"In Memory's Kitchen: In Honor of Yom HaShoah (the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust)" by Rabbi Jill Zimmerman

Kugel, plum strudel, chocolate torte...Recipes from memory, scribbled with broken pencils on tiny scraps of paper and saved onion skins survived Terezin concentration camp, even though the starving women who wrote them did not.  These Jewish mothers, who perished in the Holocaust, fed their souls by sharing recipes of the meals they cooked that nourished their families in better times.  Their food was their Torah - their meals were one of the ways they showed their love, passed on family traditions, and sustained Jewish life. Perhaps their husbands and children smelled their pot roast as they were coming up the stairs to the apartment and knew that their mother or grandmother had been preparing for them all day, with love and attention.

Terezin was a way station on the way to Auschwitz.  As the women starved, they talked incessantly about food, and kept their hope for the future alive by sharing recipes from their past.  The snippets of paper were collected by Mina Pachter, a 70-year-old inmate at the death camp.  Before she herself starved to death, she was able to smuggle the hand-sewn manuscript out of Terezin in hopes that it would reach her daughter in Palestine. The scraps of paper eventually made it into the hands of Carla de Silva, who published them in a book called In Memory's Kitchen. 

This past Sunday, our religious school children, who have never known this kind of hunger, sat side by side with older members of our own synagogue community, some who were survivors, some whose families were murdered and together, old and young, we lit six candles to remember the six million.  We said Kaddish. We sang Oseh Shalom (Make Peace.)  We talked about how important it is to stop any kind of injustice, even on the playground.

After the service, we viewed an outstanding documentary, by Hilary Helstein, founder of the Jewish Film Festival about how courageous people fought against Hitler using the only means they had -- art and culture.
 
This week, as we prepare meals for our families and friends, let us never forget those women, who could have been our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers.  May we always recall their will to survive through their memories of nourishing others.

Rabbi Jill Zimmerman