Download Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge: Memories of an American Youngster Growing Up with Chassidic Survivors of the Holocaust AudioBook Free
Through bringing out my listeners to a special world, often known only to the orthodox Chassidic Jewish community, I have selected to share my activities as an eight-year-old American son. I am the third of nine children, the oldest son and known as after my deeply Chassidic great-grandfather, Eliyahu. It was thought that for me to give honor to his name I should come in contact with the lifestyle he and his family lived. As a kid I was moved from today's American orthodox home to my grandparents' home positioned in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. There I achieved a new type of Jew, Hungarian Jews, refugees from Europe. Many had their children given birth to in "displaced person camps." That they had just showed up with their own families to NY after having a hard-earned get away from from the Russian suppression of Hungary in 1957. While living with my grandparents, called Upa and Uma, I discovered how to reside in and clothe themselves in a Chassidic lifestyle. I discovered to love my professor, called Rebbe, and my classmates. In the 1950s, the vast majority of my classmates were children of the infamous Auschwitz deportees from Hungary. Most teachers had top quality tattooed numbers on the arm, physical reminders of inhuman cruelties. I remember visiting a family with my Uma, and being advised by the mom, "How lucky you are yingela, sonny-boy, as a father, a mom, a sibling, a sister, uncles, aunts, and even grandparents. The thing I have kept from Germany is this!" She shoved her arm with the blue quantities before me. Other times, my Jewish professor, a survivor of the camps, would cry in class, thinking about the suffering he and his family had experienced. Many of the institution children were from second marriages. Either their father's or mother's first partner had been killed. It wasn't unusual for children to get half brothers and sisters who had been 10 or 15 years over the age of they.
