By Hadar Katsman, Features Editor
In commemoration of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yeshiva University hosted a poignant memorial event in Stern College for Women’s Koch Auditorium on Tuesday, April 14 entitled “Their Memory, Our Responsibility: Yom HaShoah Commemoration.” Around 200 students, faculty members and close family members of the featured speakers gathered to hear a conversation between Director of Student Life Dr. Jonathan Schwab and his grandfather Ernest Rubinstein, a Holocaust survivor.
The program opened with a candle-lighting ceremony, in which six YU students lit a candle in memory of the six million kedoshim (Jewish martyrs) who perished in the Holocaust. Kel Maleh, the recitation over martyrs, was recited by Beren Campus Rabbi Azi Fine.
Steven Galitzer (SSSB ‘26), a student who was chosen to light one of the six memorial candles, told the YU Observer, “I thought the programming was very meaningful and important for students to show up for.” With very few remaining Holocaust survivors, “it is our job as the next generation to carry on their stories,” Galitzer said.
After an introduction from Schwab, in which he described his grandfather as his greatest inspiration, Rubinstein told his story.
Originally from Czechoslovakia, Rubinstein was born in 1935 in a town called Nitra. Soon after he was born, many Jews in Slovakia were sent east for resettlement. His father had a Hungarian passport, and his mother’s schoolmate informed them that if they told the soldiers, who were gathering up the Jews of Nitra, that they would return to Hungary, they wouldn’t be taken. “But my parents knew, sooner or later, we had to get out,” Rubinstein said. His grandparents hired a gentile farmer and his daughter to take 6-and-a-half-year-old Rubinstein and his younger sister across the border to Hungary, where they lived in a shed in their great aunt’s backyard for two years in the town of Makó. After several failed attempts to cross the border, his parents eventually made it over and joined Rubinstein and his sister. His father was then sent to a labor battalion of the Hungarian army, only to reunite with them after the war.
In 1944, Rubinstein, his sister and his mother were put into a ghetto in Makó. After living there for about six to seven weeks, they were piled into freight cars, with only two thin slits for light to enter, and brought to live in a brick-walled yard in Szeged, Hungary with 10,000 other Hungarians.
A week later, the first transport came to bring Jews further east. “My mother was not anxious to go,” Rubinstein said. He would learn after the war that the first transport was sent to Auschwitz on June 25, 1944. The second transport came the following day. “I remember it like it will be today,” he said. “My mother held me on one hand, one sister on the other hand, and she held us back like she wasn’t anxious to go. But we had to go. They were pushing us.” There was only one bucket of water for the entire train car, which was gone quickly.
But then the train started moving backwards. “This is emes (truth),” Rubinstein said. Another train, he revealed, was supposed to go to Austria originally, but due to a track-changing malfunction, it went to Auschwitz instead, leaving the train he was on to be sent to Austria. “That was our mazal (destiny),” he said. “We went to Austria.” They wound up working on an apple orchard with about 25 other Jews during the summer of 1944.
That fall, the Germans put them on a train to Celle, Germany, a train station near the infamous concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. They were marched from the station to Bergen-Belsen. Rubinstein spoke of life in Bergen-Belsen as a young boy, of the quarter slice of bread he was given that was meant to last for three or four days, of the body lice he was always picking off of himself, of the lack of a change of clothes for pajamas and of the hours standing in the cold with short pants and no jacket during headcount. He described how he and the other young boys would watch “a dozen, a dozen-and-a-half” corpses being taken out of the camp everyday.
Daily conversation among the children consisted of what they would eat if they could. He recalled the American planes that flew over the camp every day and the “people who were outside begging, ‘Drop the bombs on us.’”
Rubinstein was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 13, 1945. “I tell my grandchildren that’s my second birthday, April the 13, 1945,” he said. “That’s when I was reborn.”
With tears in his eyes, Rubinstein recounted the moment a young Jewish American stood on top of a car and declared in Yiddish, “You are free.” The war continued another few months, but that day marked Rubinstein, his mother and his sister’s survival of Bergen-Belsen.
Life post-liberation meant much relocation and change, and some surprises. His mother, who desired to return to Nitra, Rubinstein’s birthplace, brought them to their grandfather’s house. There, they were shocked to reunite with Rubinstein’s mother’s sister and her two children, and to hear that Rubenstein’s father was alive. His father, who had learned from a liberated Bergen-Belsen prisoner from Nidra that his wife and children were alive, reunited with them there as well and brought them to the village he was residing in. They worked to rebuild the Jewish life that was in the village prior to the war. Rubinstein and his sister enrolled in public school, and he learned how to daven from a rabbi. While his parents and sister remained in the village, Rubinstein was sent to Bratislava, Slovakia for its larger Jewish learning opportunities, such as a cheder (Jewish elementary school) he attended in the afternoon.
In 1947, he signed himself and his sister up to go with a group of 125 other young adolescents to Dublin, Ireland. They arrived there in 1948, where he had his bar mitzvah and lived in a castle with about 80 kids from the travel group and a madrich (youth leader) to guide them. Then, while his sister stayed in Ireland, he went to England to learn in a yeshiva for two years. “And I learned from morning ‘til night,” Rubinstein said. “And it was a good experience.” In 1949, his mother immigrated to America, which he described as “the Golden Land,” and made arrangements for him and his sister to join her in New York City. His father joined them soon after.
Rubinstein spent the rest of his speech describing life in America as a young Jewish boy. He stayed religious even after the war, which was not common among Jews who underwent the tortures of the Holocaust or arrived in America to start anew. He described his mother getting up early before work on Friday to cook for Shabbos and rushing home just before Shabbos began.
Yaira Somogyi (SCW ‘27), who attended the event, told the YU Observer, “I was amazed by the fact that Mr. Rubenstein seems to never have questioned his faith or resented his identity despite the horrific trauma that he and his family and his people experienced.”
As a teenager, Rubenstein worked his way up to eventually taking a spot behind the counter at a jewelry shop. At the age of 21, he and his father started their own jewelry business. His Jewish values permeated his business conduct, as well. He closed his business on Shabbos and chagim (holidays), despite others’ objections, and always wore his yarmulke.
“The streets are lined with gold, but you have to find them the honest way,” he said of America, emphasizing the importance of making money truthfully. He concluded his talk with jokes, advice and thoughts on having an honest career and a meaningful Jewish life surrounded by a good community. The program concluded with the singing of “Hatikvah.”
Somogyi found the event to be “really special” because it was a real conversation, not just between any Holocaust survivor and his grandson but between a Holocaust survivor and YU’s very own Dr. Schwab, whom many YU students have spoken with or know of. “That was really special, to have that community connection,” Somogyi said.
Four generations of the Rubenstein family heard his story that night, including Rubenstein’s sister, who survived the Holocaust alongside him, his wife in Florida who joined over Facetime and many of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “It’s wonderful to see multiple generations of Jewish life together,” Somogyi said. “It sends a shiver down my spine to think how they are, and so many of us are, the descendants of the ones that were in the grasps of our enemies, yet we’re still here.”
Even with horrific and inspiring stories like Rubenstein’s, Galitzer recalled that there are still people today who are Holocaust deniers. “We have the moral obligation to remember the Holocaust and publicly make events to commemorate it, to show that this happened and we are still here and their stories will not be lost.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Rabbi Azi Fine