Torah links generations

STAN TAVISS SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

In September 1997, the late Rabbi Imre Balla delivered a dedication address at the opening of the new Congregation Har-El synagogue on the North Shore. He declared that he was dedicating the synagogue to the memory of the 5,000 communities that perished during the Shoah.

"We must remember the million and a half Jewish children who were murdered during the most barbaric period in human history," he told the crowd
in attendance.

It was hardly surprising that this subject was foremost in his mind, considering what had happened to his own family, which he related to the audience.

"I recall the memory of a Jewish mother in the winter of 1944," he said. This mother was hiding in Budapest with her little baby son, always on the move from one hiding place to another. She also had another precious possession with her.

Her husband had been taken to a forced labor camp and her father was hiding somewhere else. She put a little Torah scroll, the family's proud heritage, into a box and carried it wherever she went with the baby. She felt her child's safety and the safety of the Torah were inseparable.

"Can you imagine this?" Balla implored. "A starving mother carrying her baby in one hand and a Torah scroll in the other, while the Nazis were randomly killing their Jewish victims in the Danube River and the liberators were bombing the city from above - a Jewish mother in this apocalyptic fiery inferno. Her baby died just a few days short of the liberation of the city."

That heroic mother was Bluma Balla, Rabbi Balla's late mother, and the little baby would have been his older brother. Rabbi Balla was born a little over three years later on Jan. 24,1948, and was often heard to say that even if the family Torah could not save the baby's life, it did give his mother the "courage and comfort to carry on with life after the war."

This extraordinarily beautiful Torah stayed with him during his entire life. It had its place of honor in the aron kodesh (holy ark) of the North Shore congregation during the 15 years that Balla served as its rabbi. When he left in 2000 to take over as rabbi at congregation B'nai Israel in St. Catharine's, Ont., his family Torah went with him. After his death, his widow hand-carried it back to Vancouver.

Balla had served proudly on the board of directors of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and he felt close to the survivor community in our city. One of his last wishes was carried out with the donation of the Balla Torah to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. It will be on permanent display there as a teaching exhibit, and as a lasting tribute to all those who perished, and to all those who survived.

Stan Taviss is a legal consultant and freelance writer in Vancouver.

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