OUR COMMUNITY ON THE COVER
A ‘Tree’ of Remembrance Shoah survivor’s family donates memorial sculpture to Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids. SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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Henry and Beatrice Pestka
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JUNE 23 • 2022
ay into his 93 years, Henry Pestka still did not reveal much about his experiences escaping Auschwitz and surviving the Holocaust; but his children, Steve and Linda, have taken on that messaging as a personal mission with expanded and far-reaching goals. The siblings, raised in Grand Rapids where their father established a real estate development business, decided artistry would be a way to honor their dad, along with other area survivors, while keeping the messages of the Holocaust before the public. Their specific means, with the associated commitment in time and energy of the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids, became a relevant sculpture developed by an internationally known artist and placed in a memorial site with the advice and help of representatives at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. The chosen sculpture, Ariel Schlesinger’s Ways to Say Goodbye, will be dedicated at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 30, during an event open to the public and featuring remarks by the sculptor, Pestka family members and community leaders, and enhanced with music by Cantor Rachel Gottlieb Kalmowitz, who grew up in Grand Rapids and now serves at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Township. The monument, an aluminum fig tree with glass shards affixed to its branches, symbolizes the massacre and endurance of Jews during World War II. The sculpture will be placed, in the presence of the sculptor, along an
