A Yom HaShoah Reflection for Our Times

This is the 2025 iteration of a message I post annually on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). If you can read only part of it, jump to the last paragraph.

In July of 2007, I volunteered to accompany a group of 48 NFTY-ites (the Reform Movement’s youth group in North America) on a L'dor v'Dor journey to Poland, the Czech Republic, and then on to Israel. (Crazy, I know.) One of our many visits to significant sites was a mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, three hours from Warsaw and two hours from the Lithuanian border. The time we spent there was, for me, perhaps the most difficult of the entire trip—and there were many difficult moments.

But those in the forest were personal.

My paternal grandfather, Abraham Charmatz was born in Lithuania, one of 19 children (yes, 19!). He was the youngest, and only a handful came to this country. (We originally believed that his name was changed to "Herman" at Ellis Island, but I have since learned from Dara Horn, author of "People Love Dead Jews," that it is a fallacy that names were changed there. According to Horn, they were changed afterward, and there are court records that prove her assertion. I have not searched court records for my grandfather's name change.)

To hear my father tell this part of our family's story, when he was growing up on Mapes Avenue in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s, his father frequently received letters from his brothers and sisters in Lithuania. Until the letters stopped.

I lit a yahrzeit candle at the mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, and today, once again, I remember all those unknown aunts and uncles and cousins. May they rest in peace in the shelter of the Eternal.

And while we're remembering, it would be wise to remember, too, that the current administration's efforts to "protect" Jews from antisemitism, especially on college campuses, are nothing more than a facade that tramples the civil rights of immigrants, many of whom are living and studying in this country legally and have the right—just like the rest of us—to assembly and free speech. In America, when those freedoms are denied to anyone, we all lose, and no one, including Jews, is safe from the forces that wish to see us gone—from this country or from the world.

Remembering Tante Laura

This yahrzeit candle is for my Tante Laura, who died on March 5, 1970—55 years ago. Although we shared only seven years on this earth, her memory is forever etched in my heart.

She gifted me my first Hanukkiyah, so small it uses the thinnest of birthday candles and remains among my treasures.

In the early 1920s, she and one of her sisters, my grandmother, came to this country along with a brother, Max, who had served in the Austrian army. The three worked in the garment industry, saving enough to bring their parents to the Golden Medina. Two decades later, she and Max, neither of whom ever married, lived together in an apartment they rented from Mrs. Provenzano that was located above (or maybe next door to?) Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home Inc. on Second Avenue between Third and Fourth streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Across Second Avenue stands the Church of the Nativity. It got a facelift in the 1970s, but when my mother visited Tante Laura and Uncle Max as a young girl in the late 1930s and 1940s, the building had a Greek Revival edifice. As she told us many times, she loved to watch from Tante Laura's front window as wedding parties left the church on Saturday afternoons to pose for pictures on the front steps—the bride and groom in the middle flanked by groomsmen and taffeta-clad bridesmaids in pastels, two in pink, two in green, two in blue, and two in yellow.

When she was a young woman and Tante Laura wanted to make her a sandwich, my mother would tell her, "Just one slice of bread." But food was love, and although she abided by my mother's wish, she always picked the widest, thickest slice from the middle of the loaf of rye bread.

Later, she told us, when she was a young wife and mother, she'd often return from visiting Tante Laura, to find a cucumber, half a loaf of bread, or $10 stuffed in her purse.

By the time I knew Tante Laura, her hair was gray and held in place with combs. She wore clunky orthopedic shoes and her body was thick. "You can't escape your genes," I often say, and I am convinced I inherited my own body shape from her. I hope I also possess some of her generosity of spirit, love of family, and tenacity. I hope, too, that she knows, even after all these years, how deeply loved and missed she is by her great-nieces and great-nephews.

P.S. When one of those great-nephews went off to college in the 1980s and joined a fraternity, somehow he discovered that the maiden name of one of his fraternity brothers was Provenzano. When my cousin told his mom, my aunt, she off-handedly said, "Ask him if his mother's name is Adrienne." Indeed it is; she is the daughter of Mrs. Provenzano, Tante Laura and Uncle Max's landlord. What are the chances?!