Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll

The massacre began on September 28, 1941, and continued over the following two days. Scores of Ukrainian Jews were rounded up by Nazi storm troopers and their Ukrainian sympathizers, marched into a clearing in the middle of a wooded area, and shot, their bodies dumped into a mass grave.

As many as 35,000 men, women and children – the exact number has never been determined – were killed in the Babi Yar massacre, which could probably be called the first mass atrocity of the Holocaust.  It took some time for news of the slaughter to reach the world, and even longer for its full significance to be acknowledged by the Soviet leaders on whose territory it had taken place.

But the Soviet Jews who survived the war have never forgotten Babi Yar.  And those who have settled in Brooklyn have made a point of raising their voices in remembrance.

For the past seven years, they have gathered on the anniversary of Babi Yar to commemorate the tragedy.  This year’s ceremony, held this past Sunday at the East Midwood Jewish Center on Ocean Avenue, was a mixture of music, poetry, and dramatic testimony, expressing both the sadness of shared memories and the assertiveness born of survival.

About 600 people filled the EMJC sanctuary for the three-hour program, conducted mainly in Russian, which was organized by the Center, UJA-Federation, and the Association of Holocaust Survivors of the Former Soviet Union, a 700-member local group.  “Previously, they had held it at various other locations,” said Dr. Bernard Metrick, a former president of EJMC.  “But it kept getting bigger – that’s why they came here.”

Metrick had helped bring the program to EMJC for the first time last year.  At the time, admission was free; this year, it was $3, in order to raise money to expand the new museum of Jewish history in Battery Park.  The program’s organizers were hoping that with additional funding, the museum, which focuses on the European Jewish community before and during the Holocaust, would have more space for materials and exhibits about the fate of Jews in the USSR. Many of those Jews, if they were not sent to death camps, died in Warsaw-style ghettoes created by the Nazis or were killed by local anti-Semites who were happy to do the Nazis’ bidding.

This sad history was mentioned repeatedly during Sunday’s ceremony.  The stage was draped by a banner reading (in Russian), “Soviet Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day.”  And the ceremony began – after the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” – with a candlelight procession of about 30 survivors, bearing placards with photos of loved ones and names of various locations where thousands of Jews had perished:  Minsk, Odessa, Kishinev, Moldava, among others.

Later, Malka Budilovsky of the Soviet Holocaust survivors group, who was leading the ceremony, called on audience members to stand up and give their names and the towns where they had originally lived, in the hope that they could re-establish some long-broken connections. “Last year, two survivors from the Minsk ghetto recognized each other,” explained Lydia Vareljan, coordinator of the Russian division of UJA-Federation. “They hadn’t seen each other since the war.  When they saw each other across the room, they gave a great cry, and the whole ceremony stopped.”

Nothing quite so dramatic happened this year.  But there were still numerous poignant and dramatic moments, from the musical performances by popular singers Boris Pevsner (in Russian) and Marina Buchina (in Yiddish) to the address by Robert Kaplan of the Jewish Community Relations Council, who described his visit to the scene of the massacre.

“Most of my family had been buried in Babi Yar,” Kaplan told the audience.  “I don’t think there were enough tears among myself and the students I brought with me to fill Babi Yar, because Babi Yar is a valley of tears.”  But he ended on a note of hope:  “We (later) visited a refusenik family – I saw my mother’s face in one of the women’s eyes.  It turned out that they were my cousins.  Am Yisroel Chai.”

Other speakers included Rabbi Aaron Kass of EMJC, who said that Jews “must not give Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning all that you and your parents struggled so hard to preserve,” and Assemblyman Jules Polonetsky (D-Brighton Beach), who praised the audience:  “The only way I and my generation can understand what happened is by sitting here and listening to you.  For that, I am deeply grateful.”

Indeed, the idea that survivors not be silent — so that the world will not be allowed to forget — echoed throughout the ceremony, as when two actual survivors of Babi Yar, Ludmila Tkach and Manya Greenberg, recounted their stories to the audience.  Tkach, who now lives in Los Angeles, was four years old at the time; she had been pushed into the mass grave by her mother’s falling body, and had later crawled out from under the corpses after the killers had left the scene.  Greenberg, now of Philadelphia, was twelve.  She was spared when a local policeman took her out of the line of march when he decided that she did not “look Jewish.”

The program ended with Pevsner leading the audience in a Russian song about peace.  The title roughly translates as “Buchenwald Choir,” after the inmates in the camp who organized a singing group.

But as much as the audience could feel a strengthened sense of group solidarity – and of progress in telling their stories to the world – they knew that one great challenge remains:  to get a full accounting of the tragedy from their former rulers.

The former Soviet government had for many years refused to acknowledge that most of those killed were Jews; the official line was that they were unspecified “victims of Fascism.”  But in 1962, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko protested that policy in his now-famous poem, “Babi Yar.”  In the years that followed, the Soviets were increasingly pressured to change their version of the massacre; this finally happened during the Gorbachev years.  (Yevtushenko, who now lives in New York and teaches at Brooklyn College, was originally scheduled to appear at Sunday’s ceremony, but had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict.)

More progress has been made since the breakup of the USSR.  According to Russian-language journalist Joseph Richter, who attended Sunday’s program, Israel and Ukraine are currently negotiating the construction of a new memorial.  “The Ukrainians are saying, ‘we have a wonderful tradition of friendship with the Jews,’” said Richter, with a laugh.

Another reporter, Arkadiy Kagan of the Russian Forward – whose grandparents were among the 400,000 Jews who died in the Minsk ghetto – was even more hopeful.  “I have heard that Jews in Kiev have been able to do something similar (to Sunday’s ceremony),” he said.  “As recently as 1980, such commemorations were not allowed.”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

In the spacious conference room on the second floor of Queens Borough Hall, Claire Shulman speaks to a visiting delegation of Russian women about her job as Borough President.  The women, legislative aides in the former Soviet Union, are visiting the U.S. to learn about the workings of American government and politics (“Next, we’re going to see Bella Abzug,” says their interpreter).  One of the Russians asks Shulman how she deals with day-to-day problems, such as a poorly paved street.

“I call up the person in charge of roads, who is a mayoral appointee,” Shulman responds, “and I say, ‘By tomorrow, you’d better pave this street, or else.”  She pauses. “It usually works.”  The women laugh – “That’s how it is in Russia,” says the interpreter.

The performance is typical Shulman, combining the no-nonsense pragmatism of a veteran officeholder with the wry warmth of a Jewish grandmother.  It’s a style that an overwhelming number of Queens voters find appealing: the 71-year-old Shulman, currently running for her fourth term as Borough President, is so popular that local Republicans offered the lifelong Democrat their line on the ballot in November.  (She declined, not wanting to cause difficulties for other Democratic candidates in Queens.)  At this point, Shulman‘s only opposition is Conservative Party candidate David DiCasa.

Few would have predicted such success for Shulman when she took office in March of 1986.  Then Deputy Borough President, she was named to the higher post following the suicide of the incumbent, Donald Manes, who had been implicated in the city-wide corruption scandals of the mid-‘80s.  Shulman had never held elective office, and it was widely assumed by political insiders that her role was to “keep the office warm” for a few months while the powerful Queens Democratic organization chose a legitimate successor to Manes.

But Shulman says she “never paid much attention” to what others might have thought — “I decided what I was going to focus on and I went ahead and did it.” Gaining the support of Rep. Thomas Manton, the Queens Democratic leader, she was elected to serve the remainder of Manes’ term, then re-elected to full four-year terms in 1989 (with 86% of the vote) and 1993.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Shulman is now one of the most powerful Democratic women in New York City politics… which is why many observers were shocked when she recently decided not to support her longtime colleague, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, for Mayor this year.  Against the wishes of Manton and other Queens Democrats, she crossed party lines to endorse Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for a second term (she had backed David Dinkins in 1993).

It had been rumored that Shulman’s endorsement was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for the offer of the GOP line to her.  But Shulman insists that only two factors figured in her decision:  she was impressed with the Mayor’s record – and less so with the campaigns of his opponents.

“It was not an easy thing to do,” she says. “I knew it would hurt the feelings of people I’ve worked with over the years.  But I felt it was my responsibility to endorse who I felt would be the best mayor for the next four years.  And I believed that Giuliani had done a good job – that the city has come back, that its reputation worldwide has improved, revenues have increased; the city just seemed to be in a lot better shape.”

Though Shulman asserts, “I still believe in the Democratic philosophy that we are responsible for the most vulnerable in our society,” she feels “that the way the Mayor is going about it, by trying to increase the tax base so that we can provide services for those folks, is appropriate and proper for the future of this city.”

As for the Democrats, “I wanted to give them an opportunity to say what their programs and positions for the future would be – and though I think they’re all decent people, in my opinion they have not yet done this. I don’t see what they would do to improve the city.”

Understandably, Messinger was none too pleased by her colleague’s choice. “I regret that she made this decision,” she said recently in an interview on radio station WNYC. “It’s a bad decision for the city and a bad decision for Queens.  Five of the six school districts in Queens are seriously overcrowded, and some classrooms are 110-120% over capacity.”

But Shulman does not share Messinger’s view that Giuliani’s budget cuts are a major cause of school overcrowding. “This problem didn’t just happen,” she says. “The reason Queens is so behind in the number of [classroom] seats that are required is that we get new kids into the system – a couple of thousand every year.  They’re all immigrants, coming here for a better life, and we want to make sure their kids get educated.

“There are things that we can do.  We’re trying to play catch-up with the construction of schools.  Also, the Board of Education and I have spoken to [teacher’s union head] Sandy Feldman about the idea of a 12 month school year, which will cut the overage by about 30%.  And keeping the schools open longer every day is another possibility.”

The problems of Queens’ immigrant population are a major concern of Shulman’s – particularly the large number of Bukharan Jews from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan who have settled in the Rego Park-Forest Hills area in recent years.

 “There’s been a net decrease in the number of Jews in Queens over the last decade, as the population ages,” says Shulman aide Michael Rogovin, “butrecently there’s been a large Bukharan immigrant influx. (The group takes its name from the city of Bukhara, the Uzbek capital where many of them had lived.) The Bukharans have special needs, but they’re not unique to the Jewish community. They have the same needs as all immigrants — culturalization, language, making ends meet, educational issues.  And these are issues that involve government more than with other Jewish communities.”

Most of the Bukharans are Orthodox Jews, while many native-born Queens Jews belong to other denominations.   But Shulman feels that differences between the groups are a matter of “culture, not religion.

“For example,” she says, “in apartment houses, the Bukharans congregate in the halls.  If they have a party, sometimes that’s where it takes place — and some of the Jews that have been here a while don’t quite understand that.  So we’ve met with both sides, brought them together … and there now seems to be a kind of peaceful coexistence going on.”

Shulman’s office has also collected food for the Bukharans for the Jewish holidays, and provided English as a Second Language classes “so that they can learn the English necessary for naturalization.  I have over 400,000 seniors in this borough, and I think somewhere between 20 and 30,000 are not citizens, but legal immigrants.  And I was concerned that a lot of these folks were going to lose their benefits (under the recent changes in Federal welfare rules).”

Shulman’s traditional, grass-roots approach to government is rooted in her background.  Born in Flatbush (“across from Ebbets Field”) and a graduate of Adelphi University, she moved to Queens in 1945, working as a registered nurse at Queens Hospital Center, where she met her husband, Melvin, a physician.  While living in Bayside and raising two sons, Lawrence and Kim, and a daughter, Ellen, she became increasingly involved in school and community affairs: “I joined mother’s clubs and the PTA,” she says, “and I got to know a lot about education.  I did a lot of pro bono work in the education field, lobbying for more money.”

Shulman went on to become a member of Queens Community Board 11, then became board chair in 1968 “mostly because no one else wanted the job.”  Her new position gave her grounding – and a growing interest – in the city and state budgeting process. “So when my kids were old enough,” she says, “I thought, ‘Gee, maybe I should try government.’ I knew most of the elected officials (in Queens) through my work, and when they offered me a job as Director of Queens Community Boards at the end of 1972, I took it.”

Shulman went on to serve in the position for eight years, then was named Deputy Borough President by Manes. “By that time I’d learned the city government pretty thoroughly, but I was still an appointed official.  And then I got to be Borough President,” she says dryly, “in an unusual way.”

But her experience gave her the skill to deal with numerous challenges during her decade-plus in office – including a significant loss of power when the Board of Estimate was abolished in 1989. (Each of the five Borough Presidents had a seat on the Board, which functioned as a counterweight to the Mayor – a role that is now filled by the City Council.)

“I still have many discretionary dollars,” says Shulman.  “I still appoint a member of the City Planning Commission, and a member of the School Board.  And there’s something that’s not in the City Charter:  I get elected in a county of two million people.  I don’t mean to sound intimidating, but with those numbers, it’s very hazardous to take me on in an important issue if you’re a city-wide elected official.”

Under New York City’s 1993 term-limits law, Shulman’s next term will be her last.  Her agenda is ambitious:  it includes plans to expand Queens Hospital Center – “We have the largest senior population (in the city) which creates a demand that we cannot fulfill at the present time” – and to build the Technodome, a proposed sports and entertainment center, on 300 acres on the Rockaway Peninsula.

As for her future after leaving office, “Well,” Shulman laughs, “my staff thinks I’m immortal… Seriously, I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

Looking back on her career, Shulman feels that things are much easier for women in politics than when she entered public life, “and I’m delighted about that. I think people are becoming accustomed to the idea that women can function in government, and that they can function on a very high level.”

Does she see herself as a role model for younger women?  “I hope so.  I hope they find this to be a satisfying career – not only women, but younger people.”

One woman who has clearly been inspired by Shulman’s example is her daughter, Ellen Shulman Baker.  Dr. Baker is a physician and an astronaut, whose space career includes voyages on the Atlantis and Columbia space shuttles and the first docking (in 1995) of Atlantis with the troubled Russian space station Mir.

“My daughter is probably the most organized person I know,” says Shulman, almost in amazement.  “She’s got two little kids, and she does everything for them that I did for my kids – but I wasn’t working, other than pro bono things.  I’m just so impressed by her, and women like her. They’re doing everything.”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

Gabrielle Glaser can identify with Madeline Albright.  Like the Secretary of State, Glaser, a freelance journalist, grew up believing that she was a Christian – in her case, a German Lutheran, like most of her neighbors in rural Oregon – before learning otherwise. While visiting Poland in 1984, Glaser found out that she was actually descended from Jews who had emigrated from that country a century earlier.

Unlike Albright, Glaser chose to return to Judaism, and formally converted.  One factor in her decision was her marriage to New York Times correspondent Steven Engelberg, the son of Holocaust survivors.  “When we had our first child, we had to make a decision,” she says.  “I didn’t want to my kids to be confused.”  Yet she found that her in-laws still had trouble accepting her as a member of their faith — they seemed to feel that “I wasn’t Jewish enough.”

Glaser began to wonder if there were other American couples who had experienced similar problems.  Her curiosity has resulted in a new book, Strangers to the Tribe:  Portraits of Interfaith Marriage (Houghton Mifflin), in which she profiles 11 interfaith couples and the challenges that they face in our multicultural – but still predominantly non-Jewish – society.

On Friday, November 17, Glaser discussed her book in an appearance at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Bayside’s Bay Terrace shopping mall.  Her talk was part of a weeklong program, Interfaith Week, sponsored by the Samuel Field YMHA of Little Neck. The Field YMHA had conceived Interfaith Week as a means of publicizing a new project, Interfaith Network, which it had developed with a grant from the Mazer Foundation (the grant was arranged through UJA-Federation).  This program includes monthly meetings for interfaith couples, a support group for their parents and grandparents, and a telephone “warmline” providing confidential responses to interfaith-related questions.

“We decided that what we needed was a way of getting the information out to the public that we were here and we were available,” says program coordinator Lynn Levy.  In addition to Glaser, the week’s speakers included Lynne Wolfe, director of the interfaith-outreach program at MetroWest, a Jewish community center in New Jersey.  “Lynne has really been a forerunner in interfaith outreach,” says Levy.  “She’s worked very closely with Dr. Egon Mayer of Jewish Outreach Institute (JOY) in Manhattan, who is one of the great spokesmen for outreach in the Jewish community today.”

Glaser told the Barnes & Noble audience that she hopes her book “will give people who feel lonely or isolated in the intermarriage experience something to think about.  It will give them models for how other people do it, how other people feel.” And she has tried to do this, she said, while maintaining a tone of objectivity, in contrast to what she calls the “judgmental” tone of previous books on the subject.

Some of Glaser’s subjects – ranging in age from 20s to 70s – are certain to raise eyebrows.

Take, for example, the Schandler-Wong family of Hawaii.  “The mother is from an Orthodox Jewish home in North Carolina,” said Glaser.  “She worked for United Airlines, and wound up meeting a very nice Chinese man from Honolulu.  He ultimately decided to convert, and they raised two kids in Honolulu named Ari & Sha’aloni Wong.  They have a drawer for kosher chopsticks.”

Such situations may sound amusing, but in truth, according to Glaser, intermarriage can often be a minefield of pain and confusion.  Especially tough, she said, are holidays and “life-cycle” events, which “may trigger heartfelt feelings about identity, and who we are, and how is this child going to be raised – what does it mean to me if I’m a Jew and I baptize my child?  What does it mean to me if I’m a Catholic and this child isn’t baptized?  What does it mean for the child in the future?”

Levy, who made a few remarks following Glaser’s talk, agreed that what she calls “the December dilemma” is a major issue for interfaith couples:  “The Christmas tree is often the center of a highly charged drama — particularly for a family which identifies itself as Jewish, except for this two or three weeks of the year when they put the tree in the window. This year it will be particularly rough, because (Christmas and Hanukkah) coincide on the calendar.  There’s no way of keeping them separate and distinct.”

Some families, said Glaser, try to split the difference, especially regarding their children.  She cited the case of a Catholic-Jewish couple whose first child was baptized at the insistence of the wife’s mother.  “The father (felt) he was railroaded into this decision.  And they decided at that moment that the next child would be Jewish.  So now they have a 12-year-old girl who’s Catholic, and an 8- or 9- year-old boy who’s Jewish.  And that’s unusual, I would say.  But it’s not something I would recommend.”

Nor does she advise intermarrieds to bring up their children with no religious identification.  When a woman in the audience asked about a niece who was raised in an interfaith marriage, without any religious education, “Will she wonder who she is?” Glaser responded, “I’m sure she will.  Studies show that children raised in this way wind up as agnostics, with no steady faith, with no strong, clear identity.  Is that a nightmare? No – I think in part, that’s America.  Everybody has a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  But for Jewish people, I think it’s something of a sad outcome.”

But perhaps the saddest people in these situations, the ones with the greatest sense of heartbreak and injury, are the couples’ parents.  Glaser has met a number of them.

“They feel wronged, and very, very hurt,” she said. “It’s your sense of identity, of your spiritual legacy being passed on.  ‘How could my children do this to me?’ ‘How could they have not known this was important to me?’ It’s very sad and very painful for everybody involved, especially those who feel that they’re the losers in the paradigm.  If your grandchildren don’t end up as you had envisioned, it’s very, very difficult.  And not everybody is always on their best behavior.

“The best way I found for people to work through these issues,” Glaser continued, “is the ordinary old hard way of talking, and confronting them head on at the very beginning of the relationship.  I think the worst thing was when people didn’t talk about them, when they just decided that somehow fate would help them decide, or the children would decide later, and they didn’t talk to their parents, they didn’t address the issues.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Levy, who told the audience that this was the purpose of the Field YMHA’s outreach program. “It’s very possible to create and maintain a good environment and healthy relationships,” she said.  “And we’re going to explore, in these groups, different avenues and ways of doing that. Because the reality is that we are experiencing a 52% rate of intermarriage in Jewish life, and it’s a reality that’s not apt to go away.  We have to deal with the reality of those numbers.”

Still, the good news, according to Glaser, is that surveys indicate that more than half of those 52% are couples raising their children as Jews.  Indeed, both women insisted, the conventional wisdom that intermarriage is a kind of conversion-by-default for the Jewish partner is not true.  Quite the contrary, said Levy: “Once [gentile partners] have become interested in learning about Judaism,” she asserted, “they are leaning towards Judaism – I can’t say for sure about conversions, but certainly in terms of rearing children and having a single-religion home, which is, I would say, the first step toward conversion.”

Interestingly, according to Levy, a gentile wife is often more likely to push for a Jewish home than her born-Jewish husband. “Very often a husband has taken a middle-of-the-road stance – he’ll refuse to have a Christian home, but won’t really be the force behind a Jewish home,” she said. “But once the non-Jewish wife becomes interested in Judaism, she is really in a position to make that a reality for the family. I think this might be because even in today’s society, the woman structures the home.  She’s there more with the children; she’s the one who introduces religion into the home, and certain rituals.”

This was certainly true for Glaser. “My husband, like many Jews his age, basically had no Jewish experiences between his bar mitzvah and his wedding,” she told her audience, “aside from Passover and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I wanted our children to be raised as Jews in much stronger terms – ‘We are going to light Shabbat candles every Friday night. We’re going to synagogue every weekend.’

“My husband,” she said with a laugh, “sometimes raises up his hands and says, ‘How did this happen?  Who is this person?’”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

For most of her life, Susan B., now 51, has struggled with eating disorders of one kind or another.  As a child, she was a compulsive overeater; as a “size 16” teenager, she was taken by her mother to a doctor who prescribed diet pills. She spent most of the next decade on a dietary roller coaster – “I’d go up and down 20 to 25 pounds,” she says – but didn’t think she was abnormal until, at 28, she was diagnosed with hypoglycemia and told to cut sugar out of her diet.  She tried, but the “withdrawal” drove her into bulimia, the disorder whose victims compulsively purge their bodies of recently eaten food, usually by vomiting. Though she repeatedly underwent therapy and hospitalization, this condition plagued her for years.

By 1995, says Susan, “I knew I was going to die” from a heart attack, a common occurrence among bulimics – “They’d find me over a toilet bowl.”  But her daughter, herself a former bulimic, convinced her to again enter therapy, as well as a 12-step program.  (Because the program requests anonymity from its participants, Susan does not publicly reveal her last name.)  After another two years of struggle, she believes – or hopes – that she is finally on the right track:  “I’ve maintained my weight for nine months.”

Susan’s story was part of a seminar, “Eating Disorders: The Mirror Has Two Faces,” held this past Sunday at the Yeshiva of Flatbush elementary school auditorium. (The seminar was the third in a series organized by the Yeshiva’s ladies auxiliary; earlier programs had dealt with stress management and the problems of the “sandwich generation” in caring for elderly parents.)  A group of about 60 people, almost all of them women, came to hear a panel of speakers discuss the topics of  nutrition, dieting and body appearance, and how unhealthy attitudes in those areas can cause devastation to women’s lives — as they did to Susan’s.

The statistics in this area are disturbing – and they go beyond the more extreme disorders, such as bulimia and anorexia (self-starvation).

“Fifty percent of nine-year-old and 80% of ten-year-old girls in the U.S. have dieted,” said auxiliary vice-chair Flora Bienstock, the panel’s moderator.  “We must not allow these trends to continue.”

One of the panelists, Amy Wysoker, a psychiatric nurse who teaches at Long Island University, cited studies showing that “95% of people in diet programs such as Weight Watchers are women” and that “99% of the people who lose weight put it back on within two years.”

Wysoker emphasized the societal pressures on young women to lose weight at all costs that often contribute to their problems.  “Every time our children pick up a magazine, they see all these pictures of thin women,” she said.  “You pick up The New York Times and there’s the fashion section… We need to start getting to children when they’re very young.”  She asserted that “it will take a grass-roots effort to counteract these media images.”

Another panelist, social worker Ilene Fishman, founder of The Eating Disorders Center of Montclair (NJ), agreed with Wysoker that parents have to help their children develop a healthy self-image:  “What do you teach them about their own value and worth?  Is it based on achievement, or based on appearance?” She added that it was important for women of all ages to come to terms with their own appearance, to avoid perfectionist attitudes.  (“I’ll always have fatter arms than I’d like,” she joked.)

While Wysoker and Fishman spoke mainly about obsessive weight loss, panelist Rick Shields, a psychologist and nutritionist, emphasized the other end of the spectrum:  overeating, a particular problem in this country because of the unhealthy nature of the common American diet.

“Today,” he said, “the average American consumes about 130 pounds of sugar a year” – up more than 400 percent since the days of the early colonists – “and the equivalent of a stick of butter a  day” in unhealthy oils and fats.  Shields also noted that as much as 90 percent of the nation’s food supply has been processed and refined, thus removing many essential nutrients.

Like many American nutritionists, Shields spoke highly of the traditional low-fat-and-sugar Japanese diet, which emphasizes fish, vegetables and brown rice, and recommended something similar for his audience.

“Since I’ve been talking,” he said, “over one million red blood cells have died in each of our bodies.  The danish you had for breakfast won’t replace them.”

Shields flavored his presentation with several quotations from Rambam (Maimonides), whom he called “the first holistic physician” because “he understood the mind-body connection” and the importance of a healthy lifestyle.

“Rambam says, ‘Overeating is like poison to the body,’ even good foods,” said Shields.  “He says you should leave the table before you’re full.”

In the question-and-answer session which followed, some audience members wondered whether Shields, with his condemnation of certain foods, was contradicting the other panelists, who had spoken of getting away from the idea of “bad” foods (and of women thinking themselves “bad” for eating them).  Shields replied that he hadn’t meant to suggest there was no place for higher-fat and -sugar foods, just not on a regular basis – “I’m more concerned with (their) abuse and overindulgence.”

And Wysoker made it clear that she was not condoning overeating or obesity.  But the problem, she asserted, was that many women distort the concept of healthy weight loss, wanting to shed additional pounds for cosmetic rather than health reasons.  “They need to lose 10 to 15 pounds,” she said, “but they’ll try to lose 60.”

Most of the questioners were clearly worried about their own children – what, they wondered, could they do to have a positive influence? Fishman reiterated that it was important to set a good example: “If (children) see Mommy obsessing about her weight,” she said, “they’ll be affected.”

Shields added, “If parents know the harm they’re causing by putting bad habits in place at an early age, they’d try to change… It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they don’t know.”

Bienstock, like the other women in attendance, was clearly impressed by what she had heard.  But she also spoke of the ongoing need to deal with these problems – which, she asserted, could be seen outside the walls of the Yeshiva any day of the week.  “We promoted [this program] within the local community,” she said, “and even the neighborhood pizza man thought it was a good idea.  He said teenage girls who come in to his place are constantly talking about their weight.”

As for Susan, her struggle goes on.

“I have to admit that I still want to lose more weight.  It’s always there,” she says.  “But I’m very grateful that I’m taking care of myself … and that there is help for everyone out there if you really, really want it.”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

Diane Cypkin’s Brighton Beach apartment is awash in memories, from the Yiddish and English playbills on her walls to her carefully maintained albums of photos and documents. Over the years, Cypkin has given a good deal of time and energy to the preservation of the past – that of her family, and of her people – and to bringing it alive for newer generations.

Cypkin, 49, is a professor of literature and communications (“I’m in the talk area,” she jokes) at the Westchester campus of Pace University. She is also a dramatic and musical actress who has worked in both the Yiddish and English-language theatre. And this coming Sunday, she will be delivering a special performance: a concert of songs written by her father, Abraham Cypkin, while he was living under the Nazis in the ghetto of the Lithuanian city of Kovno.

The concert will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the opening of the museum’s new exhibit, “Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto.” The exhibit, which is scheduled to run for two years, is a collection of artifacts, survivor testimony, and archival material. The largest archive was donated by Tel Aviv resident Abraham Tory, who served as president of the ghetto’s Jewish Council. Also in the exhibit are photographs taken by another survivor, George Kaddish.

“When I heard about (the exhibit),” says Cypkin, “I thought, ‘wow!’” But her excitement was tempered by the thought that the program was missing a key element. “It’s true that pictures say a lot, but they’re not alive,” she says. “A picture is still. Music is the soul, it speaks.

“And so I immediately wrote a letter and said, ‘Have you considered incorporating music in the exhibit?’ My letter got to Brett Werb, who’s their musicologist – and he knew my father’s name, because he’d already been doing research into the music that was written in the Kovno ghetto. And I really didn’t have to talk him into (having the concert), because he also felt that music should have a place.”

Cypkin will be accompanied on synthesizer by Ruby Sosnowicz, a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw. “He’s like a one-man orchestra,” says Cypkin. “The synthesizer has the ability to be any instrument – (in this case) the balalaika and the concertina.” Also on the program is Toshi Reagon (daughter of noted gospel singer Bernice Johnson Reagon), performing her own freedom-themed songs. Museum spokeswoman Shana Penn says that while the museum has occasionally featured musical programs in the past, music such as Cypkin’s is “unusual … (but) anything preserved from Kovno is quite unusual.”

The story behind the concert begins in the late 1930s, when Abraham Cypkin and his wife, Etta, were living in Kovno, where Abraham owned a factory that produced children’s clothing. The first disruption in their lives was the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1940, which resulted in the Soviet invasion of Lithuania. (“I once asked them,” says Diane Cypkin, “’What does it sound like when an army invades?’ They told me, “’When the Russians came in, they were singing.’”) As a capitalist, the elder Cypkin could have been sent to Siberia. But he concealed his identity – “and his workers never told on him,” says his daughter. “They liked him.”

But when Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Cypkins – and the rest of Kovno’s 30,000 Jews – were less fortunate. The Germans herded them into Slobodka, a slum neighborhood, then reduced their numbers through an “action” at the end of October. The Jews were ordered to appear in a public plaza, from which as many as 10,000 – mostly women, children, and the elderly – were taken to their deaths. Diane Cypkin believes that her mother and brother Louis, then an infant, survived because “she was surrounded by my father, and all her brothers, who were allowed to live because they could work. And so [the Germans] probably didn’t see her.”

Etta Cypkin and her son spent the next few years hiding in their ghetto home. “She was afraid,” says her daughter, “not only of the Germans seeing that she had a little boy, but of other women [who might have informed on her].” Abraham, meanwhile, became head of work detail for the Jews, leading various slave labor “brigades” – in part because he spoke fluent German (among numerous other languages), which impressed the Nazi overlords.

It was while on his daily rounds that Abraham was inspired to compose his lyrics. “He would write them,” says his daughter, “then put them to very famous Russian melodies – famous either just before the war, or concurrent with it. They are marches and waltzes, and exceptionally melodic.”

He shared the songs with his neighbors, who “sang them as they were going to work,” she says, “or while working, to uplift their spirits. Not while a German was standing over them… but to themselves.”

It is easy to see why the songs became popular with the Cypkins’ neighbors: rather than wallowing in despair, they express a defiant spirit of hope for the future. For example, Tsores und Layd (“Pain and Sorrow”), set to the tune of a popular Russian revolutionary song, has a somber tone, but closes on a note of determination:

Mortal, soft hands are kneading hard clay.
Suffering shapes these innocent lives.
Enough of this hell – we want to go home.
Our sorrows pierce us like knives…

Hold on, be strong, eternal Jew.
Keep faith and hope for tomorrow.
Some day your slavery will come to an end,
And with it, your sorrow.
(Translated from Yiddish by Rosaline Schwartz)

Other songs are actually humorous, such as Finsternish (“Darkness”), which is set to a more Yiddish-sounding melody — Diane Cypkin believes that her father took it from one of the American Yiddish performers, like Molly Picon, who frequently came to Kovno before the war. The song, she says, depicts a man coming home at night after a German-imposed blackout: “You could blunder into the wrong apartment… and the wrong bed. And it’s nice if it’s a pretty girl that ends up next to you – but he wakes up and sees it’s an old lady.”

Another song, Maystes, (“The Meat and Poultry House”) – set to the theme of the first Russian sound film, The Happy Boys – is about workers assigned to the local poultry storehouse, from which they would smuggle pieces of fowl back into the ghetto:

Listen, my children! Pluck those fowl with pleasure,
Although your hearts are faint.
I have taken your measure,
And know that no one here is a saint…

So into the ghetto ducks and geese flew.
Chickens joining the pack.
Giving up meat and fat – a kilo or two.
And if it’s three, who can object to that?
(Translated from Yiddish by Rosaline Schwartz)

Meanwhile, outside the ghetto walls, the tide of the war was turning – which brought a new threat to the Cypkins’ survival. Learning that the Nazis planned to destroy the ghetto and send the residents to Dachau and other death camps, the family built a bunker under a woodshed near their house, and moved there along with several friends in the summer of 1944. “They were down there for thirty days,” says Diane Cypkin. “They had poison … if they had been found, they would have killed themselves.”

Finally, in August, Etta Cypkin decided to venture above ground. “It’s hard to know if a war is over – it’s not like anybody blows a whistle,” says her daughter. “But it was very quiet, so my mother went outside, and she saw all the destruction around her. And she saw a soldier. Because she had been underground for so long, her eyes were affected, and she couldn’t see the (shade) of his green uniform — the Russians and the Germans both wore green, but slightly different. And he started to speak to her in Russian. And she knew that they were liberated.”

The family went west to Freiman, an American-administered displaced persons camp in Munich, where they remained for five years. It was there that Abraham Cypkin met Shimon Kaczerginski, an American-based musicologist, who had come to Europe after the war to collect songs for an anthology, Lider Fun di Getos und Lagern (Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps). Kaczerginski and a colleague transcribed Abraham’s songs; they are included in the anthology, which was published, in Yiddish, in America.

In 1949, American relatives helped the Cypkins (including Diane, then seven months old) emigrate to the U.S. It was on the voyage across the Atlantic that Abraham Cypkin composed one last set of lyrics, Mein Haym (“My Home”). “It’s set to a very famous Russian waltz,” says his daughter. “He writes about how he’ll never see his home again, and about the things he remembers of his home – Shabbos, his mother, his father – that are nevermore.”

The Cypkins settled in Brighton Beach, where Diane still lives with her mother. Abraham Cypkin, who stopped writing and resumed his career in the garment business, died in 1979.

But his songs live on through his daughter. Diane has previously performed them in concert; she also made a previous trip to the Holocaust Museum this past September to record several of them on a compact disc, which is scheduled to be released in February.

“It’s not just to honor him,” she says. “The reason his songs were so well liked is they reflected the feelings of many – many who don’t have anyone to say Kaddish for them, or to remember them. He takes a whole ocean of people and their feelings with him. When you listen to his songs, even if you don’t understand the words, you get the feeling of what it’s all about.”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

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