others to help them. 

Gert “Dutch” Nathan was born on January 5, 1932, in Duren, Germany, the second son of Wilhelm (“Willy”)  and Hilde (nee  Friesem) Nathan. Willy had a cattle hauling business which extended throughout Europe. He did not have a formal education, but he was street smart—Dutch remembers that his father could “outcalculate a calculator.” The Nathans lived a mostly secular life in Germany, with observation of major Jewish holidays and his mothers’ lighting of Shabbat candles.

In 1938, after Hitler’s rise, the family moved sixty miles west to Valkenburg, The Netherlands. “Holland had proclaimed neutrality when war broke out in September 1939, as they had done in World I,” said Dutch, “so my father thought our family would be safe.”Willy took a job with the De Valk bus company, a former competitor, where he continued his cattle business.

On May 10, 1940, Hitler’s forces invaded the self-proclaimed “neutral” country. Five days later, after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. By 1942, the situation began to deteriorate for fellow Jews. Willy made the following arrangements with his friend, Johan Kengen, a member of the Dutch Underground:  If the Nathans were in danger of deportment. Willy would pay for the family to stay in the home of  Kengen’s fiancé’s aunt and uncle  for “a few days” until the Nathans could be spirited away to England. Willy also made arrangements for neighbors to move most of the furniture and bedding to the house next door. Whether the neighbors were paid or volunteered as an anti-Nazi action still remains a mystery to Dutch. 

The plan was put into effect a few month later. While walking from the bus station into the De Valk building, Willy was stopped by a friend and fellow employee:  Germans were waiting for him to arrest him and deport him and his family to the concentration camp.

Father quickly stole a bike and peddled the ten miles home. Dutch and his older brother Fredo were instructed to leave their house one hour apart to walk the two  miles to a house “located on the right hand side just before the road crossed the railroad tracks” with a warning to “not speak to a soul.” Willy and Hilde arrived later that evening, expecting to hear soon from the Underground of their clandestine trip to England. 

Unfortunately, the days turned into week, and the Nathans were still in hiding. Other people, including downed pilots, had priority in the Underground escape plan. To further cover the facts of extra activity in the “safe house,” an elaborate ruse was planned. Johan and the elderly couple’s niece Ann quickly arranged their wedding. At the reception, Johan picked a huge fight with Ann’s parents, who resolved that they would have no contact with the couple until Johan apologized. The newlyweds moved into the house by the railroad tracks, bringing the number to eight. 

As weeks turned into months, tensions grew. The Nathan’s spent most of their time in a small main floor bedroom. Ann was prone to hysterical outbursts, and Willy and Johan would have to physically restrain her to keep her from running outside and giving their situation away. Meanwhile, Hilde was anguishing over the fact that she had not been able bring her parents with them. She was haunted by their deaths in the concentration camp for the rest of her life.

Johan’s government job determining the number of animals that farmers could slaughtered provided a means to get extra meat and milk, but food was still scarce. Dutch and Fredo, 10 and 12 respectively, spent most of their days quietly reading books and avoiding the shaded windows so no shadows would be seen.

Along with possible discovery, the occupants lived in fear of the potential impact of living near the railroad track.The noise from the passing trains provided an extra buffer but also an extra danger:  Allies strafed German trains. They hoped that these attacks would not hit the house, either killing all of them or forcing the Nathans out into the open, thus exposing their dark secret. 

In the second half of 1944, the southern half of Holland was liberated by American troops. (The remaining areas of the Netherlands were not liberated until May 1945.) The Nathans stayed inside for a few more days to make sure they were safe. 

Once they realized they were actually free, the Nathans stepped into fresh  air for the first time in twenty-six months.  “I walked a few feet and collapsed,” remembered Dutch. When asked if he had been overcome with emotion, he said, “I hadn’t used my legs in 26 months and initially had no muscle tone to walk more than a few feet.

Before they could move back into their home, however, Americans bombed Valkenburg. One of the casualties was the Nathan’s home. “No one understood why the brick home next door burned so much,” said Dutch. “The furniture hidden in the attic acted like a tinderbox, and flames shot up in the air for hours.”

In May 1945, the remaining areas of the Netherlands were liberated. Free but homeless, the Nathan family moved into a neighbor’s home until 1946, when they obtained visas to move to United States, where several of Willy’s siblings lived. Willy built a crate the size of a truck and filled it with everything they had accumulated since the end of the war—including a piano. 

Dutch, now sixteen, enrolled in City College to learn English, adding to his previous background of German, French, and Dutch. At 18, he enlisted in the army and volunteered to go to South Korea. When he returned home, he found employment in whatever “made money.” 

In 1979, Dutch, who had been married twice before, met Sue Cohen. He proposed shortly after the meeting, but it took ten years for her to say yes. During this time, Dutch started the Stretch Lace, a Sharon Massachusetts-based company that manufactured and sold elastic shoe laces. (“Tie once, never Tie Again!”) Although his invention was successful, Dutch admitted that he didn’t know marketing and sales. He eventually sold the business, but Easy Laces are still available today and are worn by such celebrities as Brooke Shields. They lived in Sharon for most of their married life before retiring to Kissimmee, Florida, in 2007.

 In 1982, Sue and he were invited by residents of Duren, Germany, to return to the Nathan’s original home. They were treated royally and met with church members as well as school children. Sue’s main mantra to everyone she met was “Just remember! The Holocaust DID happen.” Although their visit was supposed to last a week, Dutch felt uncomfortable. He rented a car, and the two of them toured Europe, driving over 4000 miles before returning to Massachusetts 

Almost seventy-five years after his liberation, Dutch graciously shared the story that he spent most of his life trying to put those terrifying time behind him. “I try not to think about those things,” said Dutch. “It is over and cannot be undone.  His story, however, as those of the fewer and fewer remaining Holocaust survivors, must be told. As Sue Nathan told the people in Germany during the 1982 visit, “Remember. The Holocaust DID happen.” And we Jews and righteous people everywhere will never forget. 

A version of this article originally appeared in the November 8, 2018, issue of the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Profile of resilience — Shoah survivor Harry Lowenstein revisits hometown

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Standing in front of the Bielefeld, Germany, railroad station in June 2018, Harry Lowenstein traced his fingers onto the all-too-familiar names etched into the Holocaust memorial. David, his father, Bernhardine, his mother, and his sister Klaere. Aunts and uncles and cousins. Friends and neighbors. During the Nazis’ terror, his family and hundreds of Jews from surrounding areas had stood on the station’s platform before being herded onto railroad cars for the journey to ghettos, concentration camps, forced labor camps, and for most, gas chambers and death.

The then 87-year- old Floridian— the last living Jew from an entire area who had survived the Nazis and WWII— had returned home to honor those whom he had lost, to thank those who risked their lives to help in his survival, and to present his message of tolerance and equality.

Surviving The Holocaust

Harry (nee Helmut) Lowenstein was born in 1931 in Fürstenau/Hoexter Germany, the second child of a cattle/horse trader and his wife. After years of mounting anti-Semitism, Kristallnacht, the “night of the breaking glass,” unleashed the Holocaust in November 1938. It demonstrated to Jews and others across Germany the brutality and determination of Hitler’s war agains the Jews. In their small rural village, the Lowensteins watched their synagogue burn and then experienced increasingly harsher restrictions. While most Christians in the town slammed the doors of their homes and businesses in the faces of their Jewish neighbors, the owners of one small bakery risked their lives by slipping Harry lifesaving loaves of bread. It was a kindness that Harry would never forget.

On Dec. 12, 1941, hundreds of Jews, including the 21 members of the Lowenstein’s extended family, were rounded up and brought to the Bielefeld train station. Hollering SS guards brandishing rifles herded the Jews into crowded rail cars, where they began the almost 1,000 mile journey to the Riga ghetto in Latvia. As it was the first night of Chanukah someone lit the traditional candles, said the traditional prayers and sang Ma’oz Tzur, Rock of Ages. The entire train soon joined in. That last sweet memory would help sustain Harry for the next six years. To this day, Harry tears up every time he hears the song.

The Next Day Comes

After several months in the crowded ghetto, groups of Jews were moved into the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp. Harry managed to escape the gas chambers by working in an auto repair shop housed in the complex. He still remembers the unrelenting, intentionally cruel actions by Nazi guards and the fear of beatings, punishment, and execution. “I thought to myself, I will somehow survive,” said Harry. “You learned to live minute to minute—not even hour by hour—to make sure the next day comes.”

In the fall of 1944, as the Russian army drew closer, the Nazis began to evacuate Riga-Kaiserwald. Thousands of Jewish prisoners, including Harry’s remaining family (his father had been murdered earlier) were shipped by boat to Danzig and then by barge to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. He lost touch with his family. On March 9,1945, as Harry remembers it, the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Harry’s “next day”—and freedom—had finally come.

The 14-year-old returned to Fürstenau in hopes of reuniting with family. The hopes were in vain. He was the lone survivor. First finding shelter for a short time with kind neighbors, Harry lived for a year with the family who had acquired the house of his family. In 1946, he was placed in a Jewish children’s home in Hamburg. In 1952, after arriving in the United States via Paris, the 21-year -old found his way to Kissimmee, Florida, where he joined his uncle’s apparel store. In 1956, he married Carol Sainker, had three children, and eventually operated his own apparel store. With fellow Jews, including many Holocaust survivors, the Lowensteins helped to found Congregation Shalom Aleichem and then build a synagogue in Kissimmee. “I saw one synagogue burn,” he said. “I wanted to build another.”

The Return

His wife Carol died in February 2017, just before their 60th anniversary. During Carol’s long illness and his year of mourning, Harry had begun to reappraise his past.

Fritz Ostkaemper, who had been a chairman of a Holocaust museum in Höxter, came across Lowenstein’s name as part of a research project tracking the Jewish families from the Westfalia area. Ostkaemper encouraged Harry to return to his childhood home. A previously planned trip to say Kaddish at his grandparents’ gravesite in Fürstenau evolved into a family trip through Europe with his daughters Karen Pridemore and Berna Lowenstein and her husband Greg Fitzgibbons.

After tours in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Harry and his family arrived in Germany and traveled to the Bielefeld railroad station. They stood silently in front of the “Each Person Has a Name” memorial. Dedicated in 1998, the monument displayed the names of the 1840 Jewish victims from Westfalia who had been murdered by the Nazis. A further inscription contains Psalm 78.6 in Hebrew and in German: So the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.

Ostkaemper drove the visitors to Höxter in a limousine provided by the town’s mayor, Alexander Fischer. Harry, with the help of a translator, gave a 15-minute address. The evening ended with a dinner in a beer garden hosted by the community. “Most of the survivors never returned,” Fischer stated in follow-up article in a Westfalia newspaper. “Therefore it [is an] even greater honor to be able to welcome Harry Lowenstein in his former home. This way we set an example against intolerance and racism.”

The following morning, the group traveled to Fuerstenau, where Harry was born. The burned out synagogue had been repurposed into a garage/warehouse. Harry gave a tour pointing out where the bima had been and where the family pews had been located. Harry then sought out the bakery owners that had saved him from starvation. As a large crowd watched, media cameras flashed, and videotape whirled, Harry and the elderly couple hugged each other. Harry was finally able to thank them for their long-ago kindness. “Danke Schoen” he said repeatedly. “Thank you.”

Despite its modernity, the citizens of Fuerstenau had not forgotten its past. In front of each home or area previously inhabited by Jews, was a Stolperstein, a 3.9 inch cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Harry found his plate:

Here lived Helmut Lowenstein. Born 1931. Deported 1941 to Riga. [Deported] 1944 to Stutthof. Rieben. February 1945: Death March. Freed. For all the rest of his family, in place of BEFREIT- freed– was the word ERMORDET– murdered.

Zachor

The Jewish cemetery was surprising well kept, according to Harry, and he recited the Kaddish at his grandparents’ graves. His final stop was in nearby Bredenborn to visit with the family with whom he had found shelter for the first year after his liberation. In speaking with local residents of Fuerstenau, Harry was told that a permanent memorial planned for a prominent spot in Fuerstenau had been stymied by uncertainty where it should be placed and by a lack of funds. Harry railed against their excuses. “After 70 years, you should have made a permanent memorial!”

Harry pledged 50% of the funds needed. The permanent bronze plaque was erected in 2021 near the foot of the church and in the middle of the town at a crossroads that everyone must use. He missed the unveiling of the memorial due to the pandemic.

What advice does Harry Lowenstein give as a Holocaust survivor? His message on parting: “Treat each human being equally, no matter who they are.That’s all.“

Sources:

Thank you to Wolfgang Mueller for translating the articles in the Westfalen-Blatt newspapers from German to English.

https://www.germany.info/us-en/welcome/03-Jewish-Life-Germany/-/1308424

https://www.memorialmuseums.org/eng/denkmaeler/view/1476/Bielefeld-Memorial

https://www.westfalen-blatt.de/owl/kreis- Höxter/ Höxter/es-war-eine-lange-reise-1275455?&npg

https://www.westfalen-blatt.de/owl/michael-stoltz-dieses-mahnmal-ruft-1743269?&npg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein

First published (Capital Region, New York) The Jewish World in its April 27, 2023, issue. 

Yellow star marking Jews during Hitler’s reign of terror. Courtesy of Harry Lowenstein, Holocaust survivor.

The Lost Mural

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My father, Bill Cohen, (Z”L) loved to play Jewish geography, and he proudly shared with us how the  first synagogue in Burlington was founded in his grandfather’s kitchen.  As we lived on the New York side of Lake Champlain, we visited many aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in the Queen City and the surrounding areas. One was Uncle Paul Pearl (born Pesach Ossovitz), who learned the peddling trade from his uncle Archic Perelman and went on to oversee 27 Pearl’s department stores in Upstate New York and Vermont. And then there were Uncle Moe Pearl, who owned several businesses in the area, and his wife Bess; Ruth (Pearl) Kropsky and her husband Isidore; and Aunt Ida and her husband Max Ahrens. May their memories be a blessing and live on in Congregation Ohavi Zedek and its beautiful “Lost Mural.”

When the Pels family attended the High Holy Day services in September, 2022, Congregation Ohavi Zedek had a welcome addition: the restored “Lost Mural” in the foyer, completed in June 2022 by the Lost Mural Project. The story of the mural began almost 150 years earlier, in the kitchen of one of its founding members, Isaac Perelman.

Although Jews had settled in Burlington as early as 1848, the 1880s saw an influx of Eastern European Jews facing persecution by Russians in all phases of their personal, professional, and religious lives. Others came up from New York City to escape work in the sweatshops; a few migrated from Plattsburgh, New York, as it didn’t have an orthodox shul. Most became peddlers in northern Vermont, selling their wares from horse or man-drawn carts. 

Initially, a group of ten Jewish men—only two had families with them, met for services in members’ homes, a former coffin shop, or the second floor of an office building. By 1885, the Jewish community of Burlington, Vermont, recognized the need to organize a synagogue. Eighteen men met in the kitchen of Isaac Perelman, an immigrant from Čekiškė, Lithuania. Having already procured a lay leader/Kosher butcher, they purchased a lot for $25, formerly the site of an old stone shed at Hyde and Archibald streets. With $800, they built a synagogue building, naming their new shul Congregation Ohavi Zedek (Lovers of Justice).

Over the next few years, the Jewish population of Burlington continued to grow, fed by the founders. Isaac and his wife Sarah alone had six surviving children; his brothers Aaron and Jacob also had large families. By  1906, there were 162 Jewish families. The area in Burlington, dubbed “Little Jerusalem,” was laid out like the shtetls in the residents’ native Lithuania with houses and kosher bakery, kosher dairy, and a kosher butcher. The Jewish community built two more synagogues, including Chai Adam (Life of Man), and Ahavath Gerim (Love of Strangers). In 1910, the three synagogues built a Hebrew Free School together in 1910, the Talmud Torah.

In 1910, Chai Adam commissioned a 24-year-old Lithuanian immigrant and professional sign painter named Ben Zion Black to create a mural for $200. Upon completion, the project featured prayer walls and a painted ceiling. The centerpiece was a 25-foot-wide, 12-foot-high three part panel, created in the vibrant and colorful painted art style present in hundreds of Eastern European wooden synagogue interiors in the 18th and 19th centuries. The mural featured the Ten Commandments in its center and golden Lions of Judah on either side, with the artist’s rendering of the sun’s rays adding light. Blue and red curtains and pillars filled the side panels, all representing the artist’s interpretation of the Tent of the Tabernacle as described in the Book of Numbers and the Book of Exodus.

In 1939, amid a decline in the Jewish population, Chai Adam merged with Ohavi Zedek. After 1952, several buyers purchased the former Chai Adam building, which later became a carpet store and warehouse. In 1986, a developer purchased it with plans to renovate the building into multiple apartments. Recognizing that the future of the mural was in jeopardy, Aaron Goldberg,  the archivist for Ohavi Zedek synagogue and a descendant of Ohavi Zedek’s founding immigrants, persuaded the new owner to seal the mural behind a false wall, in 1986. Goldberg, archivist Jeff Potash; Shelburne Museum’s curator of collections, Richard Kershner; and architect Marcel Beaudin hoped to reclaim the mural at a later date.

Before being hidden, Ben Zion Black’s daughters took and paid for archival quality photographs of the mural. Renovations destroyed much of the painting, but a wall covered the mural over the ark.

In 2010, Goldberg partnered with his childhood friend and former Trinity College of Vermont history professor Jeff Potash to establish the Lost Mural Project with plans to establish a new home for the mural and restore the work to its original glory. They reached an agreement with the Offenhartz family, the next owners of the Chai Adam building, that the mural would be uncovered and donated to the Lost Mural Project. This was done with the understanding that the Lost Mural Project would be solely responsible for all costs of stabilizing, moving, cleaning and restoring the Lost Mural. 

In 2012, after over two decades, workers removed the false wall. A curator reported that Black’s creation had sustained extensive damage with “the painting hanging off its plaster base like cornflakes.” Over the next three years, the Lost Mural Project raised substantial funds from individuals, businesses, and foundations for the mural’s paint to be stabilized. In May 2015, workers moved the mural, encased in steel and weighing approximately 500 pounds, to Ohavi Zedek. 

Following the mural’s move, the Lost Mural Project committee incorporated, rebranded and tirelessly sought funding for the mural’s cleaning and full restoration with the help of its board and Madeleine Kunin, the former Vermont governor and US ambassador to Switzerland. By 2022, they had raised over one million dollars from local, state, national, and international donors.

In 202, two conservators hired by the Lost Mural Project began the painstaking task of cleaning the mural. Using the archival photos taken in 1985, they used a gel solvent and cotton swabs to remove darkened varnish, dirt, and grime from the painting’s surface. The next year, a second team of conservators from Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts began the infill, coloring and final restorations. According to Goldberg, the COVID-19 pandemic was a blessing, as it gave the team of workers the space and quiet needed to complete the project in the shuttered shul. 

“So many things could have gone wrong with the mural, but it survived through fate and circumstance,” says Goldberg. “It’s not just a surviving remnant. It’s a surviving piece with an astonishing history.” 

Ohavi Zedek’s Senior Rabbi Amy Small, who saw the 2022 restoration step by step, views the Lost Mural Project as a universal immigrant story. “It’s significant not only to the Jewish community and the descendants of those early settlers of Burlington, but also to other immigrants in the United States, which offered safety for Jewish and other families fleeing from many parts of the world.”

The Preservation Trust of Vermont presented the Friends of the Lost Mural with its 2022 Preservation Award. “The Lost Mural…not only exemplifies the rich history of creativity and resilience in Burlington’s Jewish community,” stated Ben Doyle, its president. “It inspires all of us to remember that the Vermont identity is dynamic and diverse.”

In June 2022, the completed project’s unveiling took place amid much fanfare. The Friends honored Governor Kunin for her contributions, and a Vermont Klezmer band provided the music. Dignitaries both in attendance and through Zoom highlighted the importance of the project. Joshua Perelman, Chief Curator & Director Of Exhibitions And Collections, National Museum Of American Jewish History called the mural “a treasure and also a significant work, both in American Jewish religious life and the world of art in this country.”

Many of the descendants of the original Lithuanian Jews who settled in Burlington over one hundred and fifty years earlier were present, including descendants of Isaac and Aaron Perelman. 

“[The mural] tells us a remarkable story of a thriving Jewish immigrant community from Lithuania and the successful efforts of their descendants to preserve their cultural legacy today,” H. E. Audra Plepyte, the ambassador of Lithuania to the United States stated in remarks shared with Ohavi Zedek. “The Lost Mural is not lost anymore.

”The Lost Mural Project, an independent secular nonprofit, is seeking donations to replicate the green corridors on the original painting that did not survive. Its educational mission is to share the story of the Lost Mural and the lost genre of the East European wooden painted synagogues with people and facilities around the world.More information, including details of the Mural’s miraculous journey, can be found at https://www.lostmural.org/donate.

Originally published September 20, 2022. Updated May 26, 2025.

SOURCES

Thanks to Aaron Goldberg , Jay Cohen, Janet Leader, Rob Pels, and Rosie Pels for their contributions to this article. 

Rathke, Lisa. “Long-hidden synagogue mural gets rehabbed.” August 17, 2022. AP Wire story; numerous sources.

Sproston, Betty. Burlington Free Press. February 22, 1995.

https://lostmural.squarespace.com/ekik-lithuania

https://www.news4jax.com/entertainment/2022/08/16/long-hidden-synagogue-mural-gets-rehabbed-relocated/

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/burlingtons-lost-mural-is-restored-to-its-original-glory/Content?oid=35853053

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/synagogue-mural-restoration-vermont-apartment-180980614/

We continue and they continue: The Czech Torah Scrolls

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“Each Memorial Scroll is a memory of the past and a messenger for the future.” Memorial Scrolls Trust

They escaped destruction by the Nazis. They survived Communism, They found their ways to new homes around the world. This is a story of three Torahs that had their roots in vanished Czechoslovakian Jewish communities.

Up until World War II, Czechoslovakia had a thriving Jewish population that first reached the area over 1000 years ago. With the rise of Hitler came increased antisemitism and eventually The Final Solution. Throughout Europe, synagogues were burned and the vast majority of Jews were murdered. Almost all Jewish artifacts—Torahs, candlesticks, prayerbooks—were destroyed.

The one exception was Bohemia and Moravia with its population of 115,000 Jews. This area in Czechoslovakia was declared a “German protectorate.” Miraculously, except for the items in Sudetenland, most of the artifacts remained unscathed during the early years of the war.

In 1942, the Nazis ordered all Jewish synagogue possessions in the region to be sent to Prague. The Jewish communities of Prague, believing the Judaica would be safer if stored in one place, worked closely with the Nazis to collect and catalogue over 210,000 items. In the end, it took 40 warehouses to store the treasure. Unfortunately, nearly every Jew who worked on the project was sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. 

The Czech Torahs survived the war but almost did not survive Communism. The Torah and other scrolls lay in a musty, damp warehouse until 1963. At that point, Czech government, in need of foreign currency, sold the scrolls to Ralph Yablon, a philanthropist and founder member of Westminster Synagogue in London. On February 5, 1964, 1564 Torahs and other scrolls arrived at the synagogue. They were divided into three categories: those in usable condition, those in need of some repair; and those deemed too far damaged to be restored.

The Memorial Scrolls Trust was then set up to preserve and restore the Czech scrolls. Each one had an identity plaque fixed to  one of the etz chaim, the wooden shafts onto which the Torah is rolled. They were loaned out to Jewish communities and organizations around the world in need of a Torah, with the understanding that the congregation was responsible for the scroll’s upkeep. The Torahs, as per stipulations by the MST, were never sold or donated but allocated on loan on the understanding that they would only need to be returned if the synagogue no longer operated. According to Jeffrey Ohrenstein, Chair, MST, 1400 scrolls have been allocated on loan around the world. Approximately 150 scrolls remain in the Memorial Scrolls Trust museum, which also has some 500 binders and wimples.

At least six Czech scrolls are on loan in the Capital District of New York and surrounding areas: Beth Emeth, Congregation Ohav Shalom, Gates of Heaven, Temple Sinai, Congregation Beth Shalom, and Congregation Beth El.

I first had the honor of holding a Holocaust Torah as a member of Congregation Beth Shalom in Clifton Park, New York. In1981, the synagogue requested from MST a replacement for three that had been stolen. Abbey and Richard Green, CBS congregants, helped fund the costs of shipping the Czech Torah MST#293 (circa1870) from London. A tag, dating back to the dark days of the Shoah, read “The Elders of the Jewish Community in Prague.”

At the time, Beth Shalom was less than ten years old, an irony that was not lost on one of its congregant. Yetta Fox, herself the child of Holocaust survivors, stated that having the Torah at a new congregation was “almost like a second life.”“Having lost one community,” said Yetta, “there is now a new community that can nurture this Torah.”

Early in 2007, the congregation arranged to have needed repairs done on the parchment of the 137-year-old Torah. That June, the congregation held a rededication ceremony, which included a procession from the Clifton Park town hall to the synagogue five minutes up the road. During the march, the scrolls were passed from hand to hand under a chuppah that the children of the Hebrew school had decorated with Stars of David. Upon its arrival, the Torah was wrapped in a wimple, the cloth traditionally used to wrap a boy at his circumcision. “This is our baby,” said Fred Pineau, a former president, “so we’re wrapping it on our Torah.”

David Clayman, the president at the time of the story. , reported that the Torah is still in good condition. To preserve it, however, it is left rolled to Parasah Beshalach, which contains “The Song of the Sea,” gently unrolling it only once a year as prescribed by the MST. Every year, in the month of Shevat, the Torah is brought out and Beshalach is chanted. “The scroll is so fragile, we are afraid to roll it to other parashot [Torah portions].”said David. The congregation brings out the Holocaust scroll twice more each year to be ceremonially held: On Kol Nidre, the solemn service commemorated during the opening hours of Yom Kippur; and on Simchas Torah, a holiday that celebrates the completion of the reading of Deuteronomy, and the beginning of Genesis.

In 1982, Sharon and Barry Kaufman, now residents of Florida, obtained a Czech Torah in honor of their daughter Robin’s bat mitzvah for their Spring, Texas synagogue. While awaiting completion of their new building, Jewish Community North congregation was holding services at Christ the Good Shepherd Catholic Church. Their only torah was on temporary loan from another Houston-area synagogue. The Kaufmans worked with Rabbi Lawrence Jacofsky, the regional director of the United Association of Hebrew Congregations, to obtain Torah Scroll MST#20, written circa 1850.

When their precious cargo arrived at the Houston airport in February 1982, Barry and Sharon immediately brought the Torah to the church to show Father Ed Abell, Good Shepherd’s priest and their good friend. The three of them carefully unrolled the scroll where it had last been read: Yom Kippur. 1938. The tenth of Tishri 5699 or October 4 and 5, 1938. Shortly after that service, the Jews that had worshipped in the Kostelec/Orlici synagogue were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, most—maybe all— never to return. 

To commemorate the moment, Father Abell, using the yad (pointer) from the loaner Torah, read from the scroll in flawless Hebrew. That evening, Sharon and Barry brought the Torah home to show Robin. As they slowly unrolled the entire scroll on their pool table to make sure is was undamaged, they found a cardboard tag that had been attached when the scroll was catalogued by Jewish librarians and curators when the scroll arrived at the Central Jewish Museum Prague during the Shoah. Aeltesternrat der Juden Prague, it read in German Elders of the Jews of Prague. 

At Robin’s bat mitzvah in May 1982, the Torah was dressed in a cover sewn and embroidered by Barry’s mother. In a moving speech to the congregation held at Good Shepherd, Barry spoke eloquently about the Torah’s history.

“If this Torah could talk—might it share with us the heart-wrenching knowledge of a prosperous people whose world had suddenly been taken from them, whose home and synagogues were gutted and destroyed for the value of their belongings? Would it tell us of the helpless terror in the fragile hearts of old men and women forced to watch their children brutally slaughtered before their own end was to come?”

After Barry spoke, the Ark was opened, and the Czech Torah was passed from the rabbi to Barry to Sharon to Robin. Clutching it tightly, Robin walked through the congregation. For the first time in two generations, a B’nai Mitzvot carried it with joy and reverence throughout a tearful congregation.

When Larry and I moved to Florida, we joined Congregation Shalom Aleichem, which was founded in 1981, ironically the same year Congregation Beth Shalom had received its Czech Torah. Initially, congregants met at the Kissimmee Women’s Club. When Harry Lowenstein, a Holocaust survivor whose parents and sister numbered among the six million Jews killed during World War II, joined with his wife Carol, he began to press for a building of their own. “I saw a synagogue burn,” said Harry, “and I was determined to build another one.” Starting with a $120,000 contributions from Sandor Salmagne, another Holocaust survivor, the Lowensteins raised another $60,000 for building expenses, including donations from Harry and Carol.

As the synagogue on Pleasant Hill Road neared completion, the Lowensteins worked to obtain the prayer books for both every day and holy days, the Torah finials, and the Yartzheit (memorial) board. Most important to the congregation, however, was to obtain a Torah.

Harry and other members reached out to the Memorial Scrolls Trust, noting in the correspondence that four of its members were Holocaust survivors. “Our Temple will be dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust,” wrote then president Henry Langer. “We would therefore deem it an honor to have you lend us a Scroll for our Temple.” With the Lowensteins’ financial support, they were able to obtain Scroll MST#408. The Torah was from Pisek-Strakonice in what was then Czechoslovakia, about 60 miles south of Prague and dated back to circa 1775.

Once they received word that they would indeed be loaned a Czech Torah, the Lowensteins asked British friends who had a vacation home near the synagogue to be responsible for getting it from Heathrow to Orlando International airport. “[Our friend] sat on the plane with the Torah on his lap for 12 hours,” recalled Carol. “He would not let it out of his sight until he could hand the Torah to Harry.”

For those who had miraculously escaped hell, welcoming the Torah was like welcoming another Holocaust survivor. “It’s like holding a piece of history” said Phil Fuerst in a 1993 Orlando Sentinel article. “You feel like you own a piece of a world that survived.”

According to Marilyn Glaser, the congregation president, the atzei chayim, which were broken, were replaced in September 2022 in accordance of the terms of the loan agreement with MST.

In November 2024, the Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee commemorated Kristallnacht by celebrating the Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust with a gathering of 24 Florida-based scrolls from the MST. Jeffrey Ohrenstein, who travelled fromLondon for the event, said “These Torahs are messengers from destroyed communities that depend on their newer congregations to assure they are remembered and the Jewish heritage is cherished.” The program ended with a parade of the Torahs. Frank Gutworth, Congregation Shalom Aleichem’s treasurer, proudly carried Scroll #408. 

Three Czech Torahs. Three congregations. Thankfully, in the end, the Nazi’s plan to eradicate the Jewish people failed. As Gloria Kupferman stated in her speech at the rededication of the Congregation Beth Shalom Torah in 2007, “We are by no means extinct. We are alive. We are thriving.”

Special thanks to Jeffrey Ohrenstein, Chair, Memorial Scrolls Trust, London, U.K. Thanks to David Clayman, Yetta Fox, Marilyn Glaser, Frank Gutworth, Harry Lowenstein, Flo Miller, and Sharon and Barry Kaufman for their input for the article.

Originally published June 10, 2022. Updated on blog November 2024.

Published in Jewish World (Capital Region NY), June 9, 2022 and Heritage Jewish News (Orlando, Fl) June 10, 2022

Sources:

https://www.albany.edu/news/releases/2005/nov2005/holocaust_scroll.shtml

www.cjcn.org

http://www.congregationbethshalomcp.webs.com

www.czechtorah.org/thestory.php.

www.memorialscrollstrust.org.

http://www.shalomaleichem.com

Frank Guttman holding Congregation Shalom Aleichem's Holocaust Torah
Frank Guttworth holding Congregation Shalom Aleichem’s Holocaust Torah

From Bialystok to Brooklyn: Part Three

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The Oshinsky Story Part Three: Making it to America

Simova, Poland ➡️ Bialystok, Poland ➡️ Minsk, Russia ➡️ Moscow ➡️ Viana, Russia ➡️ Erkutcsk ➡️ Chita, Siberia ➡️ Harbin, China ➡️ Chanzhou, China ➡️ Darien, China ➡️ Sent back to Harbin ➡️Yokohama➡️Hawaii➡️San Francisco➡️Chicago➡️Brooklyn!

Unlike most Eastern Europeans fleeing pogroms and poverty to America through ships sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Harry “Chonie” Oshinsky took a journey over three continents. His trip took a dangerous turn in Darien, China, where he and his fellow travelers were arrested, accused of being part of a murderous gang. Here is the last installment of Harry’s incredible journey. 

 Harry and his two friends were thrown into a prison, where they sat on a stone floor, fed a diet of foul rice, and listened as the Chinese prisoners who shared their cell were beaten with a rope. An attempt at a hunger strike backfired, and the three hand-bound boys were taken by train back to Harbin. 

Miraculously, Der Forvertz carried a story of their arrest, which triggered a protest in the Yiddish newspaper. Harry’s sister, when she herself read in New York about the arrest of Chunya Oshinsky and two other boys, she realized for the first time that her little brother was alive. 

Soon after, authorities transferred Harry and the others from the Russian commandant’s office to a prison near the Jewish Committee House, a place Harry and Yankel had stayed at earlier in their journey. Although the bottom floor held hardened criminals, the three were taken to the second floor, where they joined approximately thirty other political refugees who were held. They experienced good conditions: they received food, decent beds, and daily morning access to fresh air. Ironically, some of the other prisoners were actually paying money to be there. “This was so much better than being on the front lines and risking one’s life in battle!” they told Harry. Again, Harry’s tailoring skills proved useful, as the overseer often called on him to do alterations for himself and others.

As the prison stay extended into its fourth month, Harry realized that his only chance of release was to have money sent to him from America. Not knowing the address of his four siblings, he sent a desperate plea to Yankel, whom he hoped had already made it to America. He mailed a letter to The Goldbergs, 22 Ludlow Street, New York. “Just as a bird gets lost from his home in a tree and gets caught and put in a birdcage,” Harry wrote, “so this has happened to me.”

A few weeks later, Harry again faced the Russian commandant. The officials in the consulate had never been able to confirm he was a murderer; however, they conscripted him into the army. Before reporting, he made one last trip to the Jewish Committee House. Fate shone on him again, as two hundred rubles had been sent from America for his release.

On a bitter cold winter’s night in March 1917, Harry and three other Jewish refugees began their three-day trek on foot back across China into Japan. Once over the border, they traveled by train and boat. 

They arrived at the Japanese seaport of Yokohama in time to hear the news that Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown. Three weeks later, on April 10, 1917, Harry and his companions boarded the Shino Maru.

When the ship stopped in Honolulu, Harry was filled with “sheer happiness and joy” when he touched American soil for the first time. His twenty-four-hour stopover was almost extended when a tour of the island resulted in a chance meeting with a Jewish men’s clothing store owner. After hearing Harry’s story, the owner offered him a job as a tailor and salesperson. “I thanked him for his goodness,” Harry later recalled, “but I was determined to go to New York to be with my family.”

The Shino Maru arrived in San Francisco on April 29, where all immigrants were processed through Angel Island. The next morning, a representative of HIAS met with Harry to arrange for his train trip across the United States.

 Harry arrived at Grand Central Station during the first week of May 1917. He heard his name being called; it was Yankel Goldberg, his friend with whom he had traveled until their separation in Yokohama. His siblings Zalman David and Leah did not recognize Harry until Yankel shouted to them, “Here! Here he is! This is your brother Chonie!” They fell into each other’s arms, kissing and crying. After a two and a half year journey, Harry was finally reunited with his siblings.

Settling in Brooklyn, Harry found employment in a factory that sewed soldiers’ uniforms. In a few weeks, he was making enough money not only to rent his own apartment but also to help support his siblings. He enrolled in night school to learn English and in dance school to improve his social life. In his spare time, he explored New York City and attended lectures about the ongoing war and politics. 

The November 11, 1918, armistice brought relief to Harry. knowing he would not have to return to Europe to fight in the war. He was able to send a letter home. “I am alive and living in America.” A few weeks later, he received an answer. “Everyone is alive!” His sister reunited with her fiancé, who had been a prisoner of war; Poland was an independent country.

Eventually, Harry earned enough money to bring his younger draft-eligible brother Yitzchak from Poland to America. With Harry’s help, Yitzchak found a job as a salesperson in a Lower East Side candy store. 

After Harry’s parents passed away, his sister, now married with her own family, remained in Poland. Tragically, she and her family were later killed in the Holocaust.

During the Depression, Harry supplemented his income by opening a candy store he opened with his brother Yitzchak. The business remained in the family throughout their lives.

 In 1927, Harry met Frieda, a young woman from his own area in Poland, and they were married that August. Harry and Frieda had two sons, Leonard and Robert, who both shortened their surname to Oshins. Both married and had children of their own. Robert and his wife Natalie settled in Schenectady, New York, and were active members of Congregation Agudat Achim. After a career working for the post office, Lenny and his wife Bobbe moved to Clifton Park, New York, to be closer to their daughter Cindy and her family and joined Congregation Beth Shalom.

 Harry passed away in 1976, but he left his legacy and his history in a 12,000 word autobiography that was originally published in Yiddish in Der Forverts in the late 1960s. Lenny Oshins gave me a copy of the document, which had been translated into English by Simon and Anne Paktor, friends of Robert and Natalie in Schenectady. 

Lenny (Z”L), it took me way too long to write your father’s story. I hope you, your parents, your wife, and brother are all reading this in heaven and kvelling over a life well-lived.

Originally published March 17, 2022. Updated May 26, 2025.

Lenny and Robert Oshins

From Bialystok to Brooklyn: An immigrant’s trek across three continents

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The Oshinsky Story Part One: Harry’s Years in Poland

Simova, Poland ➡️ Bremen, Germany ➡️ Ostrów Mazowiecka, Poland➡️ Bialystok, Poland ➡️ Minsk, Russia

When reflecting on my family’s Jewish immigrant experience, I conjure up images of fleeing westward in hay wagons; crossing the Atlantic Ocean in crowded steerage; catching the first glimpse of the Stature of Liberty; and waiting and worrying in long lines at Ellis Island. The descendants of Harry Oshinsky, however, recall his much more circuitous—and grueling — trek. At age sixteen, Harry left his Eastern European home and traveled by train, boat, and foot through Russia/Siberia, China, Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco before reuniting with his siblings in New York City. Harry’s amazing two year-long journey was originally published in Yiddish as a series of articles in The Forward (Der Forvertz) in the 1970s. In 2014, soon after I began writing for the Jewish World, Lenny Oshins, Harry’s son and my friend in Clifton Park, New York, handed me a 60-page manuscript—thankfully translated into English—in hopes I would shape it into a more succinct article. Although Lenny passed away in 2017, with the help of his daughter, Cindy Barnett, and his sister-in-law Natalie Oshins, I am finally fulfilling a son’s wish for his father’s story to be told to another generation.

Chonie “Harry” Oshinsky was born in 1898 in what was then known as Simova, a small Jewish community in the northeastern corner of Poland. Around 1904, Harry’s father, a hardworking but poor blacksmith, left his wife and children for more lucrative employment opportunities in New York City. He sent money and, over time, passage fare for the four oldest of seven children with plans to have the entire family reunited in theUnited States in the not-too-distant future. 

Soon after his father left, Harry began attending chedar (school)—the classroom consisted of tables and chairs set up in a barn—with several other Jewish boys in Simova. The six-year-old proved to be a bright, able student. Within a year, Harry was proficient enough in Yiddish to write the letters to be sent to America not only for his mother but also for other grateful wives who had been left behind. “I had to help keep up the romance,” Harry later wrote in his account. Relying on examples from Yiddish newspaper and texts, Harry composed missives such as, “My dear husband, I miss you so! When will you send for me?” 

As reports of pogroms in nearby villages began drifting into their town, the Oshinskys received a very welcome letter from their father “Get ready! You will be leaving soon for America!” Enclosed were instructions and tickets for their passage. 

After weeks of preparations, the mother and the three siblings piled into a horse-drawn wagon driven by a hired agent to make the trip across Poland to the seaport in Bremen, Germany. Unfortunately, Harry’s mother failed the required physical when she was diagnosed with trachoma, a contagious and potentially blinding infectious eye disease. The four, crushed with disappointment, returned to Poland, settling in Ostrów Mazowiecka, commonly called Ostroveh by Jewish residents, near the family of a maternal aunt. Despite efforts by eye specialists in the nearby city of Bialystok to stop the progression of the disease, the mother eventually lost her eyesight.

The family tried to adjust to the new normal. Harry’s older sister assumed all household responsibilities while six-year-old Yitzchak was enrolled in a yeshiva. Although their father continued to send money, Harry, now twelve years old, decided he needed to help support the family by learning a trade. After completing a six-month apprenticeship, he found work as a tailor boy, traveling with his employer to small villages where he sewed peltzes, heavy coats, in exchange for room, board, and the promise of clothing and shoes. He eventually returned to Ostroveh and found steady work sewing clothes for both civilians and the military. The skills he learned in the tailor trade and the knowledge he gained through the establishment of nascent local unions shaped both his career and his lifetime commitment to workers’ rights.

Although his “formal” education had ended, Harry used every opportunity to increase his knowledge. He read newspapers and devoured books he obtained from the town’s tiny attic library. His library card came with the commitment for him to provide community service through Bikur Cholim, a volunteer organization established to provide companionship and reading aloud to the sick, thereby strengthening his own literacy skills. He also frequently earned additional income as a scribe, writing letters and documents as needed in his community.

Just before Purim, 1914, Harry’s father wrote, “I am coming home!” Since the family could not America, he was returning to Poland. Within two weeks, Harry’s father began lecturing his son on the need for Harry to immigrate to America “where a person who sews with a needle and does tailoring can earn ten times as much as here.” At his father’s insistence, Harry found a job in Bialystok to get more tailoring experience in a larger city. Harry made a good salary and began dressing like an American with a fashionable “hat and walking stick in my hand.” By August 1914, Harry had developed enough confidence to make plans to travel to America via Bremen, Germany, to New York City, the same route he, his mother, and two siblings had tried to take over four years earlier.

Fate of global proportions interceded: “The War to End All Wars” erupted in Europe. Ostroveh was filled with “tumult and noise,” recalled Harry. German planes flew above them. Polish soldiers, followed by peasants with horse and wagons, marched through the streets on their way to the front. Harry’s younger sister’s fiancé, who had just returned after serving four years in the army, was forced to reenlist. Harry and his father were required to register to work as part of the home guard, which provided weak and ultimately ineffective attempts to stop the encroaching Germans.

As the Polish army fell and the Germans moved closer to Ostroveh, Harry, who had just turned sixteen, was in imminent danger of being drafted into the army. Harry’s father, insisting that his son find whatever way possible to the United States, to safety, gave him the family’s passport as an illicit form of identification With Europe engulfed in trench warfare and German u-boats lurking in the Atlantic Ocean, Harry and Yankel Goldberg, a friend also facing conscription, took an alternative but much more grueling route. Ellis Island was no longer their destination. Instead, the two would make their way across Russia/Siberia to China and Yokohama, a Japanese seaport, and first touch American soil on Angel Island Immigration Center in San Francisco. They boarded a train in Bialystok for Minsk, Russia, in late fall 1914. 

Although eventually reunited in New York City with Yitzchak, his youngest brother, Harry would never see his parents again, who died in Poland, or his younger sister and her family, who were murdered in the Holocaust. Harry and Yankel, the two refuges at least for the time being, were free—at least for the time—and on their way to America.

Originally published March 3, 2022. Updated May 26, 2025.

First published in (Capital Region NY) The Jewish World, February 17, 2022

No Opposing View to the Holocaust!

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“You make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have a book that has an opposing view,” a Carroll County,Texas, administrator recently told a group of educators during a training session on what books were allowed in their library. Fierce backlash resulted in an apology and an investigation, but to many it hammered home the fear, denial, and outright ignorance that surrounds the teaching as well as recognition of the reality of the systematic murder of six million Jews. For that reason, there will never be “too many stories” about the Holocaust, including that of Galina “Golda” Goldin Gelfer (Z’L).

On June 22, 1941, Golda woke up on her 14th birthday to a beautiful sunny day in Glusk [now known as Hlusk], Belarus. Despite her family’s status as Jews in a highly anti-Semitic country, she and her family—her father Meir, her mother Elke, her eight year old sister Malke, and a large extended family— were happy in their small shtetl. Then, their world changed when news that Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union. Five days later, Nazis marched into their town. Soon after, Golda’s older sister, Chaisoshe returned home to join her family after Minsk University was evacuated, walking the last 30 miles with a friend. With limited means of escape, the entire Jewish population was trapped.

All Jews were registered and forced to wear yellow stars on the clothes and post the yellow stars on their homes. A Judencrat (Jewish council of three men) was formed to organize labor. While Chaisoshe remained hidden in their homeMeir and Golda worked long hours in menial jobs: cleaning and plowing the streets, digging up bricks, and mucking out horse stalls. All other work by Jews was forbidden.“We performed useless task mainly to make us feel we were slaves,” Golda later wrote in an autobiographic essay in The Holocaust DID Happen. (Southern California Council for Soviet Jews, 2010) 

For the next five months, as reports of mass executions of Jews in neighboring villages were reported, Golda and her family lived in absolute fear. On December 2, 1941, their worst nightmare was realized when they learned in the early morning hours that Nazis were beginning to round up all the Jews in Glusk for a “death march.” As the Goldin dressed in multiple layers of clothes and hastily packed bundles of food, they made plans to split up, run, and hide. Chaisoshe and a college friend were first to leave.“ You have some friends,” Elke told her husband. “Take a child. You may survive.” As Meir took Golda’s hand, Golda grabbed Malka’s. But Elke insisted that her youngest child hide with her in their shed.

Meir, Golda, and another relative they found in the street began frantically knocking on the doors of their Russian neighbors, begging for places to hide. But they were repeatedly turned away because of fear, ignorance, or indifference.The circle of Germans, politsaislocal collaborators, and dogs surrounding them grew tighter.

The three finally found refuge in the attic of an abandoned store on the main street. They climbed up to a loft filled with hay and silently watched the street below. The streets were soon filled with dushegubka, trucks modified to divert engine exhaust into a sealed internal gas chamber, As the Nazis forced women and children into the black-topped vans, Golda recalled in 2010 Yad V’Shem video, could hear a single woman screaming in agony as the van moved towards a former hospital that the Germans had converted into the slaughterhouse.

When these precursors to the gas chambers used in the concentration camps could no longer keep up with the number to be killed, the remaining Jews were herded together by Germans and the politsais. They were helped by local residents who joyfully made a game out of rounding up anyone trying to escape. “Jude! Jude,” they would yell to the Nazis, who would then shoot the “offender” and leave the corpse on the street. The numb, terrified victims could do little but march to their almost certain deaths.

Throughout the terrifying day, Meir, Golda, and the cousin heard the sounds of gunfire from Myslotino Hill, an area two and a half miles outside of Glusk. They learned later that over 1000 Jews men, women, and children were killed in a volley of bullets and then thrown in pits prepared earlier by the Germans. 

At two a.m., all was quiet. Praying that somehow members of their family had survived, the three fugitives descended from the hideout and began walking to the town’s outskirts.They narrowly missed falling into the hands of a roving band of Russian murderers who were “drunk on blood and vodka” and bragging about the number of Jews they had killed.

The threesome began their trek through deep snow and bitter cold to Zhivun, a village 23 miles from Glusk. As Meir had been born, raised, and, as an adult, done business there, they hoped to find help. While in route, Meir and Golda hid in the forest while the relative attempted to enlist the aid of friends. The two heard a volley of bullets, and the cousin never returned. 

Meir and Golda had better luck. For the next six months, Golda stayed with the local peasants helping with housework and, when necessary, being spirited from home to nearby forest to another home to escape discovery by the Nazis.Meanwhile, in between trips back to Zhivun, Meir worked with the partisans, members of the resistance movements who lived in the forest. The war had not lessened their anti-semitic feelings as they were initially reluctant to accept Meir into their circle. Meir, however, proved to be worthy comrades, helping the partisans to bomb railroads, ambush German convoys, and do whatever they could to fight the German forces.

During this time, two eleven year olds they encountered in Zhivun who had also escaped from Glusk gave Meir and Golda the bad news regarding the Goldin family. The two children initially had hidden with Elke and Malka until Elke told them to go back into the village where she correctly believed their blonde hair and blue eyes would help them blend in with the Gentile population. Two days later, a Belarussian neighbor and his son, with whom the Goldin had had a close relationship before the Nazi invasion, came to search for valuables and steal the cow. They found Elke and Malka hiding in the hay and turned them over the Nazis, who killed them. Chaisoshe and her friend met the same fate two days later when four local teenagers found their hiding place and turned them over to the Germans for bounty money. Meir and Golda later learned that 32 members of the Goldin family they had left behind had been killed.

Once he was established with the partisans Meir went back to Zhivun to get his daughter, who was at fifteen now old enough to participate in the guerrilla warfare. In addition, a Jewish doctor who joined the ragtag group enlisted the help of Golda and a 17-year-old Jewish refugee in providing needed medical assistance. (The two woman remained lifelong friends.)

Meir and Golda survived in the forest for the next two years, living as did the real-life partisans portrayed in the 2008 movie Defiance. They finally gained their “freedom” on July 4, 1944, when Belarus celebrated heir victory over the Germans (The Germans and Soviets continued fighting through May 1945).“Freedom,” however, still had its limitations. When they first met with Red Army soldier, their initial comment was, “I thought the Nazis killed all of you Jews!” Meir, Golda, and the new families they created after the war lived in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, when, upon Golda’s insistence, relocated to the United States.

Golda’s story has been saved for posterity in her two hour interview in Russian as part of Steven Speilberg’s Shoah project. In addition, her descendants continue to carry on her and the Goldin legacy through their family reunions, Zoom meetings throughout the pandemic, and through their sharing this story with me. No, Texas, there is no “opposing view to the Holocaust.” Just ask those, like Golda, who lived to tell their tale. 

A version of this article originally appeared in the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Fradel’s Story: Fulfilling a Daughter’s Promise

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I am posting this blog on September 1, 2021, what would have been my beloved mother’s (“Z”L) 104th birthday. It is with pride and love I announce the publication of my third book, Fradel’s Story.

What better way to start off Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, than to publish a new book? Fradel’s Story, my third book since 2016, is especially sweet as it was co-written with my mother, Frances Cohen.

Ever since I could remember, my mother was the family storyteller. Give her an opening, and Fran, or “Fradel” as she was known to her close family, would regale any audience with family stories any audience with stories of her grandparents’ and parents’ lives in Russia, her early years of marriage to “My Bill” Cohen, their life in small towns in the North Country. She told of raising four children, watching them leave for college and for marriage, and their returning with her grandchildren to visit her and my father in their beloved cottage on Lake Champlain. 

As my parents got older, my mother realized that she needed to record these stories. We never were one for video cameras and tapes, so she began jotting them down on lined paper, usually the five by eight notepads. The writing was messy, with words misspelled and whole sections crossed out, but she began to keep a written history. 

In 2006, after a number of health setbacks, my three siblings, our spouses, and I insisted that my parents sell their condo in Florida and move back up north That May, they moved into Coburg Village, an independent living facility only four miles from our home. 

Soon after moving in, my mother called me to tell me she was joining Coburg’s monthly writing group to finally finish all those stories she carried in her head and on those scraps of paper. When she brought her first story to the group, her accounting of why she and my father moved to Coburg, she was surprised to find that the group enjoyed her writing style. “They loved my story, Marilyn!” she told me. “They said I have a real flair for storytelling!” After that, my mother’s voice in phone calls after the monthly Wednesday meetings was filled with pride. 

Mom rarely had difficulty finding a topic and writing it down with pen on paper. However, the group leader requested that the stories be typed so they could eventually be published in the semi-annual collection and distributed to Coburg residents. My mother asked me to type them. While I was at it, could I, “My daughter the English major,” do some proofing and minor revisions so that they would read more smoothly? 

Thus began our five-year collaboration. Every month, about a week before the group met, my mother would give me her hand-written story. I would do some editing, including spelling, grammar, and even some tightening of the narrative. Her oral stories evolved into polished narratives,— funny, poignant, sad, and sometimes painful, but always entertaining.

When my father passed away in November 2008, my mother’s contribution for December was an open letter to my father. She wrote that she was moving into a smaller apartment down the hall. “Wherever I go, you also go in spirit,” she wrote. Grieving quietly, she continued with her life at Coburg, going to the concerts, visiting with friends and family who were always stopping by to see her, and continuing with her writing. All the children asked her to write about our births and early childhood, but she always postponed those stories, focusing on the Old Country, her childhood, her Bill. 

On December 22, 2010, my mother had a heart attack. The doctors recommended hospice care and living her remaining time to the fullest. She complied, enjoying visits and calls from the children, grandchildren, her extended family, and the many friends she and my father had made in Coburg and in their lifetimes. She kept writing. 

In February 2011, with my sister Laura and me sitting close by, my mother shared her story, “The Birth of My First Child,” with her writing group. She described her joy in having a beautiful little girl and her fears that she would not be able to be a good mother. The last words, written in pencil on the bottom, were “To be continued….” She died four weeks later, the day of the club’s March meeting. 

I had made a promise to myself that one day I would gather her stories in a book. When COVID-19 shuttered so many of my activities, I decided that it was time. Over the past eighteen months, I have worked on editing, filling in the gaps, and finally ordering the stories in chronological order to make the book flow smoother.

I too had family stories, articles I had written over the years capturing memories of our old Victorian in Upstate New York, our cottage on Lake Champlain, my father’s obsession with boats, bugs, and bats; my mother’s words of wisdom; my siblings’ accomplishments. I decided to include those in the book.

By this March, I was ready to send my first draft to my editor, Mia Crew. She was responsible for formatting the book for paperback and Kindle format as well as inserting the 80+ photos, many of them family pictures that dated back to 1914. Fradel’s Story has been launched on Amazon, in time for my target, September 1, what would have been my mother’s 104th birthday. 

My parents were not wealthy people. They had little of material value: a wedding ring, my Grandmother Ethel’s engagement ring, two beautiful, framed pictures of my father at thirteen and my mother at six, a few nice dishes. As my siblings and I sadly dismantled Mom’s apartment, my daughter was surprised that I wanted so little. “It’s okay, Julie,” I said. “I have her stories.” 

And now, I can share them with my large close knit family, with an incredible network of friends who personally knew my parents or knew their legacy, and hopefully hundreds of others who may find their own lives reflected in this collection.

Marilyn and Fran at Coburg Village, Rexford, New York, October 2006.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.