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The Road Home: Grandpa's Long Journey Israel today

2021-01-22T21:58:34.560Z


| You sat down Rabbi Chaim Meir Kahana and his wife Gertrude went through hardships, but managed to rehabilitate Jewish communities in remote towns • Only in 1961 did they get to come to Israel and reunite with their son, Michael - Father Ariel Kahana • 3,000 kilometers of torment passed over the two. • Their grandson in a roots journey after their amazing story Two men in a car - check (too many bags - check)


Rabbi Chaim Meir Kahana and his wife Gertrude went through hardships, but managed to rehabilitate Jewish communities in remote towns • Only in 1961 did they get to come to Israel and reunite with their son, Michael - Father Ariel Kahana • 3,000 kilometers of torment passed over the two.

• Their grandson in a roots journey after their amazing story

Two men in a car - check

(too many bags - check) ", the Ukrainian flight attendant shot at us at the boarding station at the airport in Kiev, and sent us, a family with many children and many bags, to a facility that measures the size of the luggage that gets on the plane.



My bag passed. The first son's backpack. The second trolley was almost empty, but exceeded an inch from the gauge. The flight attendant jumped on us and demanded 70 euros. 

That Friday morning, a year and a half ago, we were exhausted from a week-long visit to Ukraine.

I realized that another moment and the tough one leaves us in Kiev to sit.

I handed her my credit card, mumbling "atonement." 



A few seconds later, a Chabad follower approached me. "Say," he said, "the bag is worth 70 euros to you?

Leave him here. "" Thank you, you are right, "I replied." But she already owed the ticket. "The 



devotee was swallowed up in the boarding sleeve, and I regretted it." Children, we emptied the bag! "I announced." We will leave him in the field and fight for the money. "I also informed the Ukrainian that the bag remained, and asked her to return the money to me. 



Happy and kind-hearted we got on the plane. In the minutes left until takeoff, I looked for the Chabadnik to thank him.

He was sitting at the end of the plane.

"Who is his honor? What is he doing in Ukraine?"

I asked.

He said that his name was Moshe Orenstein, a rabbi and Rosh Yeshiva from Netanya, who on his way back from the tomb of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York, landed for a stopover in Kiev. 



"and who are you?"

He asked. 



I told him my name, and told him we had just finished a family trip.

"I took the children to the city of Chernivtsi in southern Ukraine, for a roots trip following my grandfather and my father, to get to know everything our family went through during the Holocaust and the communist era." 



"Sounds interesting," said Chabadnik. "Who did you say was your grandfather?

Kahana? "

My grandfather,

Rabbi Chaim Meir Kahana, was born in 1910 in the village of Visho in northern Romania.

Eldest son of seven brothers and sisters.

He was smart, charismatic and strong, and already in his youth was destined for greatness.

He was educated in the meetings of the Viznice storks, and at the age of 20 moved to the city of Chernivtsi in the Bukovina region, on the Romanian-Ukrainian border. 



In Chernivtsi, where a famous university, acquired knowledge and education, he studied German and first met secular, Reform and Zionist Jews.

He soon joined the Agudat Israel circles and became the party's secretary in the city and the editor of the Haredi newspaper.

In Chernivtsi, Grandpa also met Gertrude Langa, an ultra-Orthodox young woman who had been invited from Hamburg, Germany, by Agudat Israel to train ultra-Orthodox teachers.

In 1937 they married.

A year later my father, Michael, was born.

Two more years passed, and a good daughter joined the family.

The Kahana family led a routine life in Chernivtsi.

The parents continued to be active in public affairs.

Gertrude was not particularly enthusiastic about raising babies, and her young sister-in-law, Lottie, the sister of Haim Meir, who came to study in the city, entered the space.

Another brother, Yehuda, also joined them.



Among his many occupations, Rabbi Kahana was in charge of distributing the certificates - the coveted immigration permits to Eretz Israel.

In the 1930s, he visited the country twice, with the intention of immigrating later.

He kept four such certificates for his family, but eventually gave them up and handed them over to one of the members of the community, who appealed to him.

In retrospect, it turned out that these were the last certificates handed over to Agudat Israel in Chernivtsi, and thus the family was left in the city with no ability to escape.



In 1940, the Red Army invaded Chernivtsi and made a name for itself in the city.

The Jewish community, which had most of its property confiscated, suffered a particularly severe blow, but this was only the trailer for the Nazi-Romanian occupation in 1941.

Romania was an ally of Hitler, and in Chernivtsi and its environs the Nazis and Romanians imposed decrees on the Jews one after another.

Lottie tried for her life back to her parents in the village of Baklan in northern Romania.

Yehuda stays with Haim Meir and Gertrude. 



The Jews of Chernivtsi were first concentrated in a small ghetto, which brought with it unbearable living conditions, hunger and disease.

My grandparents set up an makeshift eatery in the basement of the building, from which they sent food to the many needy.

The basement also served as a shelter, where the family hid from the terror of the bombings on the city.

My dad was 3 years old, and his sister is a good few months old.

"I remember the sounds of the bombings to this day," he told us dozens of times. 



The relief, terrible as it may sound, came with the beginning of the expulsion of the Jews.

The Nazis, Romanians and Ukrainian collaborators led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Transnistria, across the Dniester River.

One by one, the shipments left Chernivtsi, first by freight trains and then on foot, into the frozen steppes of Ukraine.

In the fall of 1941, the Kahana family was also deported. 



In his book "Chapters of Life", which he wrote towards the end of his life, my grandfather describes the horror: frost, quicksand, hunger and thirst, dogs, the shots of the policemen and their sharp blows.

They were required to cross the huge Dniester River, where thousands of Jews before them had already drowned.

In the nearby Kasauz forest, my grandfather and his friends buried the bodies of Jews, who had been thrown from all sides.

On the sides of the road ambushed Ukrainian Jews, who snatched from them the little property they held.

Someone also tore the package from my grandmother's hands.

But she did not own the property, but her daughter, Tova.

When the kidnapper realized that it was not a treasure he had found but a baby, he threw the package on the ground.



Tova was mortally wounded and fought for her life.

"We saw with our own eyes how her forces were growing," Grandpa wrote. 



The next morning he dug his own grave with his own hands, somewhere near the town of Yampil, about 400 km east of Chernivtsi. Many more died around them on those terrible nights. "In the news of Job were heard from all sides," he wrote. In the 



great chaos my father, Ben, was lost. Only 3 and a half. He almost froze to death. Someone recognized him and returned to his shocked parents the loss of their daughter. Dudu Yehuda rubbed his body, thus saving his life. 



When they were exhausted, a turning point occurred. In no way, while impersonating construction workers, did Yehuda and Haim Meir obtain Living in an abandoned Jewish home in the Yampil ghetto, where the death march arrived. Not only did they save themselves, but also a group of needy people, whom my grandfather cared for throughout the journey. In the 



poor Yampil hut food was scarce, and the resourcefulness of Haim Meir and Yehuda saved the family from starvation. One day Judah sold needles he had brought with him for the day of command. The next day the two built a furnace for a local resident. Every day there was a new war for survival, but they survived.



With the arrival of spring the conditions eased a little. My grandmother recovered and began teaching her son and other children to read and write. , This week's Torah portion and general knowledge. My grandfather managed to get some money, where they bought food and clothing for the tiny community that was formed in the place.

A year later,

when the Nazis had already been repulsed by the Soviets, the heads of the central government in Bucharest began to look for ways to purge their names.

Among other things, they initiated with the JDC the launch of the orphan trains to the ghettos in Transnistria in 1944 - a program aimed at transporting orphaned Jewish children to the interior, which was safer than cities at the front. 



After some hardships, my grandparents decided to put my father on one of the trains.

Their plan was to send my father to the village of Baklan in northern Romania, where he would live quietly with his extended family until the end of the war.

Or so they thought.



On a frozen Ukrainian morning, Avi Michael and my grandmother Gertrude sat down on a snowmobile, which took them to the train station in the town of Mogilev Podolsk, near Yampil.

"The breakup was fun," my father said.

"Mom asked me to call her 'Auntie' because only orphans were allowed on the train. We thought it would be a short farewell, which would end soon. Who would have thought it would be so fateful?"



Gertrude returned to Lampill.

Dad, accompanied by a girl from the ghetto, traveled south to Romania. 

The rescue train turned out to be a nightmare.

"We were crammed into trucks for cattle," says Dad.

"The food was very little. A third of the caravan became a toilet. The suffocation and smell were terrible. It's one of the most shocking experiences I can remember."



In the city of Iasi, my father said goodbye to the girl who accompanied him, and was transferred to another train accompanied by a Goya maid who was sent, in coordination with the family, by the mayor of the town of Torda to be transferred to one of the aunts.

This ride was already more comfortable.

My father, surprisingly, befriended her with German soldiers he met.

The soldiers enjoyed the German he heard from his mother and taught him paper folding - an art that eventually taught his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well. 



From Torda my father was supposed to continue to the village of Baklan, but due to the progress of the war he was arrested.

The border with Hungary was moved south, and the village of Klan is now in Hungarian territory.

Had he continued, he would have been taken with his grandmother, uncles and cousins ​​to Auschwitz, for in those very weeks the Nazis carried out the rapid extermination operation to eliminate Hungarian Jewry.

His life was saved again.



In Torda, he was raised by his aunt Shuri Kahana, whose husband, Israel, the brother of Haim Meir, was serving in the Romanian army at the time.

Soon, however, they were forced to flee again by German bombers.

"I remember the horrible buzz, the frightening whistle of the planes diving and the screams of the victims," ​​Dad says.

"In one of the attacks I almost suffocated when people fled the inferno and trampled on each other."



The war soon ended in this part of Europe.

Israel Kahana returned home, and with his wife Shuri they became my father's adoptive parents.

Later, Uncle Yehuda returned from Mampil, who said that Chaim Meir and Gertrude remained in Chernivtsi.

They feared that my exhausted grandmother would not be able to withstand the hardships of the trip to Romania and sought to arrange a family home first. 



Another year passed, and my father's aunt, Lottie, returned from the DP camps, to which she had come after a stay in Auschwitz.

She now headed a group of pioneers on behalf of Agudat Israel, and to my father Michael she announced: "I am going to Eretz Israel, and you are coming with me."



The year was 1946. The state had not yet been established and immigration was illegal, but my 8-year-old father did not care.

He was a smart boy, strong and mature for his age, and set out on a journey to the Land of Israel.

With a small backpack, he rolled around Europe wrapped up by his aunt and apprentices.



Finally, at the end of long weeks of waiting, 4,000 people were crammed into the illegal immigrant ship "Knesset Israel", which left the port of Becker on November 8, 1946, near Trieste on the Adriatic coast, in northeastern Italy. 



The journey was arduous.

The ship was old and crowded, and many suffered from seasickness.

Lottie used to say that the pressure was worse than in Auschwitz.

"Even the distance between the bunks was smaller than in the camp," she said.



At the entrance to the port of Haifa, a confrontation broke out between the Jews on the ship and the British soldiers, and the ship was directed to Cyprus.

When he was only 8 years old, my father again found himself in a new land. 



The stay in Cyprus lasted about six months, until fate knocked on the door again - Dad won the lottery with an immigration ticket to Eretz Israel distributed by the British.

But what do you do?

The child is 9 years old, his parents are not with him and his aunt is not allowed to join him without a ticket.

Finally, after lengthy correspondence between the uncles, it was decided not to miss the hour.



Thus, in the summer of 1947, alone, without a responsible adult, my father arrived in Israel on a British ship.

He was sent to the British detention camp in Atlit, as was customary at the time, but imagined that he had reached heaven, since this is how the Land of Israel was perceived among the inhabitants of exile. 



Relatives on his mother's side came to demand his safety, but they were not financially able to raise him.

After months, in another uncle's consultation, it was decided to send him to the religious kibbutz Hefetz Haim near Gedera. 



Little Michael left alone on a bus from Haifa to Tel Aviv, where he was supposed to board another bus, but at Tel Aviv Central Station he lost his way.

He wandered the streets in tears until a wealthy ultra-Orthodox Jew, whose identity we would never know, picked him up at his house, not before buying him new pajamas.

The next day he was brought to the right bus for a living object.



"When I arrived at the kibbutz, I was born again," says my father.

9 years old, adopted for the third time by relatives, Joop and Tzala Auerbach, cousins ​​of his mother.

In high school he already studied in Jerusalem, and during vacations he returned to the kibbutz.

At the age of 17, he began earning a living as an instructor at an orphanage in Jerusalem.

In 1956 he enlisted in the parachuted Nahal, and upon his release he fulfilled the dream of studying economics at the Hebrew University. 



The three uncles who accompanied him in Europe also immigrated to Israel over the years. Only two were left behind: his parents, Haim Meir and Gertrude.

When the war ended,

Meir and Gertrude returned to Chernivtsi and set out to rebuild the devastated Jewish community.

My grandfather set up Talmud Torah and a charity fund and helped the masses of widows and orphans with housing, food and whatever was needed.



The days were the days of the reign of terror of Joseph Stalin, who declared religion, and Judaism in particular, a war of attrition.

Grandpa soon realized that Soviet rule was closing in on him.

He kept the activity to a minimum and tried to cross the iron screen with my grandmother, but it was too late.

As early as the end of 1944, after surviving the hardships of the Holocaust, my grandfather was arrested by the NKVD - the secret service of the USSR at the time. 



He tortures inferno and suffers systematic starvation, but refuses to reveal who his accomplices were in the "crime" of rehabilitating the Jewish community.

He was transferred from jail to jail and an interrogation facility to another, hospitalized in the prison hospital on the verge of death, until a judge sentenced him to seven years in prison with hard labor in Siberia.

To these were added two more years of "exile" in the city of Chryengov on the border of Belarus.



In no way did Grandpa survive Siberia.

Even in the inhumane conditions there he managed to preserve a Jewish way of life: here he stole tefillin, there matzah for Passover.

In the most unexpected places, someone suddenly whispered to him, "I am a Jew like you," and helped him.

He did the same.



Gertrude remained in Chernivtsi.

She lived cramped in a neglected neighborhood, and relatives from the country and Switzerland managed to send her some hidden money and medicine in secret ways.

At one point she was offered the opportunity to leave the USSR alone and reunite with her young son in Israel, but after much deliberation she decided to wait for her husband.



"I knew Michael was fine," she later said, "but if I leave Haim Meir here, no one will ever know what happened. From time to time she would send her husband food packages to prison. In her love for him she even once traveled to Siberia, thousands of miles away. By no means, and with the help of local Jews, she met him there, at the end of the world. She handed him some food, wrapped in Talmudic pages. six of the Mishna and arrangement. 



"those were great days of consolation and hope for us," wrote grandfather. "after a separation of more than three years, our son only, she gave me a picture of his letters in his handwriting." 



the journey nearly killed Gertrude. she had pneumonia Only an experimental operation, which included amputating one of her lungs and diverting the heart from her place, saved her life. 



The only consolation of Chaim Meir and Gertrude throughout the years was the correspondence with the Haaretz family. Under the detective eye of Soviet censorship, in secret writing only They understood, my father and uncles in Israel updated my grandmother on what was happening to them, and vice versa, and here and there someone from Chernivtsi would immigrate to Israel with an update.

More detailed ignition, or with the code marks to decipher the following letters. 

In 1951,

my grandfather

was released

from Siberia, but according to the verdict, the couple were forced to move to Cheringov.

Although he had just been released from prison, my grandfather immediately resumed his Jewish activities.

At the end of two more years the couple returned to Chernivtsi. 



True to his Judaism, Grandpa was once again integrated into the secret life led by the tiny ultra-Orthodox community.

Under the noses of the authorities, he participated in prayers and covenants, Passover seder and the construction of the mikveh in the synagogue. 



He also began giving secret lessons to a boy named 



Ben Zion Vishtzky, a Chabad follower, whose father was imprisoned for Jewish activity. At the first meeting between the two, tears flowed from my grandfather's eyes. For six years Vishtzky, his brother and friends came to Grandpa's Gemara class. If the Soviets knew, they chose to ignore.



At the end of the fifth decade of their lives, imprisoned behind the Soviet Iron Wall, cut off from their only son they had not seen for more than a decade The Holocaust and the persecution of the authorities - grandparents just wanted to immigrate to Israel. However, the USSR authorities repeatedly rejected their request to leave the country and unite with their son in Israel.



A parallel campaign was waged from the country: my father and uncles approached everyone in Israel and around the world with requests for release and immigration permits.

"It has become a regular practice," says Dad.

"Each time one request was denied, we would begin the process of submitting the next request." 



As time went on, so did outside involvement.

The president at the time, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, intervened, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the former US president and a symbol of the struggle for human rights. But the Soviets did not move



.

"We know about everything you do," the researcher slammed him.

"If you continue to do this, you will reach Siberia again, and this time you will not last any longer. There is no point in you submitting any more exit requests. You will not come out of here alive, and you will not see your son."

My grandmother underwent a parallel interrogation. 



The two returned home, crushed.

"The world was dark for us," Grandpa wrote in his book.

"We were shocked to the depths of our souls. We waited 22 years to immigrate to Eretz Israel, of which 17 years we did not see our only child." 



Desperate for the possibility of meeting their son again, my grandparents sent my father, in no way, a recording of themselves.

For the first time they spoke to him in their voices.

The chilling recording, with many quotes from the sources, we discovered after many years.

They demand my father's well-being, say that they think about him non-stop and ask him to continue on the path of the Torah. 

Dad and the uncles

heard the recording, and it was clear to them that Chaim Meir and Gertrude had lost hope of leaving the USSR. Correspondence with them continued, but Dad decided, sadly, to move on in his life.



And just then, in the summer of 1961, when everything seemed lost, and on my father's birthday. , He received a telegram containing four words: "We received permission to immigrate to Israel !!!" Thus, without prior notice and for no known reason, the Soviets decided to release his parents. The unbelievable happened. The 



rumor about the expected union between my father and his parents hit waves among everyone who knew The story of his life and the incarnations of his parents' lives. "These were days of euphoria," says Dad.

On the eighth holiday of the 1961 assembly, Chaim Meir and Gertrude crossed the border into Hungary, and from there to Austria. The Israeli ambassador in Vienna then hosted them in person and took care of all their needs. The next day, 19 years after they separated from their son Michael, when he was only 5, they met Him again, this time in Tel Aviv. 



My grandparents came to Israel in the fall of that year. They lived in Jerusalem and had many more years of work and peace. My grandfather dedicated his new life to the Jews of the USSR.

He set up an international fund that operated for decades and sent thousands of food and aid packages to his friends who remained in Chernivtsi, as well as to other cities in the USSR at the time. 



My grandmother returned to the ultra-Orthodox education sector. She headed the Refugee Home, an institution for girls who left their homes. The weekly Torah lessons she would teach before the war. Their house was full of adopted guests and girls from the USSR as a matter of routine.

They saw from my father five grandchildren, and even got to have two great-grandchildren.



Come to Israel from the Soviet Union grandfather predicted, "founded on a lie," he says, collapse. He got to see it before he died, Hanukkah 1991. After his death, my grandmother told us: "I finished my job in the world", and half a year later rose into the sky. 



Father, The boy, Michael Kahana, grew up to be a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, and he and my mother were among the founders of the Beit El community, and today embrace grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

I thought of

telling

all this

at the end of the plane to Rabbi Orenstein, who saved me 70 euros.

I wanted to tell him that I visited with my wife and children in Chernivtsi, the house where my father was born, the basement where he hid from the bombings, the Yampil ghetto, the area where his sister was buried, the train station where he said goodbye to his mother, the Jewish community where my grandfather worked before he was arrested, and the synagogue. His Jewish activities in Chernivtsi after his return from Siberia.



But, surprisingly, he did not have to be told anything about it.

"I know who your grandfather was," Orenstein said.

"I heard a lot about him. My wife's father is called Ben Zion Vishtzky. Your grandfather taught him Torah in Chernivtsi when he returned from Siberia. My father-in-law keeps talking about him all these years." 

arik3000@gmail.com

Source: israelhayom

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