Joanne Caras was excited to visit her son Jonathan and daughter-in-law Sarah in Israel after they made Aliyah. She saw all the important and beautiful sights, like Yad Vashem and the Dead Sea. But it was a meal in a soup kitchen, where the young couple volunteered, that had the most impact on her.
Ms. Caras told a rapt audience, at the Chabad of Teaneck’s Women’s Circle on March 3, about their experience at Carmel Ha’ir, a restaurant-style soup kitchen, where soldiers, families and businessmen were seated and served from a menu. “I whispered (to my son) ‘why are we eating here if we have money?’ My son said we will leave tzedakah at the door and no one will know who paid and who didn’t.”
After learning that donations kept Carmel Ha’ir going, Ms. Caras decided to undertake a fundraising campaign. Her son suggested that she make a cookbook of Jewish recipes and donate the proceeds. Shortly thereafter, Sarah’s mother, Dr. Gisela Gregorieff-Zerykier of Teaneck, wrote to Ms. Caras and other family and friends, to inform them that her wonderful mother had passed away, and how she had never recovered from the trauma of losing her family in the Holocaust. That gave Ms. Caras her idea: She would collect the recipes and stories of Holocaust survivors into a cookbook.
Fifteen years and two books later, the Caras’s World Mitzvah Project has raised over a million dollars for Jewish organizations including Carmel Ha’ir. Miracles and Meals with Joanne Caras is also a televised cooking show. The show appears on Monday evenings at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Jewish Life TV network (JLTV), on the JLTV website and in 116 other countries.
The US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC helped Ms. Caras to find survivors, and her husband wrote to Jewish publications all over the world, but answers were slow in coming. Soon the responses started trickling in; Ms.Caras travelled all over the world and in two years collected 129 stories. After another two years of compiling and editing, the Holocaust Survivor Cookbook was printed.
Once the floodgates opened, they were hard to close. Ms. Caras had not intended doing a sequel but she kept meeting people who wanted to tell her their stories. Four years ago, after a talk in Canada, a woman approached her with an elderly companion. “This is my Bubbie,” she said. “She is a Holocaust survivor, but she has never told her story to anyone, even in our family. I brought her to hear you speak, because I was hoping that after she heard you, she would tell her story to you.” That was the beginning of Meals and Miracles, with 115 stories and 250 more recipes.
Ms. Caras talked about Dr. Zerykier’s mother, Elizabeth Silberstein, who inspired the Holocaust Survivor Cookbook. Elizabeth’s family escaped from Vienna to Brussels. Elizabeth was put in a convent for safety. Her sister was supposed to join her but the family was rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Elizabeth survived and built a home and family, naming Gisela after her mother. And now Gisela’s daughter is Ms. Caras’s daughter-in-law.
Dr. Zerykier said in a follow-up interview that while she knew as a child her mother lost her whole family in Auschwitz, it wasn’t until Sarah was at Moriah that she asked her mother for more details.
“My mother spoke of her Vienna memories with longing and warmth, a longing which never wavered,” she wrote in an email interview after the program.
Mrs. Silberstein responded with a letter that Sarah used in a poster presentation about her grandmother and her family. Excerpts are printed in the Holocaust Survivor Cookbook, including this memory:
“I didn’t want to eat, I wasn’t hungry, and papa was saying to me, ‘you will remember one day this food, you’ll see, you will miss it’… Yes, papa, I was hungry, very hungry, and at those times I remembered the good food prepared by my mother…What a time! The whole family happy at the table.”
Memories aren’t calories, but visions of bygone meals kept many women alive in the concentration camps. Ms. Caras shared a few stories from her books about the inexorable link between food, family and connection. Rachel Chason, a survivor from Israel, told Ms. Caras that when she was in Auschwitz, she went to work each day in a labor camp and when the women had a break, they lay in the dirt and talked about meals they ate at home:
“We dreamed about food, talked about food and remembered the smell of home cooking. We cooked food in our mind, quietly sometimes and loudly other times, as the guards walked away, but always with a vivid imagination. When it was my turn to cook, it was stuffed cabbage. I started with choosing the best green cabbage, placing it in boiling water til the leaves softened. Separating the leaves gently, then carefully filling them with meat, rice, spices and onions. Folding and rolling each leaf in an envelope shape. Placing them in the bottom of the pot and cooking with tomato sauce using only real tomatoes. That is my mother’s secret!!”
Ruth Steinfeld, a survivor from Texas, explained to Ms. Caras that cooking helped her remember her mother, who was taken away and killed in Auschwitz when she was a young child:
“I grew up without a mother so it was important to me to be a good Jewish mother. And that meant cooking. So as I started to make chicken soup for my family, the sense of smell would trigger the feeling of my mother’s presence in the kitchen with me.”
Ms. Caras’s cookbooks are also being used in schools to teach children about the Holocaust in a more personal way. In 2009, children at a school in Naples, Florida began targeting and harassing the Jewish students. A teacher at the school heard Ms. Caras speak and initiated a Holocaust studies program using the Holocaust Survivor Cookbook as its centerpiece. She received a grant to purchase 120 books and food for recipes. Each student picked a survivor and researched the history of the Holocaust in his or her country. At the end of the semester, the students made the recipes and presented the stories of their survivors while serving the food.
Ms. Caras would like all readers to make a recipe and share the author’s story while serving the meal. The recipes are written how they are remembered—and sometimes the cook will have to add or subtract. Good luck with this one for cucumber salad by Edith Klein Smyth of London, England:
“Take one husband to peel and slice the cucumbers very thin by hand.”
Dr. Zerykier has been involved in several activities to keep alive the memory of her family and the Holocaust. She participated in a book compiled by Karen Shawn, when she directed Moriah’s Holocaust education curriculum, titled, Three Generations Speak. She spoke to students at Moriah and was given drawings they made after her presentation. She compiled them into a book that she presented to the President of Israel, on behalf of Moriah.
Her career choice stemmed from feeling her mother’s sadness. “My becoming a psychiatrist was determined by the suffering I witnessed at home, and my desire to be instrumental in being a vessel of understanding and healing.”
Rivky Goldin has run the Teaneck Chabad Women’s Circle since coming to the Teaneck center with her husband in 2008. She heard about Ms. Caras from a friend at another Lubavich Center, and joined her in arranging Ms. Caras’s New Jersey tour. Ms. Goldin said she still has a few cookbooks available. To purchase a book, or get information about upcoming Teaneck Chabad Women’s Circle events, contact [email protected].
By Bracha Schwartz
