From generation to generation: Holocaust and Oct. 7 meet in intimate salon memorials |
About 15 years ago, an Israeli university student in her early 20s was walking home from a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony she attended at her mother’s insistence.
“When I was growing up I tried to run away from anything connected to the Holocaust, ” recalled Adi Altschuler. “But as we walked along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, hearing televisions blaring a EuroLeague basketball game that young people were watching, two thoughts hit me at once: Soon there would be no survivors left to tell their stories — and there had to be a better way to spend the evening.”
Altschuler began inviting friends and neighbors to her family’s home to hear Holocaust survivors speak. The gatherings evolved into a volunteer-based organization she founded, Zikaron BaSalon, which enables small groups to meet with individual survivors and discuss how the lessons of the Holocaust resonate today.
Speaking at a seminar for volunteer leaders in Jerusalem earlier this year, Alstschuler noted that the number of gatherings has expanded dramatically, with more than 2 million people participating in 66 countries during the past year.
“But with the number of survivors dwindling, we need to find ways to pass on the testimonies of the survivors and keep the tradition of the salon discussions alive,” Altschuler said.
However, since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, discussions about the Holocaust have frequently intertwined with memories of that day and its aftermath.
Shir Segal, the daughter of Aviva and Keith Segal, two former Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 and later released, spoke about lessons hostage families have drawn from Holocaust survivors. One of the most important insights, she said, was the crucial role that telling their stories plays in their rehabilitation.
“Until those who returned from Gaza tell the full story of what happened, recovery from the war will not be possible,” Segal said. Her mother, she noted, wrote a book, “The Main Thing is To Wake Up to a New Morning, about her captivity. It hit shelves on April 8 in Hebrew.
Shai Levi, who leads the Zikaron BaSalon volunteers in Germany, described inviting survivors of Gaza border kibbutzim attacked on October 7 to participate in salons in Germany.
“It was a powerful mix in the room,” said Levi. “Some of our local Holocaust survivors were elderly Ukrainian survivors who came to Germany in recent years to escape the war with Russia.”
For some of them, he added, it was the first time they had shared their Holocaust experiences.
Noam Yosefi, the organization’s director of volunteers, acknowledged that after October 7, some from Zikaron Basalon had expected the public would want to talk less about the Holocaust.
“But instead, more people are joining us and establishing new salons,” she said. “In the wake of October 7, people want to come together and draw strength from one another.”
For a time, Zikaron BaSalon initiated sessions focused specifically on the testimony of October 7 survivors.
“But at a certain stage we realized that we had to separate the two topics,” Yosefi added. Today, that model is being implemented by another support group, 255 – The Organization for Families and Hostages.
Still, October 7 continues to surface frequently in salon discussions.
Nitzan Gleizer, who has hosted salons in her Tel Aviv apartment over the past three years, said many of her guests are soldiers from a nearby army base who have heard firsthand accounts from Gaza-border residents who hid during the attacks.
“When I play recordings of my grandfather, Zvi Solar, describing how he survived while hiding in the forests of Slovakia, they often draw parallels to the stories from the kibbutzim,” she said.
Gleizer makes a point of devoting part of the evening to describing her grandfather’s life after the war.
“I want people to know how he was able to rebuild his life, to immigrate to Israel, build a successful career with El Al, and raise a family,” she said. “It helps people realize that we can rise again, too.”
As the storytellers die, who keeps their stories alive?
Zikaron Basalon founder Alstschuler said she is always on the lookout for how to keep survivors’ stories alive.
Among those approaches are gatherings hosted by second- and third-generation descendants of survivor families, or by hosts trained by Zikaron BaSalon staff. Still the search for new models continues.
“To gain inspiration, we invited a number of Israeli public figures who see Holocaust remembrance as important and socially relevant,” explained Noam Yosefi, the organization’s director of volunteers.
Among the speakers were actress Noa Koler, 44, and her mother, Hana Koler. Noa Koler co-wrote and starred in the widely-viewed melodramatic television series “Makom Sameach” (“A Happy Place”), which is replete with scenes that relate to Holocaust memory.
“Noa Koler’s work is an example of how creative artistic expression can play an important role in providing material for salons and reach a younger generation by making the subject topical,” observed Yosefi.
Before screening a segment from the series, Hana Koler described how one episode was based on a story told by her own mother, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania.
“When my mother arrived at a concentration camp, a Nazi doctor ordered the women to undress and then carried out a selection, sending those deemed strong enough to work to labor camps and others to the gas chambers,” she recounted.
“My mother was a very small woman—only 1.4 meters [4 feet 7 inches] tall — but she had large breasts,” Koler continued. “She believed that this made her look older and saved her life.”
Her mother was moved to tell this story, Koler added, when a teenage niece had complained to her about being mocked for her body size.
In “Makom Sameach,” Noa Koler weaves this grim story into a satirical scene set during a roots trip to Lithuania. A daughter of a Holocaust survivor confronts a Lithuanian tour guide who falsely brags that “the Lithuanian people did much to help the Jews during the Holocaust.” The Lithuanian tour guide visibly winces with embarrassment, and the audience gets a chuckle.
“The memories of the Holocaust can be overwhelming for me and my generation,” said Koler. “So I try to look at things from the outside and use humor to create distance, to be able to breathe a little. The breast story is a terrible story, but it represents a small victory within a terrible reality.”
Message of resilience
That message of resilience was echoed in a story shared by Noa Koler about a survivor of the October 7 massacre at Kibbutz Kfar Aza — five-year-old Avigail Idan.
Avigail, explained Koler, is the daughter of her cousin Roee Idan, who, along with his wife Smadar, was murdered in the attack. Avigail, then 3 years old, was kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
“Early on in the war, the members of Kfar Aza asked me if I could come to entertain the children of the kibbutz, along with the other actors from ‘Kupa Rashit,’” Koler said, referring to another television series that she stars in, a lighthearted show known in English as “Cash Register.”
After nearly two months in captivity, Avigail was released and taken in by family members from her kibbutz who are raising her.
“She is doing well now,” Koler said.
A sign that Avigail is bouncing back to normalcy, she added, came in a recent complaint about Ramzi, her favorite character in Kupa Rashit: “It’s not fair, she said, that Ramzi came to visit while I was away.’”
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