Every Friday, Mayan Toledano drives her silver Volvo convertible—decorated with a dancing Elvis hanging from the rearview mirror and a pink cowboy propped on the dashboard—to deep corners of Brooklyn like Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach to deliver food to food-insecure Holocaust survivors. These survivors are members of Connect2, a program created by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island. This time, Toledano will celebrate Hanukkah and light a menorah with the survivors. “I now have a lot of grandparents in the city,” says Toledano, who moved to New York more than 10 years ago. “Otherwise, I don’t have family here at all.”
Unlike the Jewish holidays that are religiously mandated, including Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah does not show up in the Torah. Yet this year, as antisemitism is on the rise in a very public way, the holiday feels more important than ever. Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of light and good defeating evil. The story goes like this: In Babylonian times, the Maccabees, Jewish rebel warriors, fought against the Greek king Antiochus who desecrated the holy temple of the Jews. The Maccabees won, reclaimed the temple in Jerusalem, and had to rededicate the temple by lighting a menorah. But they only had enough oil to light it for one day. Miraculously, that oil burned for eight, hence the eight days of Hanukkah. It’s a holiday that hinges on faith and ultimately symbolizes how light can overcome darkness.
Toledano started to visit these survivors during the pandemic, when many of the elderly were isolated from friends and family. One-third of the remaining Holocaust survivors in the United States live below the poverty line, and there are currently some 20,000 survivors in New York City. “I started visiting because I suddenly had a lot of time. Usually I travel all the time for work, but being in New York, I realized what they really appreciate and need is the company and presence in their house,” says Toledano. The photographer began to have Shabbat dinners or spend her afternoons with them.
While there is a cheerful feeling in many of these homes, ornamented with streamers, plants, and Judaica, each survivor’s past holds a similar story. Throughout Eastern Europe, entire families were exterminated during World War II. Every survivor we spoke to has a sibling, parent, or relative who was murdered. Many were gassed, shot, bayoneted, worked to death, or buried alive. The glaring statistic—6 million Jews killed—is easy to remember, although plenty of people, including well-known and everyday citizens, deny that figure.
Each of these survivors’ homes is decorated with endless photographs of their family. Each wall and surface is decked with beaming images of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as weddings and graduations. Here, no accomplishment goes unnoticed, no birthday falls by the wayside, and every event is documented. Only rarely will these survivors—many in their 90s and some over 100—have photos of themselves, their parents, or their siblings from their former lives in Eastern Europe, which were abandoned or destroyed as a by-product of wide-scale mass murder. “They re-created life after seeing the horrors of the world and losing everyone,” says Toledano. “Now their biggest pride is having a family. And the bigger it is, the more proud they are.”
Toledano grew up in a religious Moroccan Jewish family; they celebrated Shabbat and kept kosher in the home, but her work with survivors reignited her love for those traditions after years of not living at home. “My volunteer work with the survivors wasn’t a response to the current overwhelming spike of prejudice and erasure, and the distortion of our history, but hearing their stories and advice has guided me through this time,” she says. “It taught me a lot about my responsibility as a member of my community. I am now able to give voice to their narrative, their individual humanity and beauty, beyond the gravity of the war. For any community, learning from our elders is the foundation of us building a better and more secure future.”
In the lead-up to Hanukkah, I visited several of Toledano’s friends to hear their stories.
Sabina Green, 100, was the first survivor whom Toledano met, in July 2020. “She was sitting outside, and she was singing me a song in Yiddish and was super cheerful. I remember I brought her flowers, and she was so happy,” says Toledano. “While I was talking to her, I knew I was going to see this woman for a long time. This was not a onetime visit.”
Green was born in Ulanow, Poland, with the Yiddish name Shaindl Low. She had three siblings—a sister and two brothers—and was the second oldest. At one point, she pulls out a black-and-white photo of 25 girls from her Hebrew school, Beis Yaakov, back in Poland that she had sent to a friend before the war: One by one, she counts how many were killed during the Holocaust. Only three people survived: herself, a friend, and another classmate. Her sister, also pictured, was killed.
At 18, she falsified documents to flee Poland, but her brother, sister, and mother were unable to escape and stayed behind. She later found out that they had hired a Polish man to take them to a town that was believed to be safe. The man took their money and belongings but brought Green’s family to the Gestapo and they were murdered.
At the time, Green’s brother had set her up with a man named Bernard who was 11 years her senior in order to help her escape to Stryj, which is now in Ukraine. There they became husband and wife and she pretended to be Protestant. While living in Ukraine during the war, Green never cut her hair; her husband had advised her that it would be dangerous. “He said, ‘The barber works too closely to you and will recognize who you are.’” One morning, after buying milk, she feared that she would be discovered: “Everyone spoke Ukrainian. I asked for milk in Ukrainian. The woman looked at me and said, ‘You speak like a Jew.’ I never opened my mouth in Ukrainian [again].”
After the war, Green encountered Jews who no longer wanted to be Jewish. “They said to me, ‘When G-d could wipe off all my family, I don’t want to be Jewish anymore,” she says. But Green, who had two children in Poland after the war, finally arrived in New York in 1960, where she began a new life with her husband and went on to have additional children. “I tried to hold my corner [for Jewish values],” says Green, and she has been successful: To this day, she still lights the menorah.
Toby Levy, 89, talks to Toledano and me as if we have been friends forever. There is no one who wants to experience the world more than Levy. Back in January of 2021, she wrote an article for The New York Times about grappling with the isolation of COVID-19 and how she yearned to break free from the confines of the pandemic.
Levy was born in Khodoriv, in the Lviv district of western Ukraine, in 1933. Her family was religious, and her father owned a textile shop. When they felt the threat of the Nazi invasion (Levy’s grandfather was shot in their kitchen), they found a trusted Ukrainian woman, Stefania Struk, who agreed to hide Levy’s remaining family, including her parents and sister; her uncle, aunt, and their two children; and her grandmother. For two years, the family of nine would sleep and eat in the corner of a hayloft in the back of Struk’s house. Struk did not share the secret with her children or accept any payment. (Struk’s husband had been sent to the Russian army.) “I always say that [Stefania] was my angel that watched over me,” says Levy.
The family survived on potatoes and bread that Struk would bring. At one point, they were discovered by Stefania’s son, Tadeusz, who helped to build a larger space for them in the hayloft. “We didn’t have to squeeze [anymore]. We each could turn at night,” Levy says. “He cut out the panel in the wall for us children so we could look out and see the world. That’s what I used to see the whole day—the children playing games. The minute I got out, I tried to imitate the games that I watched the kids play.”
In the town of 5,000 where Levy hid, she recalls that three Ukrainian families hid Jews. “We would not have made it another year,” Levy says. “We would have died from starvation or someone would have found us.” Levy considers her survival a miracle. In 1949, she moved to America and immediately enrolled in school. “I was 16 when I came here. I knew enough to go into fourth grade, but I couldn’t speak English. So I went to night school, and they put me in first grade,” she says. “I said, ‘That’s okay with me. Just give me a bigger chair.’” Eventually, Levy got married and got a job as a bookkeeper.
Years later, after the war, Levy visited Ukraine and met a descendant of Struk’s. “I said, ‘I will always remember you and send you money on one condition: that you tell your children what your great-grandmother did during the Second World War. She said, ‘I will. Okay. That’s a deal.’” Stefania’s and Tadeusz’s names are in the database of Yad Vashem’s The Righteous Among the Nations. To this day, Levy has kept her promise and continues to send money to Struk’s great-granddaughter, who now resides in Spain.
Levy still lights candles for Hanukkah and has always lit Shabbat candles every Friday night. She made Toledano and me Shabbat dinner and told us a story of marking Passover while in hiding. Struk would bring the family bread, but her father refused to eat it during the days when Jews do not traditionally eat leavened bread. “In hiding, he showed me who he is,” Levy says. “My father had no conflicts with faith.” For Levy, the world remains boundless, and her thirst for faith—as well as for life—is still strong.
Hymie Steinmetz, 96, hails from a part of Romania that later became Hungary. The Nazis came to his town on the last day of Passover in 1944, when Steinmetz was 18. He grew up with five sisters and one brother in a religious home and had peyos, the sidelocks that religious Jewish men wear. His father was a rabbi and owned a supermarket.
At one point, the Nazis moved into his home, leaving Steinmetz and his family confined to one room. Eventually, Steinmetz was made to go to seven different concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. There, his parents were immediately killed in the gas chambers. During his time in the camps, Steinmetz came down with typhus and was sent on a death march in the snow toward the end of the war.
When Steinmetz came to America after spending a year and a half in a displaced persons camp in Sweden, he went to school. He worked weekends checking coats at events and waited tables in the summer. He later entered the insurance business and became the general manager of the largest insurance company in the United States.
When asked how he survived the war, Steinmetz replies, “I had emunah [faith].” He adds, “I was brought up religious and I said, ‘If I ever get liberated, I will speak to people. I will tell them what happened.’ I had emunah until the last minute. I never gave that up.”
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After two years of volunteering, Toledano first visited Rabinovich, 93, this past summer. “She welcomed me in right away, and with teary eyes said, ‘You young people are doing great mitzvahs.’ I try to bring lightness and cheerfulness to the home, but Dolly quickly started telling me about the war and showed me the number on her arm,” Toledano says.
Rabinovich was born in what is now Berehove, Ukraine (formerly part of Czechoslovakia). Her idyllic childhood was cut short when the Nazis invaded, seized local businesses and properties, and sent the Jewish population to a ghetto. Even as a child, Rabinovich volunteered in the ghetto, assisting a nurse and caring for children and infants. At the end of May in 1944, Rabinovich and her family were sent to Auschwitz. Her father, who carried tefillin and a prayer shawl, was immediately sent to the gas chambers. There were two lines: Rabinovich and her mother were sent to the left and her sisters to the right. By chance, in a moment that Rabinovich considers a miracle, her mother told her to join her sisters. She never saw her mother again.
Rabinovich is perpetually optimistic and keeps her faith, crediting it with saving her life. “I come from a very happy, religious home. Mommy and Daddy always said, ‘Children, you will always be happy and healthy. Just believe in G-d.’ It gave us a lot of courage.”
Sol Goldberg, 98, of Sheepshead Bay, was born to a Hasidic family in Zduńska Wola, Poland, an hour west of Lodz. Goldberg remembers the Nazis arriving in Poland when he was 14, in 1939. He was soon sent to the Jewish ghetto, where the synagogue was immediately destroyed. “They came with big hammers. They had the Torah, and they burned it,” he says. Goldberg describes the terrifying dystopia of the ghetto: In his family, 16 people were confined to two rooms. At times, he would have to wait in line for hours for bread in the winter, only to return with nothing. Soldiers and neighbors could enter the home as they pleased, taking food or raping women. Authorities also ordered all the men to cut off their beards, defying religious customs. Goldberg remembers one man who did not want to. “They caught a guy who didn’t want to shave,” says Goldberg. “So, you know how the soldiers have the bayonet? [One] took off the beard with the skin. Could you imagine? With the skin.”
There were other unfathomable horrors that Goldberg experienced in the ghetto, but one thing he notes is that the local authorities tried to prevent people from gathering to pray. So they’d meet in secret; the women would be lookouts so that the men could form a group of 10—a minyan—to worship. Celebrating Hanukkah was also out of the question and had to be done secretly. “But many of us were from [religious homes], so we shut the windows and just for an hour, we had the candles,” he says. At one point, Goldberg and his family took the menorah and buried it in the ghetto. “It was my grandfather’s,” he says. After the war, he dug it back up, and that’s the one that he still lights today, at his home in Brooklyn. It is the only thing he has from Poland. “We risked our lives for G-d,” says Goldberg, adding, “If we lost our Judaism, our faith, our traditions, then the Nazis would have won the war.”
Zahava Szász Stessel, 92, was born in 1930 in Abaújszántó, Hungary, which once had a vibrant Jewish community. In 1938, anti-Jewish laws were implemented across the country, which affected her family’s business, a store for clothes, shoes, and books. A few years later, when Stessel was 14, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz.
There’s a wholesome joy in Stessel’s Brooklyn home, which is drenched with sunlight from a window lined with plants, some of them plastic. The metal door to her kitchen is decorated with colorful beads and streams. In the corner, there is a sewing machine covered with a pretty embroidered cloth. “There is a warmth here,” says Toledano. “You have such a pretty home.” There’s the feeling that Stessel maintains the optimism of her cutoff childhood with her here.
Like many survivors, Stessel considers the fact that she is here a miracle. When she was taken to the concentration camps, she pretended that she was older in order to be considered fit for work. At one point, the Nazis believed that she and her sister were twins, which saved them from death. “The Germans were interested in twins,” she says, referencing the brutal practices of Josef Mengele, the SS officer and physician who often did tests on twins. Stessel and her sister survived, while her parents and grandparents were killed upon arrival.
When they were liberated on a death march en route to another camp, Stessel traveled from Poland to visit her family’s former home, Hungary. “We said, ‘America? We want to go home,’” Stessel recalls. “‘Home is much warmer. In America, we don’t know anybody.’” When they returned, however, another family had moved into their house.
Eventually, Stessel settled in America, learned English, attended school, and became a librarian. She has two children and two grandchildren. Stessel has written two books—Wine and Thorns in Tokay Valley: Jewish Life in Hungary, which explores life in Hungary under anti-Jewish laws, and Snow Flowers: Hungarian Jewish Women in an Airplane Factory, Markkleeberg, Germany, in which she remembers her time doing slave labor to produce airplane parts for the SS. “You never lost your faith,” she says. “You have hope and it stays with you. You have hope you’ll be all right.”
Julius Rauch, 93, was born in Borszczow, Poland (now Ukraine), in 1931. In 1939, the area was occupied by the Russians. His father, a forester, owned guns and artillery that were useful to the Russian army. Because of that, they were sent to Siberia to live, and although conditions were harsh, they survived the war. Other Jewish families in Borszczow were murdered. “Inadvertently, we were very lucky that we were taken to Siberia, because if we would’ve been in Poland, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” says Rauch.
Rauch later settled in America. He didn’t know English but learned it while taking a job manufacturing televisions and radios. (He worked next to a Polish American man who tutored him.) Rauch married in 1959; his wife, Rose, died in September. On his table there is a homemade card he made for her to celebrate her life.
Rauch takes pride in having sent his children to religious schools. “When my son went to the law school at the University of Pennsylvania, I called him about two, three weeks later and I said, ‘Is law school hard?’ He said, ‘Dad, I learned this at Yeshiva before I got here!’”