This past Wednesday night, the Five Towns Community was honored to hear from my father, Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz at the Annual Community Wide Yom HaShoah Program. He addressed the community not only as a survivor of the Shoah, but also as a Jewish educator, author and scholar. My father is fond of saying that the tens of thousands of Jewish children who he taught at various Jewish institutions; Hertzliya – Beit Medrash L’Morim, Yeshiva Etz Chaim, Ramaz, Camp Massad, are proof that Hitler failed and that these students are his ultimate revenge.

Mayer Moskowitz is a complex person who navigates his life by weaving in and out of the different worlds he has lived in. The oldest and only son of Reb Avraham Chaim, the Shotzer Rebbe in Chernowitz, Rumania and the scion of a long and noble line of Chassidic Rabbinic lineage, his early education took place in Viznitz. His childhood memories are vivid and happy and though he only got to spend nine years with his father,it is his father who has left the longest most indelible impression on him. Until this day my father sings the zemirot of his childhood and honors his Chassidic heritage by wearing a “tish” kaftan to his Shabbat table.

As was their wont, the Nazis executed my grandfather along with other communal leaders shortly after marching into town. This was done in front of my father, his mother and sister; they were then marched, along with the other Jews of Chernowitz to Sharograd a ghetto within the concentration camp area of Transnistria. On a recent heritage tour my siblings and I took with my father, we visited Treblinka, one of the most notorious concentration camps the Nazis built. Inside one of the bunkers my father turned to us and said “I am sorry to say this, but at least here in Treblinka, the victims had a roof over their head and one meal a day; in Sharograd we were left to the elements to die of hunger.”