The Wedding Gown!

The above picture is of Jewish marriage contract (ketubah) of Lilly and Ludwig Friedman, a prayer shawl (tallit) bag; photos of two Jewish brides who later wore Lilly’s dress; wedding portrait of Lilly Lax and Ludwig Friedman; dress and gloves worn by Lilly at her wedding to Ludwig Friedman in January 1946. This Collection is housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

My friend Rebecca Fleischmann initially sent me this story .... then I researched a little.  Toda Rebecca!!  

 

Lilly Friedman doesn't remember the last name of the woman who designed and sewed the wedding gown she wore when she walked down the aisle over 60 years ago.  But the grandmother of seven does recall that when she first told her fiancé Ludwig that she had always dreamed of being married in a white gown he realized he had his work cut out for him.  For the tall, lanky 21-year-old who had survived hunger, disease and torture this was a different kind of challenge.  How was he ever going to find such a dress in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Person's camp where they felt grateful just for the clothes on their backs?

Fate would intervene in the guise of a former German pilot who walked into the food distribution centre where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes Lilly would have her white wedding gown.

For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked under the curious eyes of her fellow Displaced Persons, carefully fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was completed she sewed the leftover material into a matching shirt for the groom.  

A white wedding gown may have seemed like a frivolous request in the surreal environment of the post war camps, but for Lilly the dress symbolized the innocent, normal life she and her family had once led before the world descended into madnes.

Lilly and her siblings were raised in a Torah observant home in the small town of Zarica , Czechoslovakia where her father was a teacher, respected and well liked by the young yeshiva students he taught in nearby Irsheva.  He and his two sons were marked for extermination immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz.   For Lilly and her sisters it was only their first stop on their long journey of persecution, which included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally Bergen-Belsen.

  
Lilly Friedman and her parachute dress on display in the Bergen Belsen Museum.

Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the snow to the town of Celle on January 27th, 1946,  to attend Lilly and Ludwig's wedding.  The town Synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meagre materials available to them in preperation for the nuptials. When Sefer Torah arrived from England they converted an old kitchen cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.

"My sisters and I lost everything .... our parents, our two brothers, our homes . The most important thing was to build a new home."  declared Lilly.    Six months later, Lilly's sister Ilona wore the dress when she married Max Traeger.   After that came Cousin Rosie.   How many brides wore Lilly's dress?    "I stopped counting after 17. "   With the camps experiencing the highest marriage rate in the world, Lilly's gown was in great demand.  A Gown filled with history!!

In 1948,  when President Harry Truman finally permitted the 100,000 Jews who had been languishing in Displaced Persons camps since the end of the war to emigrate, the gown accompanied Lilly across the ocean to America. Unable to part with her dress,  it lay at the bottom of her bedroom closet for the next 50 years, "not even good enough for a garage sale.  I was happy when it found such a good home. "

Home was the to become the United  States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , D . C .   When Lily's niece,  a volunteer, told museum officials about her aunt's dress, they immediately recognized its historical significance and displayed the gown in a specially designed showcase,  guaranteed to preserve it for 500 years.  Appropriate .... but Lilly Friedman's dress had one more journey to make.   Like Lilly herself it went to Bergen Belsen,   to the museum there which opened its doors on October 28th, 2007.   The German government invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the grand opening.  They initially declined,  but finally traveled to Hanover the following year with their children, their grandchildren and extended families to view the extraordinary exhibit created for the wedding dress made from a parachute.

Lilly's family at Bergen-Belsen

Lilly's family, who were all familiar with the stories about the wedding in Celle, were eager to visit the synagogue . They found the building had been completely renovated and modernized . But when they pulled aside the handsome curtain they were astounded to find that the Aron Kodesh,  made from a kitchen cabinet, had remained untouched as a testament to the profound faith of the survivors.   As Lilly stood on the bimah once again she beckoned to her granddaughter,  Jackie,  to stand beside her where she was once a kallah . "It was an emotional trip.  We cried a lot. "    I think your readers might too, Lilly!!!

Two weeks later, the woman who had once stood trembling before the selective eyes of the infamous Dr . Josef Mengele returned home and witnessed the marriage of her granddaughter.

The three Lax sisters ~ Lilly, Ilona and Eva,  who together survived Auschwitz,  a forced labor camp,  a death march and Bergen Belsen ~ have remained close and today live within walking distance of each other in Brooklyn, a predominantly Jewish New York City suburb.   As mere teenagers, they managed to outwit and outlive a monstrous killing machine,  then went on to marry,  have children,  grandchildren and great-grandchildren and were ultimately honoured by the country that had earmarked them for extinction.

As young brides, they had stood underneath the Chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors had been saying for thousands of years . In doing so, they chose to honour the legacy of those who had perished by choosing life.  And by living it to the fullest possible.  Ha'Shem would have us be happy in Adar.  In fact, as Jews, we are commanded to live happy lives.

Lilly's Historical 'Happy' Gown

Now, more than ever, with Iraq, Iran, and many more, even within 'civilization' itself,  claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.  They wait in the wings.  To quote British statesman,  Sir Edward Grey,   on the eve of the First World War  as he looked out from the window of the Foreign Office at dusk & observed the lighting of the lamps ~ at the time Gas lamps, which required manual lighting  .... "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time".    It turned out to be a truism then,  & might well turn out to  become a truism in our own times.

 And, whilst researching this story,  I found another tale, not quite as dramatic, but also involving a "parachute" wedding gown ....  This time the wedding dress was made from a nylon parachute that saved the groom's life during World War II.   Major Claude Hensinger, a B-29 pilot, and his crew, were returning from a bombing raid over Yowata,  Japan, in August 1944 when their engine caught fire.   The crew was forced to bail out.  It was night and Major Hensinger landed on some rocks and suffered some minor injuries.   During the night he used the parachute both as a pillow and a blanket.  In the morning the crew was able to reassemble and were taken in by some friendly Chinese.   He kept the parachute and used it as a way to propose to Ruth in 1947.  He presented it to her and suggested she make a gown out of it for their wedding.  She did.   Here it is  ......

Another 'Parachute' Gown

And, given the 'Romantic' week that is in it .... I think it makes a Wonderful Wednesday story for the month of Adar Aleph!   L'Chaim!!!!!

Measured by the Moon .....

It is the Jewish month of Adar Aleph .... Adar is the happiest,  most joyous month of the Hebrew calendar. In fact, its motto is 'When Adar comes, joy is increased!   And this year there is to be a double dose of joy, because there are two months of Adar .... Adar Aleph & the true month of Adar itself!!  An extra month is added on because it is a  leap year.  What????  But how does this work????

In the solar calendar there is a concept of a leap year ~ February will have twenty-nine days instead of the usual twenty-eight. This comes once every four years. The Jewish calendar has a concept of a leap year too, but it is radically different than the common calendar leap year ~ we add another month!

To understand how the Jewish leap year works, we must first define a year. Simply speaking, a year passes by when the sun's position in the sky returns to the exact position that it was in relation to the season. Each day when we go outdoors, the sun is constantly shifting in the sky, moving up and down in the heavens, shifting its position from where it rises in the east and where it sets in the west, and how high it rises in the south. This solar cycle takes 365 days and a little under six hours.

But the Torah has fixed the Jewish month based on the moon ~ not on the sun. The moon begins at the beginning of each Jewish month as a thin crescent and gradually grows fuller each night until it is perfectly full and round. This marks the middle of the Jewish month. Then the moon begins it gradual reduction until it disappears only to reappear again at the beginning of the new month. When the moon first appears as a narrow crescent it is called the New Moon or the beginning of a new month, in Hebrew ~  Rosh Chodesh.

It takes the moon a little over 29 ½ days for the moon to complete its monthly cycle. Since we cannot have part of a day belonging to one month and part of the day belonging to another, the calendar is arranged so that some months are 29 days long and some days are 30 days long. A month is never more than 30 days nor less than 29 days.

This explains why there are sometimes two days Rosh Chodesh (the beginning of the month) and some times only one day Rosh Chodesh. When we have one day Rosh Chodesh it means that the out going month had 29 days; when there is two days Rosh Chodesh it means that the first day of Rosh Chodesh is the last day of the out going month and the second day is the first day of the incoming month. The only except to this rule is the month of Tishre when the Rosh Chodesh is actually New Year  .... then the first two days of  Rosh Chodesh are Rosh Hashanah which are the first and second days of the New Year!! 

Now,  although the months go according to the moon's cycle, the year must be reckoned in consideration to the sun's cycle. The reason is that Torah was particular that the holiday of Passover should fall in the spring. The moon's cycle has no relation to the seasons, but the sun's cycle is related. In the summer the sun is high in the noonday sky, in the winter it is low. During spring and autumn the sun's height as measured by the noon day position is in an intermediate position.

Since the holiday of Passover must be observed in the spring, we must reckon the counting of the months in a manner that the month of Nisan (in which Passover comes) is always in the spring. Now the four seasons take up 365 ¼ days, yet the moon's cycle is only 29 ½ days. If we multiply 29 ½ days by twelve months we get 354 days which leaves us some 11 days short of a solar year. That means that every year the months move back about one third of a month and in nine years the Jewish holidays would fall behind the solar year and seasons by about three months. If we allowed this to happen, Passover would be in the summer and then in a few more years in the winter! Yet the Torah explicitly stated that Passover should be celebrated in the spring.

Therefore to keep the festivals on track an extra month is added once in about every three years when the eleven day difference grows into a month. This extra month is added after the month of Sh'vat and before the month of Adar that has in it Purim. We call this month Adar I or Adar Aleph (the first letter of the Hebraic alphabet) and the Adar that has in it Purim, we call Adar II.  In this manner Nissan, the month that has Passover, is pushed back into its rightful place in the sequence of the seasons. Once Nissan is in its proper place, then all the subsequent months and their festivals, Shavuot and Succot, fall into their proper places.

During the time of the Temples, the months were declared according to visual testimony in the Jewish Supreme court, the Sanhedrin. Since the destruction of the Temple, and the demise of the Sanhedrin, we rely on the fixed calendar for all of our months and festivals. The sages who worked out this calendar were wise in astronomy and mathematics and fixed it for all generations. The following is their method of calculation: ~

A leap year cycle is a nineteen year cycle. During this period of time there are seven leap years: the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th, and 19th years in the cycle are the leap years. We can figure out if the year is a leap year by dividing the present Hebrew year by 19. If the remainder number is one of the above numbers or zero (in the place of 19) then it is a leap year. For example, this year is 5768; if we divide it by 19, we get 305 with a remainder of 11, which tells us that this is the 11th year in the 19 year cycle. The next leap year will be in the 14th year (in three more years).

If a person was born in Adar, in which Adar does he celebrate his birthday?  The usual custom is to celebrate the birthday in the same Adar in which Purim falls, meaning Adar II.  However if he was born in Adar I in a leap year, then he would celebrate his birthday in Adar I. Conversely, if someone was born in Adar II, he celebrates his birthday in regular years in the only Adar that comes, regular Adar. This can present a small problem, if one person was born in the twentieth of Adar I and his friend was born in the next month on the third of Adar II, if their bar mitzvah is in a plain year (with only one Adar), the younger boy (born in Adar II) will celebrate his bar mitzvah on the third of Adar before his older friend (born in Adar I) on the third of Adar. Ah, such is the irony of the Jewish calendar! 

And a Leap year with two months of Adar in it is considered to be a Happy, Happy Year!!!

It's Adar Aleph .....

It is the Jewish month of Adar Aleph .... Adar is the happiest, most joyous month of the Hebrew calendar. In fact, its motto is  .....   'When Adar comes, joy is increased'!

Adar is the month of good fortune for the Jewish people. The sages say of Adar ... "Its mazal (fortune) is strong." And Rebbe Nachman of Breslov has said "If you don’t feel happy, pretend to be. Even if you are depressed, put on a smile. Act happy. Genuine joy will follow....."

I haven't had a good year & have been feeling kinda down lately, but as it is Adar ....

When things go wrong as they sometimes will,

When the road you're trudging seems all up hill,

When the funds are low and the debts are high

And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,

When care is pressing you down a bit,

Rest if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,

As every one of us sometimes learns,

And many a failure turns about

When he might have won had he stuck it out;

Don't give up though the pace seems slow ~

You may succeed with another blow,

Success is failure turned inside out ~

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,

And you never can tell how close you are,

It may be near when it seems so far;

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit ~

It's when things seem worst that you must not quit!

Charlie Brown is Cool !!!!!!

Chaos in Cairo ....

  "I will incite Egyptian against Egyptian: they shall war with each other, every man with his fellow, city with city and kingdom with kingdom. Egypt shall be drained of spirit, and I will confound its plans; So they will consult the idols and shades and the ghosts and familiar spirits. And I will place the Egyptians at ...the mercy of a harsh master, and a ruthless king shall rule them..." ~ Yeshayahu 19:1-4.

It's been a harrowing, historic week in Egypt. There have been days of chants and chaos, bloodshed mixed with moments of breathtaking solidarity between the protesters and the soldiers sent to subdue them. The flame of social unrest that first flickered in Tunisia has spread to Egypt, culminating with the announcement Tuesday by President Hosni Mubarak that after three decades in power, he would not run for another term. The clashes left government buildings in ashes, stores ransacked, and an economy teetering. Cairo's international airport teemed with Americans, Israel's and other foreigners trying to flee.  Egypt's tourism industry froze.  At Cairo's Liberation Square, Mubarak's announcement was met with jeers and calls for an immediate resignation. Pro-Mubarak forces struck back, attacking the protesters in waves. The country of 80 million, rich in history but bereft of personal freedoms, awaits the next stage.

 I thought when Iran had its protests,  & Neda Soltan was brutally murdered,  that it would not be long until we would see the rest of the Islamic world go .... as Iran goes Islam goes!  ~ After Iran had its Islamic Revolution ~ not to be outdone the Saudis implemented the same kind of restrictions in Arabia  ~ like the black burqua dress for women and strict separations of the sexes in schools.  I considered after the Iranian Riots/semi-Revolution eighteen months ago that Islam might be relaxed.  The opposite happened & instead there was a tightening of Islam, especially concerning 'Women's Issues' and an increase in stoning, amputations and laws of death for apostasy.  Many Iranians were protesting against some of these Islamic strictures ~ on the streets we saw blatant examples of freedom ~ also there is a growing disillusionment ~ that this Islam doesn't hold all the answers as promised.  That is what we saw manifest in Tunisia too.  And now in Cairo,  Chaos!

 No doubt in large part across the region this uprising is about food on the plate and money in the pocket in Egypt. And the Muslim Brotherhood has raised it's head ready to step into the vacuum as Mubarak's regime gets ever more rocky. What would that mean??  What are their goals?? The goals of the Muslim Brotherhood are exactly the same goals as their offshoots Hamas and Al Qaeda. Their main goal is to restore the caliphate, creating a single state run according to Islamic precepts that would stretch from Spain to Indonesia.

Islamists take a very long-term view of events. While Westerners think in terms of election cycles, Islamists think in terms of centuries. To these groups, a decade is an eye-blink. To Islamists, the Crusades were an unfortunate century or so, which they have since rectified. They look at Israel the same way ~ as a blip on the historical page ~ an anomaly that will inexorably be destroyed in the coming decades, due to their current strategy of picking away at it piece by piece and enlisting clueless Westerners to rally to the cause in the name of "international law" and "human rights" that the Muslim world itself utterly rejects. Their patience and ability to take the long view is their strength. The important word here is "strategy." The Islamists have one ~ a long term plan ~ and the West does not.  Nor does Israel, apparently!

In most Arab countries, the Islamists have been quietly gathering strength for the eventual takeover of the lands ~ if not this decade then in the next or in five. They act with one voice. They use social service programmes to gain acceptance with the masses. They engage in outreach to gain adherents. They happily use new and old media to spread their ideology. They are imigrating into every country on planet earth and affecting demographics there. They are executing a brilliant, long term strategy. They have a strategy. We don't. And Israel, especially Eretz Yisrael, needs one. NOW!!!

 It is sad ~ the pyramid builders might not be able to go and see the pyramids. Or worse, they may be removed as the Budda's of Bamiyan were.  It all points to an opportunity for Israel's leadership to retake the Sinai .... NOW!!!

Never Again??

The historical parallels with the late 1930's hit home ever harder every day as I peruse news events.   Anti-Semitism is on the rise globally & Israel is beseiged by ever more hate propaganda & 'peace' proposals to 'negotiate' it out of existence.   Anti-Semitism has grown & the delegitimization of the State of Israel has grown,  due to and alongside this rise in anti-Semitism.  So today, I am reproducing an article printed last Thursday,  Holocaust Memorial Day,  in the Italian publication  'Il Giornale',  written by  Fiamma Nirenstein, MP.

Translated from the original Italian  ....

"We can no longer celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day simply by remembering, albeit from the depths of our hearts and with the greatest of goodwill. This Holocaust Remembrance Day must be lived in a fighting spirit. The illusion that the history of the world is marching in progress deluded us into believing that “never again” is not just a hope but a statement of fact. But it is indeed a very tough battle. The UN, born from the ashes of the Shoah, was, first and foremost, set up to guarantee that genocidal policies or instigation to genocide would have been prohibited by international law. This is provided for in the UN conventions against genocide. But as a matter of fact, we have seen what has happened in Cambodia, in Darfur, in Rwanda... We have witnessed genocide attempts in Tibet and in Bosnia... As far as incitement is concerned, it has become par for the course, although all that is actually needed would be an international court prepared to pass fair sentences. But nobody lifts a finger.

Twice during my work as a journalist in the Middle East, I collected my gas mask, just like everyone else, from one of the centres designated for this purpose. In 1991, I took refuge in a safe room prepared in the house. In 2003, I converted a walk-in cupboard in my own house into a safe room by applying nylon sheeting and sticking adhesive tape around the door. My husband and I kitted ourselves out with plastic overalls able to withstand chemical or biological attacks, so that we could go out and cover the news.

In fact, in 1991, Israel was attacked by Saddam’s missiles killing and injuring civilians; in 2003 the American attack on Saddam did not give him the time to respond. But the masks, then redistributed for fear of exterminating attacks with odourless, colourless gas that burns the skin and destroys the lungs with botulinum toxin or with anthrax, add to the unflagging efforts to build shelters for every house, school and hospital. Israel ceaselessly patents new accident and emergency services, new mass evacuation systems, it sets up rapid medical and paramedical chains, it equips the hospitals with spacious anti-atomic underground bunkers.

The population carries out drills in the event ~ unique in the world ~ of mass destruction, ~ a new extermination of the Jews, as threatened in block capitals on the television, in the newspapers, on the Internet, and at the General Assembly of the UN, all of which failed to utter a cheep in response.

The postman delivers to each family in the Jewish State, as part of its routine mail, updated brochures that describe the possibility of missile and atomic attack, complete with photos of carefree mothers, fathers and children. The Jewish State is bled dry by the costs of military defence, of strategic defence systems.

  It is appalling to write this on Holocaust Remembrance Day, after so many of these days have passed since the threat to the very existence of Israel virtually became a platitude:. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm", "the Jews stink"; "As the Imam said, Israel should be erased from the map"; "After the Second World War, the Jews founded an artificial, false and sham state" "They must know that their end is imminent"; "Among the Jews there have always been people who have slain G-d’s prophets and who have opposed justice and integrity. Throughout history, this religious group has inflicted unspeakable damage on the human race, and it has plotted against other nations and other ethnic groups in order to engender cruelty, malice and wickedness"; And if a Jew hides behind a tree or a rock, the tree or rock will call out “O son of Islam come and kill the Jew who is hiding behind me”. 

These obscene statements, often made along with affirmations denying the very existence of the Shoah. were uttered by the leaders, imams, terrorist militants, take your pick, who in Iran are making their way relentlessly towards the atomic bomb and who have equipped themselves with Shahab missiles that have a range of between 1,300 and 2,000 kilometres. These terrorists, like the Lebanese Hizbollah, have the ballistic power of 60,000 missiles of all ranges, that have been delivered to them by Syria and Iran; who, like Hamas in Gaza, in addition to arrays of suicide terrorists, are amassing ever more sophisticated weapons capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

We are trying, by keeping the memory of the survivors sacrosanct, to refocus attention on the fact that at the origin of the extermination of the Jews there is a psychological and propagandistic structure that delegitimizes the very existence of the Jews. The attack directed at Israel is increasingly more well-structured with the same elements, the same accusations of conspiracy, of thirst for blood, of insatiable desire for power and for money that led to and encouraged the genocide of the Jews, describing them as sub-humans, unfit to live.

It is by now simply impossible to maintain that the attack on Israel is connected to criticism of its politics when attacks on European Jews in 2009 exceeded those perpetrated on the eve of the Second World War. Anti-Semitism has not grown due to criticism of the State of Israel. It is the delegitimization of the State of Israel that has grown due to and along with anti-Semitism, which is fomented more and more by Islamic fundamentalism. And this too is difficult for us to denounce. But this is the task of those who can still see, in their mind's eye, the image of the child in the Warsaw Ghetto with his hands raised. “Never again”!

Do you want it never to happen again?  You are going to have to work to make sure it never does. "

Attacks on European Jews in 2009 exceeded those perpetrated on the eve of the Second World War!!

And a friend posted the Youtube link below today.  It fits perfectly ~ It's 1939 all over again  ... the Islamo-Nazi hordes gather around us ... Images of lessons learned, that we forget at our peril are set to the powerful  "Never Again ~ Remedy ~ Wu tang clan.