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Category: Life
Israel – a land of many blessings, including wine
Shiloh Winery overlooks the Shiloh River and the Judean Hills. (photo from shilohwinery.com)
The second in a short series featuring nine Israeli wine producers features Mayer Chomer of Shiloh Winery, situated above the Shiloh River overlooking the Judean Hills.
Mayer Chomer: Shiloh Winery was opened in 2005. That’s when we started running operations. We started in a very small garage, making boutique, very selected wines. I think that we’ve been making good product, good wines. Now the winery has built up to 10,000 cases and we’re growing.
Yossie Horwitz: Can you tell a little about the winemaker, the philosophy of the winery, what types of wines you’re trying to make?
MC: So, we started wanting to make just quality wines. We’re not interested in the volume business. We wanted to make very, very unique wines, quality wines, and obviously we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the rest of our colleagues and competitors. So, our philosophy is really making no compromises in our process: making and investing as much as we can in our equipment and, obviously, trying to be and to make always the best wines possible based on our grapes, our varieties that we have available and, you know, we invest a lot of money planting our vineyards so we can really control our quality. We’ve been just – thank God, you know – selecting good grapes based on a lot of research and making the wines that you see in the market. Thank God, people are acknowledging it by its quality.
YH: What types of wines do you make? Do you make single varietals or blends?
MC: We do have several series. We have the Mosaic, which is our flagship, a blend of five different grapes. We have a series that we call Secret Reserve. We have a merlot, a shiraz and a cab – straight cab. We also have the Shor series. Shor means bull in Hebrew, and the reason why we call it the Shor is because we inherited the lands of Joseph. It recognizes the bull that he slaughtered in the Bible. We also have barbera, merlot and a cab. And we have a lower blend; we call it Mor. We have a white wine, we have a dessert wine – we have all kinds of range!
YH: What’s special about the terroir where your grapes come from?
MC: I can tell you all the things about my terroir, but I’m going to answer you with a quote from the Bible…. The Bible says that Joseph got an extra blessing from the patriarch Jacob…. You know, many people … comment [o]n the Bible, one of them was Rashi, who was very famous, he asked: “What is so special about this blessing? Why did he [get] this land? [Does] Shiloh ha[ve] an extra blessing?” And, on this spot, Rashi answers, “Because the fruits are sweeter.” So, we have a gorgeous, gorgeous place to grow and plant our vineyards. As a matter of fact, many of the wineries are planting vineyards in Shiloh because of this quality. Outstanding quality!
YH: What are the plans for the future?
MC: Well, continue to do good wine, keeping the quality at all costs. And we want to grow, obviously, but we want to grow as per the request of our customers. If our demand will grow, because people will continue acknowledging our quality, then we’ll grow. Otherwise, we will stay where we are, always doing different things and new important things that can be attractive to our customers and clients. But always keeping proportions, meaning we want to be always a quality winery, as opposed to a mass winery.
YH: Can you tell us a little about how you got started in the wine business?
MC: To make this very long story short, I lived in Spain for several years. I was working and doing my PhD. I’m a lawyer by defect!… So I was there and, obviously, Spain is a very important wine region. And every time I would have people over to my house for holidays or for the Sabbath, I was very frustrated that I couldn’t get a good kosher wine. So, back in the [United] States, I was a little bit naïve and I thought, “I’m going to change the world! And I’m going to have just good quality wines, and I’m going to go to Israel and make a good winery.” And that was the beginning of it.
YH: When was this?
MC: This was in 1997. I was in Spain until 2001. So then, when I moved to Israel, I was working for a couple of years and then I decided, “OK, let’s make the dream come true!”
YH: What other regions inform your style of winemaking?
MC: I don’t know if I can answer that. I love French wines as well as Italian wines, which are very different, although they are the Old World. I really respect the New World wines: New Zealand, California. I think it’s important to have a combination of New and Old, just not be limited, but actually just making the best wine possible. We like to make wines that we know customers will appreciate, because customers nowadays start looking for something new, something interesting and attractive. At the same time, you always have that romanticism of good quality, classic wines.
– This article is reprinted courtesy of the Grape Collective, an online publication for all things wine. For more information, visit grapecollective.com.
Israel’s second-largest winery, Barkan, grows all its own fruit
The visitors centre at Barkan Winery. (photo from barkanwinery.co.il)
Wine has been made in Israel since biblical times. The Book of Deuteronomy lists seven blessed species of fruit, including “the fruit of the vine.” Israel’s Mediterranean climate boasts many microclimates, which foster a diversity of wine styles.
The modern Israeli wine industry was greatly influenced by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, owner France’s Château Lafite Rothschild. He started making wine in Israel in the late 19th century, importing French vine varieties and winemaking knowledge, and founding Carmel Winery, today the largest wine estate in Israel.
By the late 1980s, most Israeli wine was low quality, used for sacramental purposes. But the 1990s saw a huge boom in the establishment of quality-focused boutique wineries that were taking an artisanal approach. Today there are hundreds of wineries producing in aggregate more than 10 million bottles per year. Three producers are responsible for 80 percent of the production: Carmel, Barkan and Golan Heights Winery.
This short series features nine Israeli producers about the wines they make, their individual path into winemaking and their terroir. The first in the series profiles Irit Boxer-Shank of Barkan Winery, the second-largest winery in Israel.
Christopher Barnes: How did you get involvd in wine?
Irit Boxer-Shank: Well, it’s from the family. My father used to own the winery, Barkan. Now, he’s just the CEO.
CB: How did that change?
IBS: I started out as the owner’s daughter. I grew up there since I was 10, so I did everything in the winery, from putting on the labels all the way to the vineyards, walking with the workers, and then the winery was sold to a bigger company. My father is the CEO. I’m the winemaker. We’re still there doing our stuff, and we love it, but it’s not family-owned now.
CB: Tell us a little bit about the terroir where your wines are made.
IBS: Well, because we’re a big winery, we do wines from all over the country, from the northe[rnmost] part to the south, including in the desert. We have all kinds of terroir. We have all the varieties. We do a lot of experiments. That’s what’s fun about being a winemaker in Barkan. I love it because I have fruit from all over the country. I have all kinds of varieties, and I can play all the time.
CB: How many different varieties are you making right now?
IBS: A lot of them, and we do a lot of experiments. We bring a lot of new varieties. There is now a malbec that is brand new. We’re going to bring it to the [United] States. Pinotage was the first different variety that we started growing in Israel, then we have marselan and caladoc from south of France. Well, we’re playing a lot with it. Some of them that are not as good, we’ll go back, and we’ll do something else, but we have a lot. Of course, the cabernet sauvignon is the king, it will always be the king, but we do a lot of varieties.
CB: I interviewed a winemaker in Australia who is using 60 different varieties in his wines. I said to him, “How do you keep track of it? How do you know what’s working and what’s not when you have that many?” Is it more of a challenge to make wine with a lot of different types of grapes?
IBS: I don’t think so. It’s like asking a person who has a lot of children, “How do you keep up with them?” It’s like you grow them from the beginning to the end, so you know each of the wines just like you know a person, all the way, very intimately.
CB: You mentioned malbec. How do you decide if you’re going to try a new variety?
IBS: It’s a long process. We go and try it in different countries. We see the soil and the climate that they’re growing it in, and the best versions of them – like malbec in Argentina, in the south of France. And then we go back home and see if there are very similar [conditions], as similar as we can in Israel, and then we plant just a small plot. If it’s good, we’ll plant more, and then there are trials in the winery to see how to ferment it and what kind of barrels to put it in. It takes us at least eight years to start an experiment on a variety and maybe take it to the market.
CB: Do you buy a lot of fruit?
IBS: No. One of the more interesting things about Barkan Wineries is that we grow everything ourselves. We are also the biggest grower in Israel because all of the grapes are ours, which gives us full, complete control in the winemaking.
CB: Do you have a philosophy of winemaking? Is there something that you feel is your stamp in terms of the process and the styles of wines that you make?
IBS: Well, I discovered that we like using technology to do more of the Old World style. We’re trying to have all the fun from all the different worlds, the New and the Old! That’s something that really characterizes Israelis. We do fusions – that’s what you call the Israeli kitchen cuisine: “the fusion.” We take something from the new and something from the old, and do something from Israel. I guess, in winemaking, it’s also like that.
– This article is reprinted courtesy of the Grape Collective, an online publication for all things wine. For more information, visit grapecollective.com.
Visit Israel’s ancient water holes
An aerial view of the acropolis of Herodium. (photo from commons.wikimedia.org)
In Israel, water scarcity has long been an issue. Even the Old Testament narrates that the Hebrews complained to Moses about the lack of fresh drinking water (Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:2-13) in the arid Zin Wilderness.
Whether the answer to that particular water problem came from Divine intervention or from human ingenuity or both, the fact remains that the people who populated the ancient Land of Israel figured out sustainable solutions to their water shortages. This article focuses on three historical examples of sustainable water practice.
The first of the sustainable water system to be examined takes you forward in ancient history and north of the Zin Wilderness or Desert (Midbar Tzin, in Hebrew) to Herodium, a hilltop palace and fortress built by King Herod that stood securely at the highest peak in the Judean Desert.
Herodium was constructed more than 2,000 years ago in 23-20 BCE. Needless to say, it was crucial to have access to drinking water in this semi-arid and elevated location, and four vast underground cisterns for rainwater and spring water were carved deep into the mountain. Three of the cisterns were built in close proximity, about 80 feet below the summit. The fourth was hewn slightly above, about 16 feet from the summit. The largest cistern could hold up to 400,000 gallons of water. Access to the three lower cisterns was via the northeast side of the mountain, close to Herodium’s only flight of steps.
Water traveled a few miles from the Spring of Artas to drain into the large pool of Lower Herodium. It was carried uphill on donkeys and emptied into the lower cisterns. There were two ways to obtain water from these cisterns. One, exiting the palace-fortress with empty water skins or jars via the stairs until reaching the opening to the three lower cisterns. Water would then either be carried all the way back or, two, be transported to the opening of the higher cistern, at which point water was (ingeniously) funneled into the reservoir. A bucket attached to a man-made vertical shaft then brought this water up to the palace courtyard. This method was less labor intensive and insured the privacy of the “royals.”
As the nursery rhyme states, “some like it hot and some like it cold.” At Herodium, you had both hot and cold – and more. The Roman-style bathhouse featured a below-floor heating system in both the tepidarium (warm) and the caldarium (perhaps the precursor of the hot tub?), as well as a cold bath (frigidarium), or some kind of Roman bath/Hasmonean ritual bath hybrid, according to a Stanford professor of history.
According to David Mevorah, a curator of a Herod exhibit at the Israel Museum, by installing Roman baths, the king helped spread the importance of washing to the indigenous people of ancient Israel. Moreover, at what is called Lower Herodium (apparently the high-rent district of the day), the enormous pool (referred to by local residents today as El Hammam and measuring 70×45 metres or 230 feet) functioned as a swimming pool, a water reservoir and a small lake for boating, according to historians.
Today, Herodium is no longer a hilltop palace-fortress, but an amazing national park located just south and east of Jerusalem. For directions and hours, call the Herodian National Park at 057-776-1143 or visit parks.org.il.
***
Another (though more modern) solution to water scarcity is located just across the street from the Jerusalem Theatre at 17 Marcus St. Five large cisterns once serviced the Jesus Hilfe Asyl (what later became known as the Hansen Hospital). The Herrnhut Brothers, German Christians affiliated with the Moravian Church, donated the money to build the hospital in the late 1800s. It housed and treated people who were suffering from Hansen’s disease, a bacterial disease that was misdiagnosed as leprosy.
With the water collected, the 70 hospital patients (plus, in some cases, their healthy children) and the German Sisters of Mercy met all their water requirements, including medical needs, personal sanitation, in the kitchen and laundries, and for garden and farm maintenance.
Under the supervision of Jesus Hilfe builders, local workers constructed the cisterns, the largest of which was probably built in 1898. When full, it held 15×15 metres of water. In late December 1902, it even overflowed.
The other four cisterns were fed from rain gutters, which began on the hospital roof complex. Rain was collected from the staircase, the cistern roof and even from the road outside the compound’s high stone wall. Two cisterns were built near the laundry; one cistern was built near the southern garden while the others were situated within the main building, in the central courtyard or kitchen area.
With the advent of medicines to effectively treat Hansen’s disease, the in-patient hospital closed. Over the years, it has been an Israeli Ministry of Health outpatient facility and an early-childhood development centre. At present, it is being used as a Jerusalem municipal cultural centre. Inside the facility, you can visit an informative exhibit dealing with the history of the hospital and health care in Jerusalem. For visiting hours and tour arrangements, email [email protected] or call 054-744-6123.
***
Another ingenious water system is today located in a Ramla (or Ramle) city park. During the early Muslim period, in the early eighth century, Ramla was a strategically significant town, and served as the administrative centre of Palestine. Ramla was close to the road serving the holy city of Jerusalem and the port of Jaffa. Obviously, maintaining control of such an important location meant it had to be populated. This included providing inhabitants with a viable source of water.
Entering the city park, you’ll catch a glimpse of some long, rounded structures peeking up from the ground. When you descend the steep, narrow metal staircase (that now covers the original stone) leading to the pool, you take a step back in time, into the early Muslim period. This building, however, was not just any old storage unit. This elaborate reservoir, built in 789, is decorated with heavy brick, stone arches and a domed roof. Down below, you’ll find yourself facing an underground dock. It could pass for a medieval fort or a house, except that the floor is missing. In its place, the different chambers are filled with water deep enough for row boating! Altogether, the place gives you a mini-taste of Venice, Italy, except that at Ramla’s Pool of Arches, you never see the sky.
Today, we know arches make the sturdiest of structures, but this was still a novel idea back in the eighth century. Indeed, this construction proved so successful that the 400-plus-metre Pool of Arches withstood the devastation of the 1068 CE earthquake. You can see five of the original six vaults that covered the pool. Fifteen square pillars and 16 cross-shaped pillars support the vaults. Pointed arches exist between each pair of pillars. To compliment the arches, the architect designed small windows above them. These windows were likewise shaped as pointed arches. Locals drew water from 24 square openings in the ceiling.
There are various theories about the reservoir’s original source of water. Some claim it was filled only with rainwater. A more compelling assertion is that water flowed 10 kilometres from Tel Gezer via Caliph Sulayman ibn Adb al-Malik’s water conduit (in Hebrew referred to as an amah). Two points are clear: (1) it wasn’t water from any adjacent spring and (2) we are talking about a part of the world that is hot and dry for months at a time. The engineering and maintenance of this cistern was so successful that archeologists believe it was actively used for 150 years.
The site has a somewhat obscure history and goes by a variety of names, including the Pool of St. Helena and the Pool of Al-Anziya. In the early 20th cenutry, the British repaired the pool, but it was the (post-statehood) Ramla Municipality that converted it for boating.
After you visit the Pool of Arches, make note of the continuation of the city’s old subterranean water system. Ancient water cisterns are located in the White Tower’s large courtyard.
Visitors aged 2 and up can take a boat ride; life jackets are provided. For hours and directions, call 08-977-1595, 08-920-7586 or 052-851-0715. A helpful map can be found at ramla.muni.il/eng.
Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: a Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams published in English, Hebrew and Arabic (take-a-peek-inside.com).
Norman Tel Aviv gets makeover
The Norman Tel Aviv (all photos from the hotel)
The Norman Tel Aviv (thenorman.com), a luxurious boutique hotel, has restored two buildings on Nachmani Street, at the heart of the Tel Aviv UNESCO heritage site for historic Bauhaus architecture. The newly renovated hotel’s management are also dedicated patrons of the arts, seeking to support contemporary artistic expression in Israel. When complete, the complex will be a travel destination that houses and showcases many avant-garde cultural treasures.
“Tremendous care has been taken to restore these buildings to their original grandeur, preserving the eclectic style, Renaissance and oriental influences that characterize the edifice at #23 Nachmani, as well as the striking modernist architecture of the adjacent building at #25,” said Olivier Heuchenne, managing director of the Norman.
The hotel – whose grand opening is planned for this summer – will sport an interior design echoing the luxury and style of the grand hotels of the early 20th century, featuring top restaurants, an extraordinary collection of Israeli artwork, an elegant library bar and the Norman’s signature world-class amenities.
The art collection, comprised of more than 100 works, stands at the centre of this accomplishment, uniting design themes and creating an interactive experience for guests. Featured are works by Ilit Azoulay, Sigalit Landau, Klone, Dana Levy, Assaf Shaham and Tsibi Geva, among others, celebrating a class of leading contemporary Israeli artists whose work is exhibited worldwide.
For Tamar Dresdner, the in-house art curator and consultant tasked with selecting works for display, the opportunity to partake in the restoration is a dream come true. “I’ve been living in Tel Aviv for years,” she said in an interview. “I remember walking past these buildings when they were residential properties and then entering them when they housed offices for businesses and lawyers. I always fantasized about what could be done with the space.”
Survivor Judith Weiszmann was saved by Raoul Wallenberg
Judith Weiszmann holds an audience of students spellbound at Merivale High School in Ottawa in October 2013. (photo by Jeremy Page)
No matter the audience, Judith Weiszmann has three key messages when she speaks about the Holocaust: always remember the good that one person can do in the world, pay attention to the pockets of antisemitism springing up in some parts of Europe and North America, and remember that living in peace with your neighbors is much better than the alternative.
Judith and her husband Erwin, z”l, both structural engineers who emigrated to Canada after the Hungarian Revolution, were frequent speakers about the Holocaust for schools and service clubs in Winnipeg, where Judith still lives and continues to be an outreach speaker. The families of both Judith and Erwin were saved by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman-turned-diplomat who came to Hungary towards the end of the war and managed to issue thousands of Schutzpasses (a document identifying the bearer as a Swedish citizen rather than as a Jew) to Hungarian Jews who were on the brink of being deported to concentration camps.
In 2011, the Swedish government issued a stamp commemorating the 100th birthday of Wallenberg. It featured a picture of Wallenberg in the foreground and an image of a Schutzpass in the background, complete with a picture of the 14-year-old bearer of the pass, Judith Kopstein, who later became Judith Weiszmann. Serendipitously, Judith had presented a copy of her Schutzpass to Wallenberg’s half-sister Nina 10 years previously when Nina attended the unveiling of a statue in her brother’s honor in Toronto. Upon returning to Sweden, unbeknown to Judith, Nina framed her Schutzpass and hung it in her home. Years later, the Swedish Postal Services made use of the image and Canada also issued a stamp using the same Schutzpass, never imagining that the young girl pictured in it was still alive. When Canada Post learned that Judith, then 83, was very much alive, and tremendously honored to appear on a Canadian stamp with Wallenberg, they held a special ceremony for her in Toronto to mark the connections.
Since the issuing of the Wallenberg stamps, Judith has received a wide-ranging number of speaking requests – requests she is only too glad to oblige. In her words, they provide her with an opportunity to “bear witness” to the selflessness of Wallenberg and remind her audiences that forces of evil can take root again if we are not vigilant.
In Ottawa, in October 2013, Judith held an audience of students spellbound in the ethnically diverse Merivale High School during both her morning and afternoon presentations. According to teacher Irv Osterer, whose efforts resulted in Judith’s visit, “by the afternoon, word had gone around the school about how important it was for everyone to hear this woman speak. By the afternoon presentation, the kids were almost hanging from the rafters of the auditorium.”
Drawing parallels between the fact that she was the age of many of the high school students when she lived through the Holocaust, she inspired the students with messages about the difference one person can make in the world, how hating your neighbor is not a way forward, and about how a better world will come from all of us living side by side in peace. At the conclusion of her remarks, a young woman in a hijab bounded to the front of the theatre to give Judith a spontaneous embrace.
From Ottawa, Judith continued to Toronto, where she spoke to a joint session of B’nai Brith Canada and the Law Society of Upper Canada and to a conference hosted by Canada, the 2013 chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an international body that deals with Holocaust and related educational matters and liaises with several governments, Holocaust researchers and educators.
As a result of the Toronto speaking engagements, in February 2014, Judith had the opportunity to realize a lifelong dream, which was to travel to Wallenberg’s homeland, Sweden. On this occasion, she was the guest of the Canadian government and was asked to speak once more to another conference of the IHRA in which the leadership of the alliance rotated from Canada to England.
The stories she told of how the war affected Hungarian Jews and how Wallenberg’s interventions saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers no doubt resonated as deeply with the Swedish audience as they did with those in Canada. One of Judith’s most remarkable memories is about the last time anyone in the West actually saw Wallenberg.
Judith’s father, Andor Kopstein, was a senior administrative support to Wallenberg. German was the language in which they communicated. On the final day Wallenberg was seen, they were in Budapest together, as Wallenberg was to travel to Debrecen, a Hungarian city that had already been liberated. In conjunction with the Swedish Red Cross, Wallenberg’s intentions were to purchase food in Debrecen for the general population in Budapest, all of whom had had little access to food. It was widely known that Wallenberg had a considerable amount of gold on his person – funds provided by his own government and the governments of several Allied countries – with which he planned to pay for the food. Wallenberg was about to get into the middle car of a three-car convoy, with Russian military officers in the lead and last cars. Just before the convoy pulled away, Wallenberg said to Judith’s father, in German, “I am not sure if these are my bodyguards or my captors.” Wallenberg was never seen again. A young Judith had watched the exchange, hiding behind an entrance door to her apartment building, and her father repeated Wallenberg’s words to her when the convoy departed.
At the conclusion of the IHRA conference, Judith met with several Hungarian men and women who had moved to Sweden immediately after the war. At the end of the war, Sweden offered the opportunity for Jewish orphans to be brought to its shores. All those who came at that time have remained in Sweden and made their lives there. Other Hungarians came to Sweden after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
Judith gave one further presentation on her trip: to teachers involved in an educational institution that the Swedish government formed some years ago after hearing about resurgences of antisemitism in Norway and elsewhere in Europe.
The fate of Wallenberg has never been known for certain but was undoubtedly a topic of conversation when Judith had the chance once more to meet his half-sister Nina. Stopping for tea with Nina and several of Nina’s nieces, and with her own daughter Ann, who accompanied her on the trip, Judith told one interviewer that she and Nina were “united in a love for her brother Raoul.”
From Sweden, Judith traveled to Budapest to visit with relatives and speak at the Jewish Club, a sort of unofficial arm of the IHRA. The club receives some modest financial help from the alliance for its efforts to fight antisemitism. Its main activity is to present lectures and other educational presentations to teachers, students and, occasionally, the general public about the Holocaust and antisemitism. As Judith explained to me, “During the communist regime, there was no education about WWII. Today’s reality is that there is whole generation of teachers who have grown up with no background whatsoever on what happened during the war, Hungary’s role in it and the consequences of antisemitism. They cannot teach what they do not themselves know about.”
Judith’s presentation drew about 70 people, 60 of whom were students at the senior high school or university level. Organizers told her that about 55 of the students present were non-Jews, which Judith saw as an expression of interest and open-mindedness, and she remarked that the students asked intelligent questions. Many attendees admitted that they were hearing for the first time about Hungary’s role in the war and about the treatment of Jews and other minorities during that time. At the conclusion of her talk, one non-Jewish young man stood to say that he knew that there were fewer survivors each year and that “we young people have to take over and talk about it.”
Since returning home from Sweden and Hungary, Judith continues to share her messages with groups of students and others in Winnipeg. Now, she also wants to talk about new concerns she has about the rise of antisemitic incidences in Hungary. In her view, after the landslide victory of Hungary’s right-wing party in the country’s national elections on April 6, “things do not look very promising for Hungarian Jews.” She is irritated with plans (proposed by the previous government) to erect a monument suggesting that Hungary was occupied during the Second World War and that any fault lies with the German Nazis. A very feisty Judith Weiszmann is here to say otherwise – however, she is also here to remind us how much good one person can do in the world and that we all have options to work at peaceful coexistence.
Karen Ginsberg, an Ottawa-based writer, considers herself blessed to count Judith as a friend.
Mourning turns to joy
Passover is a traditional time for families to sit down together and celebrate a holiday of freedom and deliverance. It’s a time to catch up and share meaningful moments. For one family torn apart by the Second World War, this Passover held a special significance as they caught up on nearly 70 years of history.
For 65 years, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Gershon Chanowitz said Kaddish for his sister, Asna Mera, who he believed had been murdered by the Nazis in 1942. And, for more than half a century, Asna Mera thought that all of her siblings had perished in the Holocaust, leaving her a lone survivor. But thanks to an incredible turn of events, the children of these survivors have learned of each other’s existence and have been reunited. With a shot-in-the-dark Google search and an implausible email, the long-lost Chanowitz cousins began unearthing a mystery spanning six decades and three continents.
A mysterious email
“About a week ago, my son, Moishe, the Chabad emissary [to St. Maarten], received an email through his Chabad website from someone in Israel searching for any news of his relatives,” said Rabbi Ben Zion Chanowitz, a Chabad emissary in Monticello, N.Y., and the son of Gershon Chanowitz – who passed away this past summer at the age of 91.
An excerpt from the email (grammatically edited) read:
“Shalom. I don’t speak English well…. I am from Vitebsk, Belarus. My name is Sashe Bumginz. My mother’s surname was Chanowitz from the shtetl of Glubokoe in the Vitebsk region. In the war, all of my family perished. I am interested in all information on Chanowitz from Glubokoe.”
“I was skeptical at first,” admitted Chanowitz. “We know all of our relatives, after all.” But then a follow up email “shook everything I knew.” Bumginz sent another email detailing his family history with names, places and dates that matched up exactly with Chanowitz’s. He explained how his mother, who passed away in 2007, survived the war and raised a family. As far as he knew, no other close family survived, but he was always searching for any information he could find on his family history.
Suddenly, the largely American-based Chanowitz family was electrified. Could their father’s sister have survived the war? Could they have cousins they hadn’t known existed?
Bumginz grew up in Soviet Russia and eventually moved to Israel in the early ’90s, where he is currently living in Herzilyah with his wife and two children. When he first arrived in Israel he contacted the Holocaust centre and museum Yad Vashem, as well as other resources over the years, attempting to seek out any information they might have on his mother’s family, but every search reached a dead end.
In March 2014, on Purim, Bumginz was invited by a Chabad co-worker to a farbrengen, a Chassidic gathering to celebrate the holiday. At the farbrengen, Bumginz opened up about his history and mentioned that his family, Chanowitz, has been Chabad for generations. He asked around if anyone knew the name, and one participant mentioned that there were Chabad emissaries with that name and suggested that Bumginz use Google to find them. A short search led to the Chanowitz family of St. Maarten, and the email above was received and then forwarded to Ben Zion Chanowitz.
An email exchange ensued.
“Many of us are excited and emotional about this special family news,” said Rebbetzin Simie Schtrocks, Gershon’s daughter. Schtrocks resides in South Surrey, serving as co-director of the Centre for Judaism, Chabad’s branch serving the Lower Fraser Valley.
“It is mind blowing that after 65 years plus we should now find out that Asna Mera actually did survive, had two children and lived in Vitebsk of all places. How tragic it is that she was unaware that the Lubavitch world had continued to flourish and that she had brothers 6,000 miles away who would have been thrilled to help her.”
As the family digests this news, they are slowly discovering stories explaining the years of misinformation, and uncovering many painful details along the way.
Gershon’s story
In the early 1920s, Gershon Chanowitz was born in the town of Glubokoe, in what was then Poland, a border city that has belonged to Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Belarus in the previous 100 years. He was one of 10 children in a dynastic Chabad Chassidic family. His father, Ben Zion, was a shochet (ritual slaughterer), a follower of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, and an important figure in the small town of 5,000 Jews.
Gershon was sent at a young age to learn in a yeshivah in Otwock, Poland, and he was there in 1941 after the war broke out. At the advice of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, he escaped north to Warsaw and then Vilna. He found out about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese ambassador to Kovno, who was signing visas that saved some 2,000 Jewish lives. He obtained visas for three of his siblings, and snuck back to Glubokoe to beg his father to allow him to add his youngest brother, Yisroel, to a forged family passport, allowing him to leave as well. Ben Zion, his wife and the other children stayed behind. Gershon procured visa #1785 for himself, #1836 for his oldest sister Fruma, #1841 for his brother Shmuel Avraham and #2027 for young Yisroel. It was just in time too – the last issued visa was #2039.
The four siblings traveled to Kobe, Japan, and then Shanghai, China, where they resided until they could obtain visas to the United States. During that time, Shmuel Avraham died of an illness in Shanghai. When the war was over, they corresponded with different services seeking any information about their remaining family and discovered that their parents and siblings had been killed. A fifth brother, Chaim, escaped the war, and moved to the newly founded state of Israel and then to America. Eventually, the other three siblings made it to the United States and started rebuilding their lives, establishing the large families that exist today.
When the surviving siblings in the West sought out information on exactly what had happened to their family, they learned that, one day, when the Nazis arrived in town seeking to fill a “death quota,” they went about town killing people. The remaining Chanowitz family barricaded themselves in their house. At one point, they heard desperate banging on the door and 16-year-old Asna Mera, anguished at the thought that it might be a Jew seeking refuge, and despite her family’s protest, answered the door. The German soldier standing there grabbed her and took her away to be killed. The rest of the family was killed a year later in another mass murder.
Gershon and his surviving siblings, Chaim, Yisroel and Fruma, marked their parents’ and siblings’ passing every year, and said Kaddish for them throughout their lives.
Asna Mera’s story
The day that Asna Mera opened the door to the Nazi, she was taken to a soccer field with about 800-900 other Jews. They were then boarded onto trucks to be taken to be executed. On the way, a German commander picked her, and 14 other young beautiful girls, to be taken to a German army base to be among the soldiers. At one point, Asna Mera was with a soldier who had a large knife on his belt. She grabbed the knife and stabbed him to death, running away into the woods.
In the woods, she eventually met up with her 12-year-old brother, Tzvi Hersh, who had also escaped. The two siblings were freezing in the brutal winter and starving. They remembered that their well-respected father had a non-Jewish farmer friend in a nearby town to whom he once gave a large down coat and an expensive ring. They decided to go ask the farmer, who their father had always trusted, for the coat so they could survive. Scared to go together, Tzvi Hersh went first and knocked on the door. The farmer opened the door and grabbed the young boy, tied him up and gave him to the police in exchange for a 10-kilogram bag of flour. Tzvi Hersh was hanged that day.
Asna Mera miraculously survived the war, thinking she was a lone survivor. In her attempts to find her siblings, she traced them to Vilna but then their trails disappeared. She never found out what happened to them. At age 39, she married and moved to Vitebsk, which at that point was a part of Soviet Russia. She had two sons, one Simeon/Ben Zion, named after her father, and another, Sashe/Sholom Ber. Despite communism’s harsh shadow, she raised them as religious Jews.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Sashe moved to Israel. Asna Mera once visited in the early 2000s, and went to Yad Vashem herself, where she again tried to seek out more information to no avail.
After the war, Asna Mera discovered the heartbreaking news that the day after she killed the German soldier, the Nazis returned to Glubokoe and killed 150 people in retaliation. She suffered under the shadow of this horrific event all her life.
“She had very little happiness in life,” said Sashe. “She went through so much during the war.” And, when her oldest son Ben Zion was brutally killed while serving in the Russian army (he was thrown off a train by his comrades), she was devastated anew. “She was always quiet and withdrawn and broken.”
“We all wish she at least had happiness,” said Schtroks upon learning the news. “And she still did from her surviving son, passing down the family tradition and maintaining a legacy. We are just sad that although my father and his siblings tried so hard to find missing relatives, they did not find her in time to help her and ameliorate her situation.”
A family reunited
Despite the painful history that they learned along the way, the Chanowitz and Bumginz family are overjoyed at the discovery of one another, and eagerly looked forward to an emotional meeting in person after the Passover holiday. Benson, the son of Yisroel Chanowitz, was the first one of the family to meet Sashe during the intermediate days of Passover last week.
Rabbi Ben Zion Chanowitz recalled a story of his father during his yeshivah years in Poland right before the war, when he had the unique opportunity to observe the Passover seder of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe.
“A Chassid at the table asked the rebbe how we can be celebrating the holiday of freedom while we are still in exile – suffering under the threat of communist Russia and Nazi Germany. The rebbe sagely replied that ‘The redemption in Egypt showed us that you can leave, even if you are in the deepest exile.’”
This year, as Jewish families all over the world gathered to retell the miracles of old, they had a biblical obligation to feel “like they themselves left Egypt.” As they relived their family history, both the darkest moments and the miraculous survival, the Chanowitz and Bumginz families celebrated the miracle of redemption like never before.
– This article was originally published on lubavitch.com and is reprinted with permission.
Mystery photo … April 25/14
Group of men with documents, State of Israel Bonds, Vancouver, B.C., 1970. (JWB fonds, JMABC L.14607)
If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected].
This week’s cartoon … April 18/14
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This week’s cartoon … April 11/14
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