Dear Child survivors of the Holocaust, We trust you and your loved ones are well. Time has passed since our last edition of Connections and the daily news from Israel remains of great concern as do the actions of protesters at our universities and on our streets. Resilience has become a very important word for me, and there are many examples of pride and strength from not only Israel but our own Child Survivors who share their thoughts on the situation when we speak.
An invitation will be sent to you in August, inviting you to bring along your children and grandchildren; the time capsule complete with all its stories will be present. This occasion will also celebrate the resilience of Child survivors of the Holocaust.
CSH Time capsule event:
September 15, 2024 will be a very special occasion for our child survivors and their families. In 2014 we held a ceremony to close the Child Survivor Time Capsule We asked you to write your story and add an item of memorabilia to the special storage box, to be locked away and not opened till 2054!! That event was an incredible success and here we are ten years later ready to celebrate our first milestone anniversary, having reached the ten-year mark.
In this edition you will find an article on CSH statistics sharing how many survivors are alive today and where they are living. CSH, Claude Sanicki writes about recently discovering his mother’s testimony and Margarita Rialkennen’s introduction for her mother Roza at the recent Yom Hashoah commemoration where Roza was one of six candle lighters, is a heartfelt tribute from a second-generation much-loved daughter.
Sending you and yours a special warm hug over these cold winter months, we look forward to seeing you all in September.
Lena’s Desk:
Viv Parry & Lena Fiszman Co-Presidents
The amazing true story of a baby illegally born and smuggled out of Kovno ghetto
Zipora Klein Jakob’s first impression of her cousin Elida was that she dressed and acted differently and spoke only Yiddish with the adults in the family.
Elida was a young teenager who had arrived in Israel from Vilnius, Lithuania in 1957 with a couple who were apparently her parents. At only 12 years old, Jakob didn’t connect with this slightly older girl who the adults said was “from over there.”
Elida Freidman Goldberg Katzman changed names, families, countries and continents numerous times as she grappled until her premature death with being a Holocaust orphan from birth.
Jakob’s parents had immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1935 and did not speak to her about the Holocaust and
relatives who had perished, so she had no idea what “from over there” meant, nor what her cousin may have endured.
Then an uncle named Lazar and his wife Toibe showed up in Haifa from the United States after a few months to adopt Elida.
“I caught snatches of conversation about legal complications with the adoption process, but it wasn’t until I read a newspaper article about an unusual adoption story that I realized that this was about Elida. From that point, I became obsessed with her story and it became my way of dealing with the Shoah,” Jakob said.
Jakob, a history teacher and editor, spent nine years researching Elida’s astonishing and tragic life. The result was a biographical novel self-published in Hebrew in 2020. An English translation was picked up by HarperCollins and published as “The Forbidden Daughter” on April 23.
“I had amassed so many facts, but I did not want to write a dry biography but rather a novel based on the facts. It was important to create for Elida’s character an inner life — her thoughts, her feelings, the dilemmas she faced, and how she handled them,” Jakob said.
“I was able to do this by reading a great deal about people with similar life stories and experiences, and through interviews with people who knew her. I also got to spend some time with her when we were both adults before she died,” she said.
Elida’s life started miraculously as a baby born illegally in the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto in 1943 to prominent physician Dr. Jonah Freidman and his wife Tzila. Although later in life she spelled her name Elida, her parents gave her the Hebrew name Ee-leida, which means non-birth, to reflect the forbidden nature of her arrival.
A non-Jewish family that Freidman had helped before the war agreed to take the baby if she could be smuggled out. Freidman’s cousin Lazar Goldberg helped in the clandestine mission, promising Freidman that if either of them survived the war, they would find and adopt the other’s children.
The Freidmans were killed during the liquidation of the ghetto, but Goldberg survived, leading him to show up in Haifa wanting to take Elida home with him to the US.
“This was the pact I read about in the newspaper. It made such an impression on me. You have to remember that this was before the Eichmann trial, when no one
spoke about the Holocaust, especially not to children,” Jakob said.
Drugged and hidden in a basket, Ee-leida was brought to a farm located far from Kaunus. There she was renamed Rita and raised by a woman named Stanislava and her mother. Rita knew the women as her mother and grandmother, and Stanislava’s young daughter Audra as her sister.
After the war and the Soviet takeover, Stanislava handed over the Jewish girl to a childless survivor couple in Vilnius. The pre-school age girl was given yet another name. Now she was Gita Ruhin, although she was never formally adopted.
Adjusting to a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking household and new parents was challenging for the girl, especially with a father scarred from his wartime experiences who either ignored, or worse yet, physically abused her. Gita found her only solace in books and her Russian-language school, where she excelled.
Having forgotten her earliest years with Stanislava on the farm, Gita knew only her 10 years with the Ruhins. However, as a young teenager, she started picking up on signs that her true identity may lie elsewhere.
Once the Ruhins understood that biological relatives of their daughter had made contact with her, they eventually cooperated with efforts to arrange for the Ruhins’ emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1957.
“By then, Ee-leida had insisted on changing her name back to her birth name, and that is what we called her. She chose not to live with the Ruhins, who were given an apartment in Kiryat Haim, but rather with my uncle and aunt and their kids in Haifa,” Jakob said.
Elida and Dr. Richard Katzman with their sons John, Alexander and Tony in Israel 1973-1974. (Courtesy of Zipora Klein Jakob)
Ee-leida, who was good with languages, was just starting to pick up Hebrew and settle in when Lazar and Toibe
Goldberg showed up from Laredo, Texas, to adopt her. All, including the Ruhins, agreed that Ee-leida would have a better life with the Goldbergs in the US.
Thus, Ee-leida Freidman became Rita became Gita Ruhin became Ee-leida Freidman became Elida Goldberg — all within 15 years.
After an initially rough and rebellious adjustment to life in Laredo, Elida acquired unaccented English and enjoyed and did well in her studies. She convinced her parents to send her to a Catholic school, where the education was rigorous, and where she felt most comfortable, to her parents’ dismay.
“It’s understandable that they would feel that way. On one of my research trips, I went to Laredo and visited that school. Every room had a Madonna and Child in it,” Jakob said.
Jakob said that a common theme running through interviews with child survivors who were given to Christian strangers is their anger at their birth parents.
“They know intellectually that their parents were trying to save their lives, but emotionally they have this reaction of having been rejected,” Jakob said.
The cover of the original Hebrew edition of ‘The Forbidden Daughter’ features Elida Freidman Goldberg Katzman as a young woman. (Rikma Publishing)
“Many of them also find it hard to separate from their connection to their experience with the church in childhood. This was true in Elida’s case,” she said. Indeed, throughout the book, the protagonist struggles with her Jewish identity, feels comfortable in churches and Christian schools, and even proclaims several times that she wants to convert.
In graduate school for Slavic languages, Elida fell in love
‘The Forbidden Daughter’ author Zipora Klein Jakob (Courtesy)
and married. Now she was known as Lida Katzman — her sixth identity in a quarter century. The couple had three boys and moved around the US and to Israel for Elida’s emotionally unstable husband Dr. Richard Katzman’s research career. Her own burgeoning brilliant academic career was put on hold.
The subtitle of Jakob’s original Hebrew-language book states factually, with a clear Biblical reference, that Elida was the “daughter of three fathers and four mothers.” Another apt Biblical comparison would be Moses, who wandered the desert for decades and never made it to the Promised Land. With so many changes of names and families, and so much moving around, Elida never felt truly at home.
“Her turbulent, short life is symbolic of Jewish history in the second half of the 20th century,” Jakob said. It’s only when one reads the shocking final pages of “The Forbidden Daughter” that one understands how much so.
By Renee Ghert-Zand(Reprinted from the Times of Israel)
Speech for my mother Roza Riaikkenen, candle lighter Yom Hashoah 2024
It is my great privilege to introduce my mother, Roza Riaikkenen, to light a candle.
My mother was born on the 9th of March 1938, in Kaunas, Lithuania, into a happy, loving and welleducated family. She was 3 (1) when on the 22nd of June 1941 Germans attacked the USSR and Kaunas was occupied.
Roza’s grandfather was killed, and her father disappeared. Roza, her mother and grandmother were relocated to the Kaunas Ghetto, where she survived three ‘actions’ of extermination of children and elderly thanks to the courage of her mother and grandmother, and with help from the people of the ghetto underground. She was one of only six children out of thousands to survive the Kaunas ghetto.
My mother’s former Lithuanian nanny, Bronislava and her husband Kazimeras Varnauskas helped them with food and later found Maria and Kazys Baksha, a couple who agreed to take Roza, hide her and look after her, risking their own lives (2). The Baksha couple is now recognised as the Righteous among the Nations.
Many of my mother’s large family perished during the
war. But at the end of the war, thanks to a God’s miracle, Roza’s mother, who managed to escape from a German concentration camp, and her father, who had been evacuated to the North of Russia, returned, and the family reunited. Roza’s rescuers remained a part of our family (3).
After completing her studies, my mother became an engineer and scientist. She also taught children piano and eventually met my father and created a family. In 1995, thanks to the Australian government’s quota for prosecuted minorities, my mum was able to reunite with her younger sister Rachel (6) and bring our family to
Australia (7).
Today my mother lives together with me (8) and has four grandchildren. She enjoys writing books on spiritual philosophy and science (9), playing piano and gardening (10).
Mum actively participates in the Child Survivors of the Holocaust Group which is supported by the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.
I am so proud of my precious mother. In lighting this candle she honours those we have lost. May their memory be a blessing.
By Margarita RiaikkenenIn Australia, a new Holocaust museum doubles down on its mission after Oct. 7
Because many of the Queensland Holocaust Museum’s visitors have never met a Jew, its strategy of outreach takes on added importance in its quest to educate on racial tolerance.
With just a handful of small synagogues in Brisbane and a Chabad House in the state’s remote north, the Jewish community in Queensland, Australia, has historically been overshadowed by larger and more established Jewish communities in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth.
But this past August, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, made the long trip north from Canberra to visit Queensland’s first-ever Jewish Museum — a Holocaust museum in Brisbane that had just opened its doors in late June.
Queensland is usually known for its iconic Great Barrier Reef and top-notch surf beaches. Its small Jewish community numbers just 5,000 among a wider population of 5.5 million.
With Jews accounting for just 0.1 percent of the state’s population, most Queenslanders will never meet a Jew and are likely to have a limited understanding of Jewish culture and tradition. For that reason, the Queensland Holocaust Museum aims to have an outsize impact in educating one of Australia’s fastest-growing populations.
“The need for this museum and the education it provides has never been more relevant than in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel,” said museum board
member Danny Berkovic. “Educating the Australian public about where the extremes of social intolerance can lead has real relevance given the backdrop of the conflict in Israel.”
On October 7, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 240 more to the Gaza Strip. The magnitude — and the sheer brutality with which entire families, women, the elderly, and even infants were murdered in cold blood — led Israel’s government to vow to end the Hamas terror group and the threat it poses to innocent Israelis. But in the wake of the ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip to dismantle Hamas and bring the Israeli hostages home, antisemitism has skyrocketed around the globe — and Australia is no exception.
“Here is a state in Australia, where a lot of the population may not have had a chance to meet Jewish people, and there is a lot of misinformation about the Holocaust,” said Berkovic. “We hope the museum will help to educate Queenslanders about one of the most tragic chapters in human history, and also more generally, about racial
tolerance.”
Berkovic does not doubt the strategic importance of the museum in Queensland.
“Over 80% of the Jewish population [in Australia] live in Sydney and Melbourne. If we focus all our Holocaust education in these cities, we are missing a chance to educate large numbers of Australians who may not be thinking deeply about racial intolerance,” Berkovic said. Applying lessons of the Holocaust
Jason Steinberg is the president of Queensland’s Jewish Board of Deputies. In part, it is thanks to his dogged efforts over the past decade, that the Queensland Holocaust Museum became a reality. A born and bred Queenslander, Steinberg works at a global engineering and consulting firm but has spent years volunteering as a leader in his small community.
“If people understand the Holocaust and how it impacted Jewish people and other communities, they can apply it in their daily lives to be respectful of others, and support multiculturalism,” said Steinberg.
Israeli Ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon at the Queensland Holocaust Museum in Brisbane, Australia, August 2023. (Queensland Holocaust Museum and Education Center)
This vision accelerated in 2019, when Australia’s Jewish former treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, announced that he wanted to establish Holocaust museums in every single Australian state and territory. In addition to AU$3.5 million ($2.3 million) provided by the federal government, the Queensland Holocaust Museum has been funded through a mix of local grants including more than AU$4 million ($2.6 million) from Queensland’s state government and the Brisbane city council.
“I think I’m in a lucky position to be able to have advocated for our community for the first-ever Holocaust Museum,” said Steinberg. “We have also been very lucky that space for our physical museum [has been provided] by the Catholic Archdiocese in Brisbane,” he said, referring to the prime location the museum sits on in the
capital’s downtown.
While originally it was estimated that Queensland was home to only a few dozen Holocaust survivors, the small team at the museum has now identified more than 200 and is actively highlighting the stories of survival and resilience in Queensland’s community. The museum will also serve as an educational institution and will raise awareness about human rights, as well as foster dialogue on genocide prevention.
“The community of survivors, they are so honored that their family’s heritage is now immortalized in this museum, and it is also very emotional for the descendants,” said Steinberg.
Three-pronged approach
The museum is comprised of three components — a physical museum in Brisbane; a traveling museum that will visit regional areas across the state, such as Townsville; and an online museum highlighting the stories of Queensland’s Holocaust survivors.
The impact of the museum is likely to be felt far and wide in the enormous state.
Rabbi Ari Rubin heads the Chabad House in Cairns, a tropical holiday destination in Queensland’s far north. In 2023, he wrote an op-ed for the major local newspaper decrying antisemitism after a worker of a well-known local traffic control company drove around Cairns displaying an electric traffic management sign saying, “Jews did 9/11.” With an estimated 500 Jews among the city’s 150,000 residents, the perpetrator of such a hateful message had likely never even met a Jew.
Rubin is excited for the traveling museum to make its way to his locale and help educate locals.
“I really want the non-Jewish kids in the schools to get a taste of education about the Holocaust,” he said.
He is aware that his own children and others in his community have experienced harassment for being Jewish, and he is hopeful that the education offered by
the traveling museum will make a difference.
“I know children that suffer for being bullied for Jewish and hide their Judaism, so I hope this will improve things for them,” he said.
With Queensland set to host the 2032 Olympics and net migration set to double the population by 2046, the strategic importance of Queensland within Australia is likely to keep on growing.
“The Queensland population is spread across major
cities and a vast outback. Our online museum will help to deliver Holocaust education to those people who are unable to visit our physical museum in Brisbane or our traveling museum,” Berkovic said. “I don’t think anyone would want to ignore a population that’s going to be [more than] 10 million people by 2060.”
By Nomi Kaltmann(Reprinted from the Times of Israel) Almost 80 years
