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Growing Up in Anne Frank’s Shadow, My Kids Have Known About the Holocaust Since Before They Could Speak

By Cnaan Liphshiz

The son of JTA's Europe correspondent, pictured here when he was nearing his second birthday, examines a memorial cobblestone for murdered Dutch Jews in Heerlen, the Netherlands, July 29, 2017. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — On a country road steeped in spring blossom, the 5-year-old in the backseat asked a question that sent shivers down our spines.

“Did the farmer plant those trees around his house because his family’s Jewish?” he asked us, his parents, pointing at a farmhouse we passed along the way.

I knew immediately what he meant.

“What do you mean?” I asked anyway.

“So, people wouldn’t be able to see them from the road,” he replied.

It was startling evidence of how his mother and I — and perhaps life itself as a Dutch-Jewish boy — have allowed Holocaust traumas to mark his young mind and that of his younger sister.

For me, the revelation invoked a pang of guilt. But that feeling subsided into resignation of the reality of raising children in cities haunted by the ghosts of their murdered ancestors. For Europe’s Jews, that’s just our lot in life.

I told my son reassuringly that the farmer’s family probably wasn’t Jewish and that they wouldn’t need to hide even if they were.

But in my mind I was revisiting — one guilty flashback by another — all the times that I had exposed the kids to the Holocaust.

There was that rainy afternoon when I took them to the Holocaust museum in Mechelen, Belgium. We had some time to spare, I wanted to see the place and the two bottom floors were supposed to be ageappropriate. They deal only with the background to the genocide, which is explored in escalating order in the five-story building.

But the lobby had a temporary exhibition of drawings by an Auschwitz prisoner showing a Nazi flailing an inmate’s bare buttocks.

Questions followed. Answers flowed, including about how the Germans tried to kill Granny Hella at Auschwitz because she was Jewish. Before I knew it I mentioned gas chambers. Then I changed the subject and we walked in the rain to the nearest ice cream shop.

I’ve been obsessed with the Holocaust since a young age. I must have been 3 when Hella told me, sobbing intermittently, about how she had survived Auschwitz, the death marches and the carpet bombing of Dresden.

My job as JTA Europe correspondent isn’t helping me put distance from the genocide.

Clearly I’m partly responsible for introducing my very young children to horrific facts.

Some parents make the argument for starting early with age-appropriate Holocaust instruction. I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing, especially considering the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism today in Europe and the Netherlands.

In last month’s general elections here, the right-wing and COVIDskeptic Forum for Democracy party quadrupled its number of seats in parliament — it has eight now — despite a massive scandal over antiSemitism in its ranks in November.

On the left, Green Left, the only party in the Dutch parliament that supports a boycott of Israel — and no other country — entered as a lawmaker Kauthar Bouchallikht, an activist who in 2014 posed for pictures in front of a sign reading “stop doing what Hitler did to you” at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. She has apologized for her actions.

But even if I’m overreacting, the H-word seems unavoidable for a Jewish-Dutch child who is being raised here to be invested in their identity.

For such Jews, the Holocaust seems everywhere in the Netherlands, where the Nazis and collaborators murdered at least 75% of the local Jewish population — the highest death rate in occupied Western Europe.

My father-in-law lives down the road from Anne Frank’s old apartment, before she went into hiding. On visits, the kids go with their saba, Hebrew for grandfather, to a playground just under that flat featuring a prominent statue of the teenage diarist that always has fresh wreaths at its feet, placed there by tourists.

Their mother attended Frank’s former elementary school, which is now named for her. It sits about 500 yards from the playground.

The entrance to our children’s Jewish kindergarten has a life-size poster of Anne Frank. And there’s a building-size portrait of her towering over the passenger terminal of the ferry that we take several times a week to reach the city center.

On the streets of many Dutch cities, especially their native Amsterdam, shiny brass memorial cobblestones decorate the doorsteps of pretty much each building from which Jews were deported. They are magnets for inquisitive young children, especially my 4-year-old

The author’s son visits the Kazerne Dossin Holocaust museum near Antwerp, Belgium, March 12, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz) Frost covers the Merwede Square in Amsterdam, where a statue of Anne Frank stands opposite her last home in which she and her family lived as free people. (Wikimedia Commons/Franklin Heijnen)

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daughter, who tells me, “Look, Dad, Jews!” whenever she notices one (she seems to think they should make me happy).

Then there are the German-built massive bunkers that scar the entire length of the coastline; annual World War II memorial days with a two-minute silence where everybody stands still; and the innumerable references to the genocide in our heavily Jewish social circle and on television.

To help me think through it all, I called up a fellow Dutch-Jewish parent: Meir Villegas Henriquez, an Orthodox rabbi from Rotterdam. His two boys, aged 8 and 11, are a little older than my kids, so he has more experience with navigating the challenge of raising children in the shadow of the Shoah — and more insight into the potential trauma that might result.

Henriquez, 41, told me that he tries to filter the content that his children encounter about the Holocaust at a young age — but has come to terms with being unable to block it out.

His older son learned about the Holocaust in third grade at his nonJewish school, Henriquez said. So the boy’s younger brother, who was then 5, also heard about it.

“And there are commemorations. It’s not something you can ignore for more than a few years as a parent,” he said.

Henriquez says he has some guidelines for his family. He tries to shield his sons from graphic images of the Holocaust and avoids taking them to museums with such pictures.

“Images have a tendency to burn into the mind,” he said.

Henriquez also works to show his sons that they are safe as Jews in the Netherlands through his volunteer work running Ohel Abraham, a nonprofit and study center that he founded for both Jews and non-Jews with an interest in Judaism.

“The boys see an openness to the outside world. They see many nonJews with a warm sentiment toward Judaism, the Jewish people and Israel,” he said. “Such things create a balance. That’s the best you can strive for.”

Still, Henriquez has not shied away from turning the Holocaust into a sobering warning for his children.

“I try to instill vigilance, but not fears, phobias or paranoia,” he said.

He told his boys that the Holocaust “shows you need to be vigilant. Not trust the government. Any government. That Anne Frank and her family were betrayed by their countrymen.” (The exact circumstances of the Frank family’s capture remain a subject of debate among historians.)

Henriquez shares another lesson with his children.

“It shows why aliyah is a good idea,” he said, using the Hebrewlanguage word for immigrating to Israel as a Jew.

As an Israeli Jew living in the Netherlands, I see the appeal. And I confess that after some thought, I realize that a part of me doesn’t mind slightly traumatizing the kids with their exposure to the Holocaust.

My own trauma, acquired growing up in my native Israel among survivors, is making me prioritize instilling in them powerful survival instincts over giving them a sheltered childhood. I can’t know what I would have done as a Jew in Europe in the 1930s. All I can know is that my grandmother was lucky to survive — and I wouldn’t want my children to have to depend on luck.

I also know that, as an Israeli in Europe, I’m OK with my children feeling some discomfort. Maybe exposing my children to the Holocaust early on will give them a nuanced understanding of their home here — a home that is perhaps conditional, even as it is beloved every day. 

Best wishes to my many friends & associates in the Jewish Community. Thank you for your continued support.

Judge Kern Reese

Orleans Civil District Court, Section L

Yemen’s Jewish Population, Once Over 50,000, Drops to Below 10

By Gabe Friedman

Yemeni Rabbi Youssef Moussa, left, and his brother Salem sit in an apartment in Sanaa, Yemen, Nov. 10, 2009, after fleeing conflict in the northern part of the country. (Marwan Naamani/AFP via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Amid the ongoing civil war in Yemen, 13 Jews have immigrated to Egypt, leaving the country’s once vibrant community of at least 50,000 with a population of fewer than 10.

Some reports claimed that the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who control part of Yemen, forced the Jews to leave. The Times of Israel reported that the refugees instead struck a deal with the Houthis to leave peacefully Cairo.

They also reportedly refused an offer to go to Israel.

Other Yemeni Jewish families have left for the United Arab Emirates in recent months, according to The Times of Israel. The UAE is newly on formal diplomatic terms with Israel after signing onto the Abraham Accords peace deal last year.

Tens of thousands of Yemeni Jews left for Israel shortly after its establishment as a state in 1948, spurred by the wave of anti-Semitism across the Arab world that the founding had triggered. A group of 19 Yemeni Jews were brought to Israel on a secret mission in 2016 coordinated by the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Attacks against Jews in Yemen had risen sharply since 2008, when a Jewish teacher was murdered in Raydah. In 2012, another Yemeni Jewish citizen was murdered in Sanaa, and a young Jewish woman was abducted, forced to convert to Islam and forcibly wed to a Muslim man. 

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Is Your Name on This List? Your Jewish Roots Might Be in Cairo, Baghdad or Nearby

By Asaf Shalev

A scanned page of the list of Baghdadi Jewish men exempt from Ottoman military service published by Rabbi Shlomo Bekhor Husin in 1892 and archived at the National

Libary of Israel in Jerusalem. (Courtesy of Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch) (JTA) — In the late 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was looking to conscript men into its army, including the several thousand young Jewish ones who were living in the city of Baghdad.

The Jewish community didn’t like the idea of the imperial forces taking away its young men, so it arranged to pay authorities for exemptions. Rabbi Shlomo Bekhor Husin of Baghdad documented the exemptions, carefully jotting each down name in medieval Rashi script.

In the following decades, many of those names vanished or morphed as the Jews living there dispersed across the globe. But the lists survived and now are housed at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem — if you’re willing to deal with the microfilm format on which they are preserved.

Retired Israeli diplomat and independent researcher Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch has squinted to read and translate every single one of the nearly 3,500 names on Husin’s lists. And the lists are just one of the dozens of idiosyncratic sources that Rosen-Koenigsbuch has consulted in his years-long hunt for lost Jewish family names.

Rosen-Koenigsbuch, 73, has published the world’s most complete lists of Jewish surnames from the cities of Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and — as of this week — Alexandria. (Next up are probably Basra, Mosul and Erbil, he said.) The four lists have been combined by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency into this searchable database. (If you know your name belongs but isn’t there, email Rosen-Koenigsbuch, who’s always making additions and corrections.) A Flourish data visualization Before I spotted Rosen-Koenigsbuch’s research on the internet, I had only once ever seen a written reference to my family’s original Baghdadi last name. The generically Israeli sounding “Shalev” was “Shaloo” until my grandfather changed it upon moving from Iraq to Israel in 1951. An act of assimilation, the switch was easy because “Shalev” and “Shaloo” are spelled the same in Hebrew script: shin-lamed-vav. The letter “vav” is capable of making both an “oo” sound and a “v” sound. I searched and found no “Shaloo” on Rosen-Koenigsbuch’s list. But I did find a “Shellu,” and it felt close enough. Maybe, I thought, that was just how he had transliterated a name that could be spelled out any number of ways. “One of the biggest problems in this work is transliteration,” RosenKoenigsbuch said on the phone from Jerusalem as he began to confirm my inkling. “There are different ways to pronounce the names and different ways to spell them.” I asked him where he had found “Shellu.” He pulled up his sources and quickly told me that the name appeared three times. First, he told me about Husin’s Ottoman exemptions, and among them was a young lad with the name spelled “shinlamed-vav.” Shellu. Shaloo. Shalev. Bingo. This could be a forgotten ancestor. Then, he said the name appeared twice in a 1950 registry from Iraq. This was a list of people whose citizenship was revoked during the Iraqi Jewish exodus — definitely my ancestors. After years of curiosity, and some research, I had finally made a genealogical breakthrough.

Rosen-Koenigsbuch started on the surnames project while doing his own genealogical research. But his family is not from the Middle East; they’re from Poland.

“My parents were Holocaust survivors,” he said. “And they didn’t speak. My father was completely silent.”

To learn anything about his family’s past, he had to dig.

He discovered elaborate family connections and eventually gave lectures on his findings. Audience members with Mizrahi heritage would approach him and they tended to have a certain reaction.

“I would hear this mantra,” he said. “We don’t know anything about our families because we left Egypt or Syria or Iraq in a hurry. We left everything behind and the archives are closed. We came out alive from those countries, but the documents are not with us. In Europe, most of the Jews were annihilated but the archives are open.’”

Rosen-Koenigsbuch, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Jordan from 2006 to 2009, had the geographic interest and some of the linguistic knowledge to find out what kind of information might still exist despite the lacunae.

He decided to focus on surnames and found thousands of them in historic newspapers, business directories, a circumcision registry, court records, previously published research and through the help of social media groups dedicated to the various Jewish diasporas.

None of these sources are comprehensive. Your family was more likely to be mentioned somewhere, for example, if you donated money or if you sent your kids to Jewish schools.

“There are many limitations, but we have to try to gather the history because we still have among us people in their 70s, early 80s and in 10 years there will be no one to talk to,” Rosen-Koenigsbuch said. “If we will not hurry they will be gone. It’s a very important message to encourage people to start thinking about this.” 

Together we celebrate 73 years of Independence in Israel!

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