A story of survival and inspiration

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.”

My father was separated from his mother and sister and sent to a work camp where he was forced into hard labor. One day, while being marched out to his work detail, my father instinctively followed the man immediately in front of him on the marching line and jumped into an embankment on the side of the road that was covered in deep snow. The understaffed guards shot into the snow hitting my father in the arm but did not give chase. My father dug his way to a road, managed to get to Russian occupied territory and was smuggled to Palestine by the Aliyat Hanoar movement. In Palestine, my father, an orphan as far as he knew, studied agriculture at Mikveh Yisrael in Holon, philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was inducted into the Hagganah. He was reunited with his sister in Palestine and she married and settled there. Shortly thereafter they found out that their mother had survived as well and was living in New York. My father, who was single, made the heart-wrenching decision to leave his new life and join his mother here.

Upon coming to New York, my father studied under and received his semicha from Reb Moshe Feinstein at Mesivta Tiferet Yerushalyim. He also taught and studied at Hertzliya – Beit Medrash L’Morim. He has been involved in Jewish education for over 60 years and has been at the Ramaz School for almost 50. He was also a director at Camp Massad and is the author of “A Memoir of Sanctity” published in the original Hebrew in Jerusalem and translated into English. The book is available at J Levine Bookstore in New York (http://levinejudaica.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=35_59&products_id=16602).

According to my father, despite surviving the horrors of the Shoah, the greatest tragedy that he endured was losing his wife, my mother, to cancer at age 46. Despite all he has gone through, he is constantly rebuilding or in his words “surviving.” At 80 plus he still teaches a full schedule, is physically active and does not miss the opportunity to be culturally enlightened, going often to the theatre, ballet, opera, the movies and most recently a Bruce Springsteen concert. Those of us fortunate enough to have been touched by him are now inspired by his vitality and zest for life. May it be a long and healthy one.