JEWISH PRESS VoLLXXX
No. 26
Omaha, NE
27Nisan,5761
April 20,: 20,2001
SERVING NEBRASKA AND WESTERN IOWA FOR 80 YEARS
United Way Recognizes Volunteers Kay Ferer and Sheila Tomps by PAM MONSKY, Federation Communications Director Kay Ferer and Sheila Tomps will be honored by the United Way of the Midlands as Volunteers of the Year at the United Way Annual Recognition Luncheon on April 24. Ferer was nominated by the Jewish i Federation of Omaha for her work with the Women's Division of the Annual Campaign, her service to Young Energetic Seniors (YES) and her devotion to the residents of the Rose Blumkin Home. She will be recognized as Volunteer of the Year in the Elderly category at the Luncheon. "For the past five years, Kay has led the Kay Ferer Sheila Tomps Young Energetic Seniors Women's Campaign Blumkin Home Sing-A-Long every Tuesday since division for the Federation. She is also the only 1980, is an involved officer for Y.S.S. (Young Campaign division leader to get 100% participation Energetic Seniors), and also volunteers at from her donors! Kay is a wonderful lady and very Methodist Hospital every Friday. deserving of this wonderful award!" said Kathy Sheila Tomps will be recognized as Volunteer of McGauvran, Federation Women's Campaign the Year in the Health category. Tomps was nomiDirector. nated by Jewish Senior Services and the Rose Ferer's most selfless acts of volunteerism are Blumkin Jewish Home. undoubtedly her visits to elderly community memLois Wine, Director of Volunteer Services for bers who are hospitalized. She has helped with the
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Jewish Senior Services said of Tomps, "She is very deserving of this honor. Sheila does so much for us at the Home and for the community. We're just gratefiil to have her as a volunteer!" Tomps' volunteer career includes work with Boy Scouts and mentally-challenged students at Rose Hill School and Special Olympics. Her dedication to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home, however, is most amazing. Tomps is always available to visit lonely residents, and assists with errands, doctor appointments and is the first one to volunteer as a chaperone on outings. Tomps does not seek recognition for the hundreds of hours she gives to the residents of the Home. At her request, there is no written record of the time she spends there. Ferer and Tomps will both be recognized at the 46th Annual United Way of the Midlands "Change the World" Volunteer Recognition Luncheon on Tuesday, April 24, at the Doubletree Hotel. For more information and tickets to the luncheon, please call the United Way at 522-7931.
Piecing Together a Lost Past by LEO ADAM BIG A, Special to the Jewish Press ——•
For the first 52 years of his life, Fred Kader lived everyday in the shadow of a lost past. An orphaned child of the Holocaust, Kader% early years remained an unfathomable mystery that he hoped one day to solve so that he might finally come to know how he survived the Shoah as a small boy in his native Belgium. That he had been one of an estimated 4,500 hidden children in his homeland during World War II, he already knew. That he was the lone surviving member of his immediate family, he was certain. That he ended up in an orphanage reserved for Jewish children, he definitely recalled. That an uncle found him after the war and took him in to live with his family, he also remembered. But precisely how he came to be hidden, where hewas protected and by whom were details frustratingly outside his memory's reach. After all, when the events that eventually, tragically separated Kader from his family first transpired he was about four years old — an age when distinct memories are rare in even the best of circumstances. Given the trauma he endured during the four years he was in hiding, he no doubt buried memories that he might otherwise have retained. Few members of his extended family who were left could provide only partial answers to the questions that dogged him all these years later. For Kader, a pediatric neurologist with his own private practice in Omaha, the strain of not knowing his own life history left an ever-present void he could not fill. With the disturbing sense that pieces of this puzzling odyssey lay just beyond his grasp, Kader, a soft-spoken man with sensitive eyes, described what it is like to be burdened with such a gulf inside. "It's like a big box of unknown," he said in his delicately-accented voice. "If s a big box that's empty, yet it isn't empty. You know it's full of things but there's no way of getting into it. When you have a chance to talk about it, you remember so little that it takes just a few minutes to put in words what you can say about it because the rest of you just represses it all. The pieces you know; fill just a small corner of the box and the rest of the box is empty and yet you know it isn't. "And you know whatever is in there certainly affected you and influenced you and has a direct relationship to who you are and what you do. It's a strange kind of void. It's part of you and yet it's
separate from you. You must keep going in spite of it and just try and accept it." Fragments and snatches of memories from wartorn Europe haunted him, but he could never make sense of them or be sure they were not fabrications of his imagination. Besides, the images in his head were obscured—like shadows filtered through a screen. For example, he recalled resting his head in someone's lap and crying during a noisy, nighttime road trip, but could not remember who consoled him or why or where he was traveling. Then there ¥red K a d e r i s t h e o n l y b l o n d e child in this 1942 photo, second row, ^ a f J_^!_1™a?^..°L _^m second from left. Another friend, Marcel Chojnacki, with whom he is wandering the streets as a is seated in the third row, third from front. little boy lost and being "Emotionally, I was trying to stay pretty calm, whisked away to safety. Why he was alone and who cool and collected because I didn't want to build up rescued him he did not know. "It was all bits and pieces," Kader recalled. "Some any kind of false hopes," he said. "I mean, who was of it I knew was facts; some may have come from going to know anything about this one little Jewish something I remembered and other parts of it may boy in the middle of this immense devastation that have come from something I read and incorporated. went on in Europe?" Much to his astonishment, however, he discovAfter a while, things kind of merge and it's hard to ered a wealth of information that, for the first time, tell what is a memory and what?s a nightmare." Striking an uneasy truce with his seemingly irre- gave him a near complete picture of how his own trievable and intractable past, Kader got to the hidden child story played out and revealed the point of never expecting to fully know what caused identities of those individuals whose actions shielded him from almost certain death. These revelahim to be spared amid the Holocaust. Then, at the urging of a fellow hidden cMld from tions came about as the result of Kader meeting Belgium who, amazingly enough, had also wound people at the conference who knew his story either up as a pediatric specialist practicing in Omaha- as researchers or as first-hand participants who child psychiatrist Tom Jaeger—Kader joined Ms aided his survival. friend at the First International Gathering of (Continued on page 9) Children Hidden During World War H in a shared search for clues to their missing stories. COMING EVENTS: Heading into the 1991 conference in New York Yom HaShoah, community commemoration City, the then-52-year-old Kader adopted a decided- of the Holocaust-Wednesday, April 25, 7 p.m., ly guarded attitude about what he might find, so as at Temple Israel not to be disappointed if his questions turned up no Yom HaAtzmuut, Sunday, May 6, 12:30 p.m.. at real answers. the JCC