Posted on 02/17/2006 4:14:12 PM PST by Hannah Senesh
It may have taken 63 years but Herman Rosenblat is finally able to celebrate being a man.
Rosenblat, formerly of Bay Terrace, received his Bar Mitzvah today at Congregation Beth Sholom Chabad in Mineola. Although most Jewish boys celebrate at age 13 -- the age when the child becomes responsible for himself under Jewish law -- Rosenblat was hardly in a position for balloons and streamers: the 76-year-old Polish immigrant spent his 13th year in a concentration camp during World War II.
Rosenblat celebrated with about a dozen friends and local congregants, eating cookies and dancing the Hora. But his journey from near death in a German concentration camp to celebrating his life in a Mineola temple is just one of Rosenblat's amazing tales.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
"Perhaps his most astonishing is the story of how he met his wife, Roma. While in the concentration camp, the teenage Rosenblat met a girl on the outside who would throw him apples and bread over the barbed wire fence that separated them. The little girl gave him hope, he said, in a world that was filled with death. Seventeen years later, after being freed by the Russians and immigrating to New York, Rosenblat reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date. After a few minutes of talking, the girl, Roma, asked him where he was during the war. When he told her, she got quiet and then told the story of how she used to feed apples and bread to a teenage boy in a concentration camp. The two realized they had been reunited and Rosenblat proposed on the spot. Six months later they married."
BTTT
What an amazing and uplifting story. How can anyone read that and not believe that destiny plays a role in the lives of human beings? And if there is destiny, there is a force operating in our lives that is larger than ourselves.
It says other things to me as well: how much more courageous a little girl was than many adults, how many more could have been saved if they would have had that child's courage.
And yes, you're quite right, it is a very beautiful and uplifting story. I have so many terrible and sad stories about that time inside of me though that it does little do lift my own particular spirits.
Wow.
When you stop and think about it - I got goose bumps.
I am a firm believer that someone else had their hand in this.
What a great feeling and what a great start to the weekend.
Wow.........again!
Mazel tov!
God bless you, Hannah.
The terrible and sad stories from that time must weigh heavily on those who either lived them or are brought close to them in some way. There is so much evil in this world. Not all are so fortunate in this life to be insulated from the worst of it.
Thanks for posting that beautiful story. It's made even more beautiful, perhaps, by the contrast to the pain and evil and cowardice of that time. With your permission, I will pray that you can find comfort and healing for the painful stories inside of you.
Just. Wow.
Think what a great movie Hollywood could make from this story.
Did they have the guy who draws you with a big face and a little body skiing, playing baseball, or whatever you tell him you like to do, at the Bar Mitzvah? I have never been to a Bar Mitzvah that did not have that guy, and I have been to a bunch.
bttt for archive
"The terrible and sad stories from that time must weigh heavily on those who either lived them or are brought close to them in some way."
I have worked with survivors in Poland and Hungary. To suggest that many of their stories are horrific would be to do them a grave injustice - they are much worse than anything any normal person can imagine. In many ways to have survived was worse than to have died. Can you imagine what it must have been like, not just to have been the sole survivor of one's immediate family, or even one's extended family of perhaps a hundred people, but of one's entire town - the friends you went to school with, the boy who first kissed you, the butcher, the rabbi's assistant who used to give you sweets, your mother's friends, your doctor, your teachers - everyone? Such was the fate of many survivors in Poland and Hungary (especially in Poland).
This is the reason the death camps were built in Poland. It already had large concentrations of Jews and its location near Germany made it an ideal location to deport "undesirables" from Germany and points west.
My great-grandfather (who, though not Jewish, lost many cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends) visited Poland after WWII. What really freaked him out was passing through some of the Shetl, and seeing what were once thriving towns turned into ghost towns. The piles and piles of shoes outside Oswiechim (Auschwitz) was also a harrowing experience for him.
BTW: Are you with Chabad? I love your sound trucks!
"Jews were 40% of the population of Warsaw"
Around 33% of the population in Warsaw and Lodz was Jewish. 70% of the doctors in Warsaw were Jewish.
Around 250,000 to 300,000 Jews escaped to the Soviet Union as the Germans approached (the gates were firmly shut shortly afterwards). 99% of the remaining Jews (over 3 million) were subsequently murdered.
"BTW: Are you with Chabad? I love your sound trucks!"
Nobody could be less religious than me. I don't believe that a god and an Auschwitz (or a Cambodia or a Rwanda or a Darfur or a hundred different other places and times) could possibly co-exist in the same universe.
As you say, surviving that horror having seen and endured such unspeakable things must have been the worst possible outcome for many. I do believe there must be a reason why a person survives the horror when everyone they know and care about has died and been released. It's hard to even contemplate how horrific being left behind to endure further would be, as you say, truly awful.
Mazel Tov to both of them! My dad survived the Nazis and fought them in the Polish Army. I never once heard him or any other survivor ask the stupidity "Why do they hate us?"!
"I do believe there must be a reason why a person survives the horror when everyone they know and care about has died and been released."
Perhaps, but that is something different to the particular point I was making.
Correction: Largest Jewish population in EUROPE. I just noticed my error. Damn Meds! ;-)
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