This year, on Yom HaShoah, the duty of remembrance is shifting to a younger generation as the numbers of Baltimore survivors dwindle, as most are old and often in frail health.
A community commemoration, highlighting second- and third-generation survivors, will take place at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 5, at Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom Congregation. Baltimore Jewish Council is organizing this event. Several hundred people are expected, and there will be an opportunity to view the event online.
“We’re honoring the legacy of survivors through their descendants as our survivor community has become older and older,” said Howard Libit, executive director of BJC. “The second and third generation tell the stories of what their parents and grandparents experience, and it’s so powerful. It’s our sacred obligation to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten.”
Through 3G Baltimore, an organization of grandchildren of survivors, participants are receiving training to refine the stories of their grandparents and become more comfortable speaking in public about the story, Libit said.
For its annual Yom HaShoah program on May 5, the Jewish Federation of Howard County will present “Stumbling Stones to Remember: A Loved One Lived Here” at the Oakland Mills Meeting House in Columbia.
Robert Lang, reporter for WBAL NewsRadio and moderator of the Columbia program, will interview Judy Gartner, whose grandparents died in the Holocaust. Gartner has served on the Howard County Holocaust Memorial Committee for 14 years.
Gartner, 68, and her husband, Randy, attended a sidewalk ceremony in Berlin last year for the laying of Stolpersteine, literally a “stumbling stone,” in memory of her grandparents, Friedrich and Ella Weiler. Her grandparents lived in the house adjacent to the stumbling stone set in the sidewalk with their names. The Weilers were transported to Theresienstadt and then to Treblinka in 1942, where they were likely gassed, Gartner said.
“To me, it’s memorializing my grandparents who I never knew, but have gotten to know them somehow doing the stumbling stone,” said Gartner, who is a first-time presenter at the Howard County Yom HaShoah event. “Presenting in a program like Yom HaShoah gives people a takeaway that it’s something they can do. I can do that for my family.”
Claudia Andorsky of Ellicott City will be presenting at the Yom HaShoah event at Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom this year. She represents her late father, Henry Walter.
Andorsky, 70, was trained by professional storytellers, representing a group called Teach the Shoah, which includes Jennifer Zunikoff of Baltimore. The group teaches younger generations how to tell their ancestors’ stories.
“As a second generation, I’ve learned how to tell the story in my father’s voice as if he was telling the story,” Andorsky said. “I’ve been able to really connect with it and be comfortable with it.”
Andorsky was born in a displaced persons camp after the war. Her father and his brother were Holocaust survivors from Vienna and originally Hungary.
Andorsky’s father and his brother fled to Lviv, Poland, right before the Nazis invaded. “They used a lot of savvy and moxie to talk themselves into being civilians in the German army,” Andorsky said. “There was a colonel who took them under his wing and would move them to different divisions where they would function basically as translators and in other jobs. They were never in concentration camps, and they never got caught.”
The Andorskys took their children to Europe in 2016 to trace the footsteps of their ancestors. “It really means a lot to me to keep my father’s legacy alive. I have grandchildren now, and they will not have ever met him,” Andorsky said.
“My children now have connected with their ancestry and feel very strongly a part of that and will continue telling the story after I pass,” he added.
Jessica Silverman, 51, of Pikesville, is another presenter at the communitywide event at Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom. She took two classes that taught how to tell her grandmother’s story.
Her grandmother, Minnie Osher of Yonkers, New York, died in her late 90s on Nov. 19, 2023. For many years, she spoke about her experience at schools and other venues. Osher was a survivor of at least four concentration camps and was liberated at Bergen-Belson on April 15, 1945.
“Just surviving the Lodz ghetto was extremely difficult,” Silverman said. “She was extremely clever and shrewd. She had the perseverance and the resilience to want to live and did whatever she could to survive.
“It was very important for her to tell her story of the Shoah so that future generations can bear witness and pass it along.”
Silverman said her grandmother believed that “where there is life, there’s hope,” and that became the title of her memoir.
“She had hope that tomorrow would be a better day,” Silverman said. “As bad as it was, the starvation, the diseases, everything that she experienced, she still had hope. It was perseverance that helped her through the war. And then ultimately after the war, she found happiness and success and lived a full life into her upper 90s.”
