(A Dead Shul Lives Online)
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=12415
This is the recent article in the latest Jewish Week and I thought
you would find this to be of interest.
Note there are several inaccuracies!
Rabbi Wolpoe
A Dead Shul Lives Online
The prayer books, tattered and yellowed, some bearing the hurried scrawl of those fleeing the Nazis, were the last link to a dead Washington Heights shul.
So Karen Franklin, a professional genealogist, recently found herself in the basement of the Bronx’s Hirsch & Sons funeral home on a rescue mission.
Franklin’s eyes went wide as she homed in on the gurney carrying her latest project, siddurim dating back to 1832, inscribed with the name and village of the German-Jewish immigrants who brought them here.
Already in small brown packages tied with string to be buried, the prayer books were an overlooked batch from a ragtag library Franklin collected from the pews of the Congregation Ohav Sholaum when the Conservative synagogue closed forever in January.
Splashed by transatlantic waters and inscribed with history-laden, and eerie, dates such as “the tenth of November, 1938, Kristallnacht,” Franklin shuddered to think of the stories, journeys of Holocaust refugees now mostly deceased, about to be buried. “The men in the funeral home were so respectful,” said Franklin, director of the Judaica Museum of The Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. “They understood the power of what I was doing. They had no idea that books this old with these kinds of stories were among those that they were burying.”
Those stories, and the power they carry with them, are now keeping Ohav Sholaum and its congregants alive, in a manner of speaking, with the help of modern technology.
In the past few weeks since she listed the books’ owners on a Jewish genealogy Web site, Franklin has heard from many families who now have tangible pieces of their family history, and the history of a once-thriving shul.“It means so much to our family to have Julius’ prayer book,” wrote Sheila Adler of Ohio of the book belonging to her husband’s uncle. “Julius is the reason our
Adler side of the family survived the Holocaust. He gave an affidavit to his brother, my father-in-law, to come to the states in 1938 from Germany.”
Franklin, who collected over 100 of these books with the intent of returning them to the families, said she has since received e-mails from Mexico, Israel, Canada and Germany.
“These books have unleashed a flood of memories and family stories,” she said of the 20 items she has returned so far. “For us as Jews, the most valuable items are the items that tell stories that connect us. And it’s our Torah scrolls and the prayer books that unite us that are the ones that are the most valuable.”
Schelly Talalay Dardashti, organizer of the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy slated for August in New York, said projects like Franklin’s are becoming increasingly common as both amateur and professional genealogists use the Web to pool resources, compare notes and connect family histories.
“It’s the mystery of history,” said Tallalay Dardashti. “Everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from.”
Allen Spatz of Riverdale, whose late father Alfred Spatz was a founder of the Ohav Sholaum said he was “touched” by the return of his father’s book. In January, he had taken pictures at the closing of the temple where his parents attended the 1940 groundbreaking and where, as a child, he sat between his grandfather and father, refugees from Munich.
When he showed the book to his mother, Erna Spatz, she was “taken aback” by her husband’s familiar handwriting. She laughed at the trademark meticulousness Alfred displayed by including his phone number along with a bevy of other practical information “he would always include should someone lose something.”
As a child in Nazi Germany, Alfred’s survival depended upon such practicality. He learned early on from his mother, whose frequent trips from Munich to deposit money in Swiss bank accounts would later ensure her family’s financial stability when they arrived in New York.
Aside from recounting these few details, Allen said his father refused to discuss his childhood. Erna, on the other hand, enjoyed sharing her memories, and at age 93, she said, the value of the prayer book is that it “reminds her of things.”
Born in Brilon, a tiny town in northern Germany with about 27 Jewish families, Erna felt things change in 1931 when her former friends would spit at her and give her dirty looks as she walked down the street. She said the rising tide of anti-Semitism was especially heartbreaking because her Jewish neighbors had just finished construction on a new synagogue, which would likely be destroyed.
“It was already not good in Europe,” she said in a heavy German accent. “They knew something would happen but they wanted to invest the money in a new synagogue,” she added.
In 1936 Erna boarded a boat for America. Eventually her whole family would join her in Washington Heights, except for one sister who was killed in Belgium by the Nazis, just as she and her son were about to board a plane. Erna began taking night classes to learn English. When she met Alfred he was working factory jobs in the garment industry. They discovered a shared love of dancing and married in 1942, one month after they met.
Born in 1945, Allen was mostly unaware of his German history until he visited his mother’s hometown, at the end of his military service in 1967. He spent a week with Regina Hummel who once hid Erna’s family, across the street from Erna’s old house. Hummel showed Allen to a room she had dedicated to his mother’s family, explaining that she wanted to hold onto traces of neighbors she might never see again.
Another prayer book was returned to Steven Bachenheimer in North Carolina. The book belonged to his second cousin, Fred Ruelf.
Bachenheimer wrote that his sweetest memory of Ruelf was when they met in Germany, and Ruelf took him on a tour of his old haunts in their family’s ancestral village, Rauischholzhausen. They spent two days there, visiting the Jewish cemetery where his great-great grandparents are buried, and a nearby town where his grandparents are buried.
Bachenheimer said that Ruelf’s mother had died in 1930 and was also buried in the Jewish cemetery of that village. Ruelf landed in Europe on D-Day as a jeep driver in General George Patton’s Third Army, and he was the first Allied soldier into the village in 1945. He went promptly to the cemetery and ordered the mayor of the town, on threat of death, to restore the cemetery to its
original state.
In later years Bachenheimer would visit Ruelf in Washington Heights. One afternoon Ruelf took him to a nearby shul (perhaps Ohav Sholaum) where a memorial tablet of fallen World War I Jewish soldiers from Rauischholzhausen and nearby villages was kept. It had originally stood in the cemetery, and Ruelf had arranged for it to be relocated to New York.
Bachenheimer said he still thinks often of Ruelf, a link to his family’s past.
Franklin said that the gratification of connecting people like Bachenheimer to their past is addictive.
“People get extremely emotional,” she said. “For me that is so powerful. That’s why I do what I do.”
In March, Franklin held a reunion for a handful of Ohav Sholaum members who are still alive to recall their synagogue, a once-thriving home to over 600 German-Jewish immigrant families in the late 1940s and ‘50s.
For Larry Stein, 82, it was a bittersweet gathering.
“It’s very depressing,” Stein admitted. “I go in the synagogue and look around and there’s no one left. I was one of the very first and very last,” he said.
Stein said he missed attending services at the temple, which once helped his family make the transition from Europe to the United States.
“When we came here my father didn’t speak any English, and he had no trade,” he said. “But we had a base in Ohav Sholaum and it was a tradition that we were used to,” he added.
Still, Stein acknowledged that although the synagogue has died, its soul endures through relics like its siddurim.
“If the prayer books bring people together to talk about [Ohav Sholaum],” Stein said, “then it is not lost altogether.”
Currently, three of the prayer books from Congregation Ohav Sholaum are on exhibit at The Judaica Museum of The Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. (718-581-1787) The names of the original owners of all prayer books found at the synagogue are listed online at www.jewishgen.org on a discussion group of GERSIG, the German Special Interest Group.
So Karen Franklin, a professional genealogist, recently found herself in the basement of the Bronx’s Hirsch & Sons funeral home on a rescue mission.
Franklin’s eyes went wide as she homed in on the gurney carrying her latest project, siddurim dating back to 1832, inscribed with the name and village of the German-Jewish immigrants who brought them here.
Already in small brown packages tied with string to be buried, the prayer books were an overlooked batch from a ragtag library Franklin collected from the pews of the Congregation Ohav Sholaum when the Conservative synagogue closed forever in January.
Splashed by transatlantic waters and inscribed with history-laden, and eerie, dates such as “the tenth of November, 1938, Kristallnacht,” Franklin shuddered to think of the stories, journeys of Holocaust refugees now mostly deceased, about to be buried. “The men in the funeral home were so respectful,” said Franklin, director of the Judaica Museum of The Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. “They understood the power of what I was doing. They had no idea that books this old with these kinds of stories were among those that they were burying.”
Those stories, and the power they carry with them, are now keeping Ohav Sholaum and its congregants alive, in a manner of speaking, with the help of modern technology.
In the past few weeks since she listed the books’ owners on a Jewish genealogy Web site, Franklin has heard from many families who now have tangible pieces of their family history, and the history of a once-thriving shul.“It means so much to our family to have Julius’ prayer book,” wrote Sheila Adler of Ohio of the book belonging to her husband’s uncle. “Julius is the reason our
Adler side of the family survived the Holocaust. He gave an affidavit to his brother, my father-in-law, to come to the states in 1938 from Germany.”
Franklin, who collected over 100 of these books with the intent of returning them to the families, said she has since received e-mails from Mexico, Israel, Canada and Germany.
“These books have unleashed a flood of memories and family stories,” she said of the 20 items she has returned so far. “For us as Jews, the most valuable items are the items that tell stories that connect us. And it’s our Torah scrolls and the prayer books that unite us that are the ones that are the most valuable.”
Schelly Talalay Dardashti, organizer of the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy slated for August in New York, said projects like Franklin’s are becoming increasingly common as both amateur and professional genealogists use the Web to pool resources, compare notes and connect family histories.
“It’s the mystery of history,” said Tallalay Dardashti. “Everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from.”
Allen Spatz of Riverdale, whose late father Alfred Spatz was a founder of the Ohav Sholaum said he was “touched” by the return of his father’s book. In January, he had taken pictures at the closing of the temple where his parents attended the 1940 groundbreaking and where, as a child, he sat between his grandfather and father, refugees from Munich.
When he showed the book to his mother, Erna Spatz, she was “taken aback” by her husband’s familiar handwriting. She laughed at the trademark meticulousness Alfred displayed by including his phone number along with a bevy of other practical information “he would always include should someone lose something.”
As a child in Nazi Germany, Alfred’s survival depended upon such practicality. He learned early on from his mother, whose frequent trips from Munich to deposit money in Swiss bank accounts would later ensure her family’s financial stability when they arrived in New York.
Aside from recounting these few details, Allen said his father refused to discuss his childhood. Erna, on the other hand, enjoyed sharing her memories, and at age 93, she said, the value of the prayer book is that it “reminds her of things.”
Born in Brilon, a tiny town in northern Germany with about 27 Jewish families, Erna felt things change in 1931 when her former friends would spit at her and give her dirty looks as she walked down the street. She said the rising tide of anti-Semitism was especially heartbreaking because her Jewish neighbors had just finished construction on a new synagogue, which would likely be destroyed.
“It was already not good in Europe,” she said in a heavy German accent. “They knew something would happen but they wanted to invest the money in a new synagogue,” she added.
In 1936 Erna boarded a boat for America. Eventually her whole family would join her in Washington Heights, except for one sister who was killed in Belgium by the Nazis, just as she and her son were about to board a plane. Erna began taking night classes to learn English. When she met Alfred he was working factory jobs in the garment industry. They discovered a shared love of dancing and married in 1942, one month after they met.
Born in 1945, Allen was mostly unaware of his German history until he visited his mother’s hometown, at the end of his military service in 1967. He spent a week with Regina Hummel who once hid Erna’s family, across the street from Erna’s old house. Hummel showed Allen to a room she had dedicated to his mother’s family, explaining that she wanted to hold onto traces of neighbors she might never see again.
Another prayer book was returned to Steven Bachenheimer in North Carolina. The book belonged to his second cousin, Fred Ruelf.
Bachenheimer wrote that his sweetest memory of Ruelf was when they met in Germany, and Ruelf took him on a tour of his old haunts in their family’s ancestral village, Rauischholzhausen. They spent two days there, visiting the Jewish cemetery where his great-great grandparents are buried, and a nearby town where his grandparents are buried.
Bachenheimer said that Ruelf’s mother had died in 1930 and was also buried in the Jewish cemetery of that village. Ruelf landed in Europe on D-Day as a jeep driver in General George Patton’s Third Army, and he was the first Allied soldier into the village in 1945. He went promptly to the cemetery and ordered the mayor of the town, on threat of death, to restore the cemetery to its
original state.
In later years Bachenheimer would visit Ruelf in Washington Heights. One afternoon Ruelf took him to a nearby shul (perhaps Ohav Sholaum) where a memorial tablet of fallen World War I Jewish soldiers from Rauischholzhausen and nearby villages was kept. It had originally stood in the cemetery, and Ruelf had arranged for it to be relocated to New York.
Bachenheimer said he still thinks often of Ruelf, a link to his family’s past.
Franklin said that the gratification of connecting people like Bachenheimer to their past is addictive.
“People get extremely emotional,” she said. “For me that is so powerful. That’s why I do what I do.”
In March, Franklin held a reunion for a handful of Ohav Sholaum members who are still alive to recall their synagogue, a once-thriving home to over 600 German-Jewish immigrant families in the late 1940s and ‘50s.
For Larry Stein, 82, it was a bittersweet gathering.
“It’s very depressing,” Stein admitted. “I go in the synagogue and look around and there’s no one left. I was one of the very first and very last,” he said.
Stein said he missed attending services at the temple, which once helped his family make the transition from Europe to the United States.
“When we came here my father didn’t speak any English, and he had no trade,” he said. “But we had a base in Ohav Sholaum and it was a tradition that we were used to,” he added.
Still, Stein acknowledged that although the synagogue has died, its soul endures through relics like its siddurim.
“If the prayer books bring people together to talk about [Ohav Sholaum],” Stein said, “then it is not lost altogether.”
Currently, three of the prayer books from Congregation Ohav Sholaum are on exhibit at The Judaica Museum of The Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. (718-581-1787) The names of the original owners of all prayer books found at the synagogue are listed online at www.jewishgen.org on a discussion group of GERSIG, the German Special Interest Group.
