When Connie Francis made Jewish mothers famous when she wrote her song “My Yiddeshe Momme” about her mother, Jewish mothers around the world finally got some well-deserved appreciation even though, as the joke goes, they would be content sitting in the dark and not having us bother to turn on the lights for them.
My mother’s Yahrtzeit is tomorrow and I am unsure whether I will have the opportunity to say Kaddish or the typical memorial prayers for her this year in Shul so I am sharing a few brief words of recollection with you if for no other reason then to fulfill my obligation as her son to perpetuate her memory. As the great author Irwin Kurtz wrote, when we “remember” we re-member, we reconnect with those we remember.
In many ways, my mother inspired me to continue the chain of Jewish tradition in our family merely by her surviving difficult times growing up in Poland prior to the Holocaust and then restarting her life in England and then the United States after World War II. The Holocaust left deep scars on my mother’s psyche as I can attest to as she often had long conversations with dead relatives late at night in Polish and in Yiddish. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that this wasn’t a typical behavior amongst my friends’ parents.
I was part of my mother’s revenge against Adolf Hitler, what I mean by that is my mother wanted to have as many children as physically possible in order to replace all her deceased relatives who perished in the Holocaust. I am the youngest of five children and had my mother been physically capable, I am sure my mother would have had another five after me but since I was born when she was 45 years old, her doctors were concerned about her health in having more children.
Another way my mother tried to rebuild was ensuring all five of her children had Jewish Day School educations despite the challenges of paying tuition on my father’s teacher’s salary and for that I am eternally grateful.
To be frank, until this pandemic, I had mostly taken for granted the efforts of those who came before me and had not been able to fully relate to their struggles. While hopefully, the Covid-19 pandemic will start to fade once a vaccine is perfected and distributed, this short period of so far less than a half a year of ongoing, stressful tension and anxiety experienced throughout the world helps me understand on some small level the constant fear of the unknown future that faced my mother’s generation.
If there is one thing I would take away as a lesson from my mother’s life it would be the importance of continuing to strive to move forward even in the face of huge obstacles. Hopefully, if we role-model this attitude in ourselves, our children will learn from us resilience and sticktoitiveness in their own lives even when they face significant challenges in the future.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Elisha Paul
