Israel Matzav

In all fairness....

Reader Rob M has gotten on my case with some justification for some of the things I posted about Abe Foxman lately (particularly the Mark Steyn piece I posted on Tuesday night). So for some fairness and balance, here's a story from the Detroit Jewish News, which is pictured above. The older man in the picture is Rabbi Leo Goldman zt"l of Detroit, the  younger man is Foxman.

One incident just after World War II ended had a profound effect on Rabbi Goldman’s life.
On Sept. 30, 1945, inside the near-ruin that once was the Great Shul of Vilna, Lithuania, Rabbi Goldman, then a Russian army officer in his 20s, approached a father holding his 5-year-old son.

It was Simchat Torah and, in a city that once called itself home to 100,000 Jews, of which 3,000 survived, the shul has been stripped of almost everything, including the Torahs.

Rabbi Goldman asked if the boy were Jewish, then said, “During the war, I traveled many kilometers as a soldier, and I did not see many Jewish children alive. May I take him as my Sefer Torah?”

In place of dancing while holding the Torah, the soldier danced while hoisting the boy who, to everyone in the sanctuary, represented the rebirth of the Jewish people.

Although they parted ways after that day, the experience had a huge impact on both their lives.

Rabbi Goldman would devote his life to teaching and comforting the Jewish people. And the boy, who had been hidden by a Polish nanny and raised Catholic until the end of the war, began his return to Yiddishkeit that day. Today, he is well-known as Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York City, who serves as a protector of the Jewish people and fighter against bigotry.

Although he never heard what happened to the boy, Rabbi Goldman’s memory of the story became the subject of a song, “The Man From Vilna,” which was written in 2004 after he met a Toronto songwriter on an airplane. The song turned out to be pivotal in reuniting the two survivors.

In 2007, Foxman shared his story with a group of Israeli soldiers and Birthright Israel participants at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Someone asked him if the soldier were still alive.

A woman who worked at Yad Vashem said she would do some research and find out. She found a story about the song in a Chabad-Lubavitch newspaper. Connections were made and, in January 2010, Foxman met Rabbi Goldman’s daughter Vivian Aronson in Indianapolis.

When she showed him a 1945 photo of her father as a Russian soldier, Foxman was overwhelmed.

On April 8, 2010, Foxman walked into Rabbi Goldman’s Oak Park home. The little boy and the Jewish soldier would be able to hold each other again.

“I’ve been waiting a long time,” Foxman said at the time. “It’s so emotional.”

Said the rabbi’s grandson David Brystowski, then 15, “It was an emotional and inspirational moment, like long-lost family members reconnecting. It is a feeling and a moment that I will keep with me for the rest of my life.”

Nice story, no? It's a shame they were apart for so long.

Labels: Abe Foxman, Holocaust

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:12 PM