Chesed: loving kindness and mercy

"The world is built with chesed." (Psalms 89:3)

Chesed, one of the most fundamental concepts in Jewish life, is generally thought of in terms of various acts of kindness performed by one person on behalf of another. Because we spend so much time focusing on our own abilities to impact the world and those around us (charity, caring for the sick, volunteering, a warm smile to a stranger), it seems we often forget that it is the constant acts of kindness performed by G-d on our own behalf that have as much, if not greater impact on our lives. In fact, it seems that many times these acts of kindness from G-d go completely unnoticed. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that it is both forms of chesed, those acts performed between one man and another, and also those acts performed by G-d on our own behalf that help sustain humanity in the midst of this dark and brutal world in which we live.

One may certainly question whether the creation of this brutal world was truly an act of chesed. Are we really better off living in a world of such utter brutality and dismay than had we never been created at all? Obviously, this is an age old philosophical question which will most certainly continue to be debated long after we are gone. But regardless of the answer, it is into this world that we were born, and so long as we are here we must somehow find a way to live, prosper, and find happiness.

My Mom is a survivor of the Shoah (Holocaust). She was just a child when her family was torn asunder and she was forced onto the deportation trains that would pull her away from her father, her home, and her childhood forever. It was June 1942 and life became a desperate attempt to survive in the midst of concentration camps, displaced person camps, hiding places, sickness, death, trains, praying for a single potato to be thrown her way, and watching her mother fight to keep her dignity in a place in which Jews were forced to warm themselves with horse piss during the frigid Ukrainian/Rumanian/German winters.

Somehow my Mom was one of the lucky one's who made it out alive. Following the war, and several failed attempts to regain any semblance of the identity and life she had once lived, she came to America. Father was never seen again – what happened to him? Only G-d knew. What of their house in Rumania? Like most other homes, hers was stolen and inhabited by an anti-Semitic family that hadn't the slightest interest in returning it to its rightful owner when the war ended. Material belongings, clothing, piano, money – all gone. She came to America with her mother, sister, and nothing else.

Somehow my mother not only survived but also thrived in her new life. She built a new family – married a true mentch, had five children, two of whom now live in Israel, The Jewish Homeland, has seven grandchildren to date, taught hundreds of children at the Hebrew Academy of Atlanta, built her own company, travels around the world, and is currently a docent at the Bremen Holocaust Museum in Atlanta, GA. Yet despite her new life something has always been missing. Something big.

For sixty some-odd years my Mom was forced to live as a virtual orphan, never knowing what befell her entire family. Like a locked closet with no key, she's never known the details of what really happened, nor when, to all the relatives whom she never saw again. Today, the only thing remaining for my Mom and her sister is a single suitcase, a letter or two, and a couple of torn and tattered photographs, one of which is ripped down the middle. Never mind the fact that she's never known who may be included in the missing half of that photo, she hasn't even been able to positively identify some of those in the picture who are visible.

For much of my mother's life, like so many other survivors, she was unable to discuss the trauma she and her family endured during the war. Prior to her mother's passing in 1969, she never found the courage to discuss all the secrets and mysteries from their dark past. She never had the chance to probe her mother, the only adult survivor of the three, for answers to the terrifying questions they had been avoiding for so many years. What really transpired during those brutal years of 1942-45? What really happened to the rest of the Neumann family?

Over time my mother's attitude towards her past began to change. The First World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors took place in Jerusalem during the summer of 1980. On a whim, she picked up and went, not really knowing that she was about to open a true pandora's box. Upon her arrival she was immediately overwhelmed by thousands of fellow survivors crying, holding up pictures, searching for tidbits of information that would help unlock the mystery of their loved one's fate. It's important to remember that in 1980 there was still some sense of hope (fantasy) among survivors that perhaps some of those never heard from would magically reappear. As a child, I seem to remember my Mom being one of those people still clinging to her dream that father would someday return. The scene of all those survivors standing there with their black and white photo's must have been eerily similar to the days immediately following 9/11 in which survivors and family members held their own candlelight vigils near the site of the WTC hoping to find somebody/anybody alive. But this time, as opposed to three thousand murdered, it was six million human beings who had perished at the hands of the Nazi's (yemach shemam!). And unfortunately this wasn't 2-3 days after the event; it was thirty five years after the near-total annihilation of European Jewry.

Unfortunately, the trip to the Survivors Gathering resulted in only dead-ends for my mother and no serious leads. But the conference and the experience itself kindled something inside my mother that led to her dedicating the next twenty five years of her life to researching any and all potential clues that may help shed light on the clouded picture of her untimely beginning in this world. She's been back to Israel's Yad Vashem Museum (the world's foremost Holocaust archive center) several times to meet and work with the museums records and survivor assistance personnel. She's worked with the U.S. Holocaust Museum too, once locating the actual transport records that showed her mother's name listed among those transported to the labor and concentration camps in Transnystria. She and her sister traveled back to their home town in Czernowitz in Rumania. She's worked the libraries, attended other survivor conferences, searched foreign phone books and written letters. Yet nothing ever amounted to much until about a month and a half ago.

Around ten years ago, Yad Vashem embarked on an information-gathering project that would one day lead to the creation of the world's largest database (over three million entries collected) pertaining to victims of the Holocaust. As some of you may already know, Yad Vashem began collecting “pages of testimony” commemorating the names and details of victims’ lives in 1954. The process of computerizing the database began in 1994. One of the methods of information-gathering employed by the museum was to send to every Israeli citizen a package which contained a request to forward the enclosed forms to any known Holocaust survivor. The forms contained questions which would assist in garnering facts regarding the last known whereabouts of place, time, and cause of death for any people known to have perished in the Holocaust. Roughly six weeks ago, after many years of exhausting research, Yad Vashem finally launched the YAD VASHEM website.

When I first heard about the database, I remember wondering whether this was just another futile attempt to find that which was totally destroyed by the Nazi's (yemach shemam). After all, it was now sixty years later and I had watched my mother struggle (always with the most positive attitude one could ever imagine) through so many hopeless attempts to piece together her childhood. But shortly after the websites initial release, thanks to the tireless efforts of my sister and brother-in-law in Atlanta, things began to move in a different direction.

Sister and brother-in-law spent hours digging through hints, clues, misspelled names, foreign languages, strange handwriting, you name it. Finally, against great odds, they somehow found a distant relative who was still alive as of 1999 and living right here in Israel. I got a phone call from my sister one morning asking me to find this person. My sister and brother-in-law here in Israel searched through the Israeli version of the White Pages and successfully located this person, along with a local phone number and Jerusalem address. Can you imagine the excitement? What would we say? How would they react? Would we actually meet? Does he know what happened to anybody else in the family? Are others still alive? Did we really just find true mishpacha? Simply amazing.

To say that what happened next was a disappointment would be one of the world's biggest understatements. We called the phone number of our seemingly last living relative with indescribable hope only to be informed by the voice on the other end that our long lost cousin had passed away several years ago. We never got the chance to meet, hug, compare notes, and build a relationship. And to make matters worse, this gentleman's wife now suffers from some sort of mental illness or Alzheimer's disease and is unable to share any of the information that my mom (and all of us) so badly crave. Another door slammed in my mom's face. But my sister and brother-in-law in Atlanta refused to give up, and thank G-d for them. Only a few days later they discovered gold.

I remember the exact minute five weeks ago when we got the phone call here in Israel like it was this morning. It was a rainy, chilly Friday at 7:30 AM, and my sister should have been fast asleep in Atlanta, GA. Instead, she was on the other end of the line, screaming something about having just hung up the phone with an 84 year old woman living in Holon (Israel) who is my grandfather's first cousin. It's true! This woman, Koka, is my mother's first cousin, once-removed, and she's alive and well, living only 60 kilometers from where I sit right now.

I'm sitting here because I have the great privilege to be spending my first few months in Israel living in the home of my oldest sister and her wonderful family. She and I spent that entire Friday and Shabbat screaming, dancing, singing. "Mom has a cousin!" "What is Mom gonna think?" It was still only 3 AM in Atlanta when the initial connection with Koka was made, and my parents were presumably still sleeping. My sister and I spent the entire Shabbat here in a state of joy and bewilderment. What would Mom's reaction be?

When we finally spoke to Mom on Sunday, I was a bit under whelmed by her initial reaction. She seemed to be downplaying the entire episode as if survivors of the world's worst calculated massacre in history come across long lost cousin's everyday. But my Dad, my siblings, and I sensed that this time it was for real. Perhaps Mom was feeling that this too was simply another false alarm in a long string of false alarms. In retrospect I completely understand why her reaction didn't exactly match our own level of enthusiasm and excitement. After all, she's lived sixty years with absolutely no tangible memories of any family outside of her mother (1969) and sister. I have no idea how she made it this far. Wouldn't you feel cheated if this was your life? Amazingly, I never heard my Mom ever say anything even resembling an attitude such as that. She endured some twenty five years of exhaustive, fruitless searches in an attempt to locate someone, anyone, that would look like her, sound like her, share some of the same memories, and most of all, help her understand what in the hell happened.

The timing of our discovery is just as much a part of the miracle as is the discovery itself. Due to logistical considerations such as geographic separation, it would normally be next to impossible for our entire family to be together in Israel to go meet Koka. But the fact that our discovery was made only a month before my nephews bar mitzvah ensured that there would be fourteen of us traveling up to Holon to go meet our newest relative. Two weeks ago, January 10 2005, parasha Vayera 5765 we all piled into a rented van and commenced one of the finest celebrations of our lives. And believe me when I say this was a true celebration of life itself. Four generations of family who had never before met were present, including five of my Mom's grandchildren and two Holocaust survivors. Needless to say there was plenty of crying, hugging, story telling, exchanging of pictures, family tree's, the whole bit. One of the most amazing things about the whole experience was learning that it wasn't just my Mom who thought everybody else had perished. You see, Koka too had spent the last sixty years thinking that my Mom and her sister had died in the war. She never thought she would ever see them again.

Koka to my Mom: "How many times have you been to Israel? How many times have we been only fifty kilometers away from each other and we never found each other? How can it be???" "Your daughter lives here for six years and we never found each other until now???"

Mom to Koka: "I never thought I would find somebody who loves me like family."

Mom and Koka sat holding hands for more than two hours.

My sister, the one that found Koka on the internet, has a five year old daughter whose middle name is Nesya (which means "miracle" in Hebrew). She was given this name because she was born during Chanukkah, the holiday of public miracles. Little did her parents know at the time that one day they would be the one's responsible for discovering Koka, a true living miracle and a true living relative of our mother. To make matters even more miraculous, I'm sure they also never imagined finding out that Koka's own mother, of blessed memory, was also named Nesya. As well, Koka also gave the name Nesya to her very own daughter as well. Some things are truly unbelievable.

Koka was nineteen years old when she was deported for the concentration camps. She was fourteen years older than my mom and thus has a vastly wider memory of the events that took place. She remembers playing with my mom as a baby and even remembers my mom's nickname "Paulika". She's also got one of the very same pictures that my mom has always kept with her. Koka provided details of exactly what happened to my grandfather (of blessed memory), my mom's father, and even the timing of his abduction and death. She told us how she was present with her own mom and my mother's grandmother when they both died from starvation in the freezing snow on the same day. She told other frightening stories of some of what they endured.

After about an hour of talking about the past, Koka was tired and worn out. We spent the next couple of hours talking about nicer things such as our new lives and our hopes for the future. To my delight, I discovered that her son-in-law actually owns two falafel stores in Holon. This was truly another miracle in our day of miracles. I love this man. As for the rest of the story about those awful times, we will have to continue at a later date, but thank G-d I now live in Israel so I hope to continue strengthening our relationship as much as possible.

I don't think all has sunk in yet so I'm going to stop here for now. But I started out by recounting something my father mentioned to our family as we sat together trying to assess our feelings after this historic day. He reminded us that the world was created with chesed and is maintained through chesed. Sometimes it's the chesed between man and man which takes place on the street, in the store, or waiting on line at the bank. But sometimes, and perhaps even more powerfully, it is the chesed performed by G-d for our own benefit that makes us realize that this world is not so dark and scary after all. There's still plenty of beauty here after all.

Terrorism, tsunami's, war, disease, murder, famine, AIDS, strife, child abuse, spousal abuse, drugs, pornography, hatred, division… This is our world. Yet it is the experience of performing and receiving true acts of chesed that will continue to make this world a better place.

The underlying foundation of all existence is a gift.















Falafel man and me

posted by Avi G @ 15:16