Teaneck—The Torah Academy of Bergen County (TABC) led a stirring school-wide Yom HaShoah commemoration on Monday with music, poetry, family history stories prepared by students, and a special guest presentation from a Holocaust survivor who today lives in Fort Lee. The morning event was organized for the 13th year by TABC’s Leah Moskovits and Donna Hoenig.
Six students shared stories as part of a candle lighting ceremony, commemorating their own families’ journeys through the Shoah, with a particularly unique perspective heard from Shmuel Kooijmans, a TABC senior who moved to Teaneck from Holland with his parents, Vered and Yochanan, along with four siblings, just four years ago. He spoke of how his grandfather, Gidon Kornblum, didn’t even know when or where he was born.
Kornblum, who today lives in Israel and works at the Weizmann Institute, estimates he was between 4 and 8 years old at the time of his liberation in 1944, and has no knowledge of any surviving relatives. He was rescued by American forces from a Final Solution “Death Train” with 800 children on it, headed for Thereienstadt. “The Nazis issued the order to load all the Jews back onto the train, and then either blow it up or drive it off a bridge,” Kooijmans said.
“Miraculously, just as the Nazis were about to carry out their lamentable task, a Sherman light tank appeared at the top of a nearby hill. The 743rd Tank Battalion and the accompanying infantrymen of the 30th Infantry Division were astonished by the sight of the Death Train. Although they had heard rumors of Nazi atrocities, they had believed it to be propaganda,” Kooijmans said.
Kooijmans added that last year his grandfather had the opportunity to meet and thank those who had freed him at a reunion in Kentucky. Kooijmans and his mother were there too. “I personally had the incredible opportunity to meet and thank the soldiers that liberated my Saba,” he told the crowd of 300 students, staff, faculty and family members.
Another candle lighting presentation, made by 12th grader Jason Breuer, joined by his brother Avromie, a 9th grader, shared harrowing stories of the survival of his great-grandparents, David and Rivka. His presentation ended with an inspirational note. While so many in their families had been lost, his grandparents’ marriage produced seven children, 57 grandchildren, 260 great-grandchildren, and even 29 great-great-grandchildren.
Other moving family history presentations were made by 9th grader Yoni Laub, 10th graders Yair Knoller and Zachary Lent, and 11th grader Binyamin Pomeranz. An original poem called “See No Evil,” written by 12th grader Yosef Greenfield, was read by 12th grader Isaac Altman. A musical presentation of the song “Last Night” was sung by the senior choir, led by Rabbi Beni Krohn and Rabbi Raphi Mandestaum. During the music, a pictorial presentation of children of the Holocaust made by 10th grader Zev Hagler was show on a screen. Yaakov Yeger, a 12th grader, provided some thoughts on the students’ perspective on the Shoah, where he indicated that students must always continue to learn about the Shoah.
TABC’s special guest speaker at this year’s event was Marta Feldenbaum, who was born in 1928 in Ungvar, part of a disputed territory in Czechezlovakia/Hungary, that at other times was called Uzhorod in Hungarian. Today it is called Uzgorod, and is part of Ukraine. However, Feldenbaum might have never been anywhere near Europe during the atrocities of the Shoah due to a short-lived move to Palestine with her family in 1936. However, her parents, who were religious, deemed the Chalutzim they saw not religious enough and the family returned home, where they were successful in running a kosher restaurant and sold wholesale liquor.
In 1944, however, they lost everything. “Before, Jews had all the freedoms, just like here. Then the Nazis came and everything changed. The world was closed off to the Jews,” she said.
Feldenbaum said her family, which was named Moskovitz, was sent to Budapest’s ghetto, where there was no place for them to sleep, much less live. They spent two weeks sleeping outside before they were brought to a train station and placed in a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. “There was no toilet, just a barrel in the corner,” she said.
When she arrived in Auschwitz with her parents and two sisters, the men were separated from the women. She never saw her father again. Feldenbaum, with her mother and sisters, then passed in front of the infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who indicated that her mother should go one way and the sisters the other. “I took my arm away from my mother’s. To this day I feel guilty. Why did I do that? My mother had no one to hug in the gas chambers,” Feldenbaum cried.
Feldenbaum’s sisters were each able to see their father one more time before his group was moved, but then he was never heard from again. Feldenbaum and her sisters were freed by the Russians in 1945. She moved to America in 1948, settling first in Boston. Her husband Leslie was also a survivor; he passed away nine years ago. Today, she remains religious and proud of her Jewish heritage. She is a member of the Young Israel of Fort Lee.
“I was the lucky one. But sometimes I feel guilty why I came back. I grew up without my mother and father, but I always remember how to act. That’s why I’m still religious, because I believe there is only one God who helps you—and helped me, years ago also. My mother and father, I think they deserve that. That’s how they raised me.”
“If anyone ever tells you that the Holocaust didn’t happen, you tell them that it is not true. You tell them that you met someone who was there. You tell this to your children and your grandchildren. Remember the six million who died for kiddush Hashem,” she said.
In an interview with JLBC following her presentation, Feldenbaum said that she left out something she wanted to make very clear in her presentation. “I forgot to tell the children they should always remember to support Israel. It’s the most important thing. Because there was no country in this world who wanted to help us. If there would have been an Israel, Israel would have opened the doors and let us in. The six million would not have died. That’s what I want to tell them,” she said.
TABC’s principal, Rabbi Yosef Adler, who is also mara d’asra of Teaneck’s Congregation Rinat Yisrael, shared how important he felt the day was by drawing parallels with the rituals we engage in as we remember the exodus from Egypt on Pesach and how we remember Shabbos each week to celebrate the creation of the world. “The only way we can somehow capture the events that took place in litziyat mizrayim 3300 years ago, is to engage in ritual. It’s painful to me that the rabbinate has not established formal ritual for the Yom HaShoah,” he said. “Because in the absence of ritual, all we can do is try to talk about it, and not re-experience it,” he said.
However, even without formal ritual, the many students who helped produce every aspect of the day’s event, from designing and illustrating the program to providing background music as students entered the room, imbued it with a strong measure of the importance and sobriety required for a day to remember what, and who, has been lost.
By Elizabeth Kratz
