Holocaust Memorial Board erected at Windsor synagogue

Reprinted with permission from the Windsor Journal April 21, 2000

Holocaust Memorial Board erected at Windsor synagogue

By:Laura Soll, Special to the Journal April 21, 2000

As the world's annual Yom Hashoah commemoration of Holocaust victims nears, a local synagogue unveils its own memorial. Congregation Beth Ahm of Windsor recently installed a Holocaust Memorial Board where people may place placques to remember their loved ones who died during World War II. The board is part of the synagogue's Yom Hashoah observance of all Holocaust victims, which begins on Monday, May 1, at sundown.

"While the Holocaust memorial board is important to the spirit of the synagaogue, there also is a very personal reason why it was created," explained Rabbi Alan Lefkowitz of Congregation Beth Ahm. "The Phillipine mahogany board with bronze plates was built by hand by a Windsor resident and synagogue member, Manuel Stein, to honor the memory of his wife Rhoda's family."

"Like many Jews, I already had put up placques on the synagaogue's regular memorial board for my own parents, listing the dates they died. But Rhoda didn't know when her grandparents, parents or brothers died - there are no graves or tombstones - and I wanted to make a special place for them, too," Stein said.

"I know that there are other people in the area who lost relatives in the Holocaust, (and) I hope that they might want to dedicate a permanent memorial to them as well," Stein added.

During most of World War II, Rhoda Schuldhaus Stein was a "hidden child." She lived with families who took her in from the age of about four - she doesn't know her birth date or the year these events occured. Born in the Ukraine near Lvov, Poland, she spent the first few years of her life in a remote area of the countryside, which was first overrun by Russian soldiers, until the German Army pushed the Russians out. She lived on a farm owned by her grandparents with her mother and four brothers. Her father was killed by the Germans before she was four.

Mrs. Stein recalls that the Nazis first confiscated all of their farm animals,and eventually took everything away, moving the family to a ghetto in a nearby town. One day, they started sweeping through the ghetto, taking people from their small one-room apartments. When the Nazis arrived at her building, her mother had managed to hide her two sons under a bed, and another in a storage bin above an oven. Rhoda crouched in an empty box meant for firewood. As her mother tried to hide the youngest boy, she and her son were arrested, leaving the four other children and a neighbor boy whose own family had left him behind.

During the next few days, more sweeps took place, one that took away two more of Mrs. Stein's brothers. After five days, Rhoda, then only about age five, her brother, about nine years of age, and the young neighbor were the onlyones left in the apartment. They hid in a basement for several days with a number of other Jews, until all of those families left together...again, the three children were alone.

With nowhere to go and in a strange town, they tried to find their way to the village where their family once lived. They wandered through the countryside, sleeping in barns, developing frostbite. Finally, a family sheltered Rhoda and her brother for the rest of the winter, but in the spring, they were on their own again.

Eventually, a teenage boy persuaded his parents to allow little Rhoda to live with them. But her brother did not join her. The poor Christian family, living from one harvest to the next, shared what little they had with her. When the woman's husband was drafted and her son joined the "Underground," she and Rhoda remained together. After the war, she and Rhoda moved to Lvov to a boarding house run by the woman's brother. It was there that Rhoda was found by a cousin, who was a soldier in the Russian Army. In 1949, she was brought to New York City by an uncle who had come to the U.S. before World War I. Several years later, Rhoda met her future husband, Manny, at a relative's Bar Mitzvah. This year, they will celebrate 44 years of marriage. They have four children and six grandchildren.

Several years ago, Rhoda Stein shared her story with Steven Spielberg's film project, the Shoah Foundation. Rhoda assumes that all of her family was lost during the Holocaust. The brother, with whom she escaped the ghetto, reportedly was arrested by the Germans. She never saw him again."The Holocaust Memorial Board is a way of helping Rhoda Stein and other survivors know that there families will always be remembered, and a reminder to all of us that this atrocity must never happen again," said Rabbi Lefkowitz. "We are grateful to Manny for his generosity and hard work in making it a reality."

The heavy brass plates can be engraved with the names of families or individuals. They are 10 inches wide and two inches deep or more. The fee for production of each plate depends on its size.

For information about placing a placque on Congregation Beth Ahm's Holocaust Memorial Board, call Rabbi Alan Lefkowitz or Manny Stein at Congregation Beth Ahm at 688-9989.