Jewish Resilience

From The Times of Israel, a beautifully-written Holocaust story with a twist. The violent antisemitism in Australia is disgraceful, but the resilience of the Jewish people goes on.

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In Melbourne, the Adass Synagogue is a wreck, but we are not
Like so many others, my mother survived the Holocaust with nothing, but the Judaism she left me as an inheritance filled with small miracles.

"My mother Mira’s story of surviving the Holocaust is one that is peppered with miracles, which sounds contrived until you consider a strange coincidence that took place after the war. Having survived four concentration camps — including Auschwitz — as well as the brutalities that saw her father, mother, only sister, and youngest brother murdered, she was desperate to rebuild her life. In 1946, a year after her liberation, she married her husband, Pavel, who had escaped the Treblinka death camp and was the sole survivor of his own large family.

"By then, Mira was 19 and living in Prague. Unlike other newlyweds, the couple had no parents to gift them heirlooms; indeed, all their heirlooms had been confiscated long ago. There would be no Kiddush cup to use for a Sabbath; no silver candlestick holders for the Sabbath candles, either. Resourceful, they bought their own second-hand treasures from a pawn shop. Among them, a set of prayer books — black and leather-bound, with gold monogrammed initials — to be used during Jewish festivals.

"Soon, Mira and Pavel moved elsewhere: first to Milan, and then to Antwerp, settling eventually in Paris, where they lived for a decade, and raised their three children. All the while, the prayer books remained with them. Finally, in 1959, they moved to Melbourne, Australia, only to divorce several years later. In 1965, my mother married ex-soldier Manny Unreich, also originally from Czechoslovakia, and had me, Rachelle.

"I was already in my 20s when Manny decided to go to synagogue one day and could not find his own prayer book. He asked Mira if he could borrow hers. Sure, she said, and handed it over. When he looked at it, he was startled. He turned it over carefully several times. And then he pointed to the monogram on the front. “See these initials?” he asked her. “S.U.”? “This prayer book belonged to my father, Shalom Unreich.” Shalom and his wife, Regina, were also murdered in the Holocaust. Like Mira, Manny did not have any of his family’s possessions – until that day.

"So many precious and valuable items that once belonged to Jewish families were destroyed or stolen during the Holocaust. In Melbourne, a few survived. The Melbourne Holocaust Museum displays a cream and red silk curtain that once covered the Torah scrolls in a synagogue in Czestochowa, Poland. The synagogue was destroyed, but the parochet (curtain) remained hidden, eventually brought to Australia in 1947. Is that another miracle? I like to think so.

"In Rippon Lea’s Adass Synagogue, which was firebombed recently, so much was destroyed that, when you look at photos, all you see left of one room is an ugly mass of twisted steel, black ash and burned items everywhere. Yet two Torah scrolls, hidden all throughout the Holocaust, were spared, having been placed in a fireproof cabinet. Another coincidence: it was my father’s cousins, the Eckstein family, who donated those scrolls in the first place, and founded the synagogue to begin with.

"When Holocaust survivors first descended on Australia, they did so with a fervor: per capita, more settled in this country than in any other over the world, outside of Israel. They did so because of Australia’s geographic distance, because of the sanctuary it offered… and the opportunity. For my mother, it offered warmth and welcoming faces. From the start, she enrolled to study English at night, and fit in everywhere. My parents had many friends who were not Jewish and invited them to our home for Sabbath meals and Passover seders. When Mira died, her Aussie next-door-neighbors attended the funeral at the Jewish cemetery, which might have felt odd to them since men and women were separated, and many Hebrew prayers were recited. But they never said so, telling me instead how honored they felt to pay their respects.

"I grew up near the Adass Synagogue, and although it was not our regular place of worship, my father occasionally prayed there, and both my parents were well known to its congregants. The area is dotted with small food stores where one can buy challahs, smoked fish, carrot salad, and kosher-for-Passover groceries. At these, the older vendors call me by the Yiddish version of my name, Rochele. Some of the signs hanging over the awnings feel ancient, rusted by weather and time.

"Not everything keeps going after trauma. Books get burned; artefacts get lost, buried, destroyed. But in Australia, the Jewish story is one of survival. When I went to visit Adass Synagogue this week, I sat down on a nearby street bench, a man with his tzitzit hanging from beneath his jacket next to me. Together, we marveled that the building still stood, and that, more importantly, so did the community around it. And then we sat there silently, not needing words for the exchange we shared.

"We both know that survival is only part of the Australian Jewish story. We have learned — by our DNA, our ancestors, and history — to live with strength. And pride. Burn our synagogues down, and we will rebuild them. Destroy us and our way of living, our commitment to the values of humanity that we all share in this country? It is impossible. We do not always feel protected, that’s true. But we know that sometimes one just has to see the small miracles around us all."

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About the Author: Rachelle Unreich is an Australian journalist and author of A Brilliant Life: My Mother’s Inspiring Story of Surviving the Holocaust. She is a contributor to the anthology, On Being Jewish Now.