I had Rosh Hashanah dinner last night at my sister’s apartment with Ellen Mendel, 89, a former refugee from Nazi Germany who fled to the U.S. with her parents in 1940 just before darkness overtook Continental Europe. We met twenty-five years ago at Congregation Habonim, founded by German Jews in New York City in 1939. This is the story of the congregation’s founding as told in the 65th anniversary video, coordinated by Ellen, and prepared in part by my daughter Margot Edelman who conducted a few of the interviews. The first 10 minutes highlight the plight of Jews living in Nazi Germany who fled to the U.S. in search of a safe haven.
Here is Ellen’s story, which I heard for the first time last night. She was born in Essen, Germany in September 1935 a week after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, which took away all civil rights of the Jews. Ellen was the only child of a prominent physician and his wife. Her father’s practice was gradually shrinking in the late 1930s as he was allowed to treat only non-Aryan patients, even though he had served in the German Army in World War I. In July 1938, a new law restricted all Jews from practicing medicine. Her father said, “If I can no longer take care of my family, we have to leave.”
She had a distinct memory of riding the trolley car with her father and seeing Nazis in uniform with swastikas on their sleeves. “Daddy, what are those? Why can’t you wear those things on your shirt?” she blurted out. Her father silenced her and bolted off the trolley car with her before trouble could arise.
Ellen’s parents attended the large Essen Synagogue for Shabbat services. On Kristallnacht, Nov. 9-10, 1938, the Synagogue was burned, Jewish establishments were smashed, and Jewish males ages 16 to 60 were arrested. Her father gathered the family and said it was time to move to America. There were very few slots allocated to Jewish refugees by the U.S. State Department, so the Mendel family relocated to Brussels, taking only 10 marks in cash, which was all they were allowed, and sending all their belongings in large crates on freighters to New York City. Ellen recalls Brussels as a very pleasant time, including outings to the beach and learning French in a parochial pre-school, while they were waiting for their quota number to come up.
The Mendel family received an affidavit from a relative who would sponsor them and visa for the U.S. in December 1939. They went to Amsterdam for two weeks to say good-bye to their closest family members—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, who had fled Germany. At the last moment, her grandmother offered to keep little Ellen in Holland until her parents were on firm financial footing. Her father said, “where we go, Ellen will go,” a critical decision that saved Ellen’s life. They sailed in February 1940 from Rotterdam to New York City. The Low Countries were overrun by the Nazis three months later; twenty-five family members perished in concentration camps in the next two years.
It was not an easy transition to the U.S. Dr. Mendel had to retake his medical board exams in English and suffered a heart attack during the exam. He recovered, retook the exam, and passed. He tried in time for a faculty position at Columbia University only to be informed that there were no positions for Jews. Congregation Habonim was a refuge for the displaced German Jews, with Rabbi Hugo Hahn, formerly of the Essen Synagogue, presiding. Ellen continues her successful career as an Adlerian psychoanalyst and has appeared in dozens of schools throughout Germany and across the U.S. to tell her story.
The Ellen Mendel story must live on because people must know the truth about the Holocaust. Sasha Havlicek, CEO, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), shared with me reports of neo-Nazis working to reanimate Hitler and openly deny the Holocaust. Schools and political commentators are giving platforms to Holocaust deniers to share their perspectives. I find this revolting and deeply concerning. There is no room in this world for disinformation, especially disinformation about hate in all its forms, including antisemitism, as well as anti-Muslim hate.
I conclude with a poem written by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, titled “One Tiny Seed.” It is a tribute to her late son Hersh, an American living in Israel, who was one of the 240 hostages taken on Oct. 7.
“There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand tears before you grow to be a man. I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days. We all have. And I know that way over there there’s another woman who looks just like me because we are all so very similar and she has also been crying. All those tears, a sea of tears, they all taste the same.
Can we take them, gather them up, remove the salt and pour them over our desert of despair and plant one tiny seed. A seed wrapped in fear, trauma, pain, war, and hope, and see what grows? Could it be that this woman so very like me, that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years, laughing without teeth because we have drunk so much sweet tea together and now we are so very old and our faces are creased like worn out brown paper bags.
And our sons have their own grandchildren, and our sons have long lives, one of them without an arm, but who needs two arms anyway? Is it all a dream, a fantasy, a prophecy? One tiny seed.”
Here is to a better year in 5785.
Richard Edelman is CEO.
