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In Their Own Words

Here are the stories of six Jewish families as told to writer Georgia East

A 1930 family portrait of Eva, David and young Victor Breitburg

'Those Children Never Saw
Daylight Again'
Victor Breitburg, 71, of Levittown, is a Holocaust survivor.
Within four weeks after the Germans came to Lodz, Poland, where I lived, there was a proclamation that every Jew had to wear a yellow star. Then ghettos formed in the worst part of town and we had to move.

I remember our janitor opening the gates 24 inches and saying you cannot take more than two suitcases with you. We pleaded with her. We packed what we could and went to the ghetto. We had just enough room for a bed on one side and another bed on the other side and a crib.

After a few months my father was arrested. He opened the door for food smugglers and was caught. That year, 1941, we had a terrible winter. Sometimes we didn't have any coal. Our rations became smaller and smaller. We would wake up and the water would be frozen in a pot on the stove. My mother still nursed my sister, even though she was 3, and she nursed another child, whose mother couldn't nurse her. My father came back to the ghetto. He wasn't the same man. He didn't talk about his time away.

In June of 1941, we heard that the Russians declared war on Germany. We felt now we're going to be liberated. But at the end of 1941 our rations were reduced. People were dying, especially grandmothers and grandfathers.

I started working at a woodworking factory, about 12 hours a day . . . We made everything for the Germans from their hats to their shoes.

In 1942, the Germans told us they were going to send the children to farms and we would see them after the war. We hid our sister. My aunt believed them and gave them her daughter. Those children never saw daylight again. I learned later they were gassed and burned.

In June 18, 1943, my father passed away. He was 41.

That year, the Germans took us to work on farms. I decided they're not going to take me. I ran though the field. The men fired bullets, but none hit me. I went back to the ghetto.

In July, 1944, the Germans came to take us to the country to work. My family hid in the basement for days. By Day 6, we were out of food, the children were getting sick and my sister was turning yellow. So we took our knapsack with our pots and pans and clothes and we boarded the train. Day 1 we were given a loaf of bread and something to drink. Day 2, we saw guys in stripes working in the fields. The train stopped near the fields and there was a lot of noise, and a lot of dogs barking. Women were told to go on one side and men on the other side. I was 17. I didn't want to leave my mother.

She said, `You go.' When I turned around, they were so far I didn't see them. On the third day I noticed somebody from Lodz and I asked him where the women and children were. He took me to the end of a wire and he said behind those buildings there was a crematorium. He said they were all gassed and cremated.

I could not understand cremation. I couldn't understand gas. I stood there for about an hour. I looked at the smoke. I still couldn't believe it. I didn't care if I lived or died. But after some time passed, I had the will of survival. The hate was so strong, that I had to live.

I never forgot looking at skeletons and dead people. We were skeletons, and as we rode by on trains, the people outside would spit on us. I continued to work. I would dig up bombs that did not explode. I figured if I don't do it I won't get food and I'll die anyway.

On May 8, 1945, I was coming out of the bathroom and I saw people running. I said, what's happening. I didn't move. The war was over. Somehow I survived. I was the only survivor out of 54 people in my family. I went back to Lodz to see if I could find some of my family members, but there was no one.

After the war Victor Breitburg found relatives in America who had left Europe before the Holocaust and moved to Brooklyn, where he met his wife, Lucille. In 1959 he moved to Levittown, where he raised his two daughters, Denis and Myra. He recently retired from his woodwork business.

My Mother and the
Jews of Sag Harbor
Ethel Bookstaver Charach, 90, of Patchogue, remembers her mother, Annie Yarfitz.
My mother lived in New York, and she married my father, who lived in Sag Harbor. He used to go to New York to court her. On several occasions he went on bicycle. She married in December of 1897, and she went to Sag Harbor to live. She had a large family in New York and she missed them terribly. Every night, she would cry herself to sleep. Then she got used to Sag Harbor. Very often we were without a shochet. Sometimes there wasn't even one in Sag Harbor, so there was no way of getting kosher meat. Most of the Jews, like my mother, wouldn't eat if it wasn't kosher. They'd have to go to New York or Jamaica sometimes to get it. It got to the point where my father would get chickens and calves and bring them to Riverhead for the shochet to kill. Sometimes they would bring someone in from New York to conduct services on High Holy Days. It was usually somebody who could kill the chickens and teach the kids.

From Lithuania to Glen Cove
David Zatlin, 46, of Glen Cove remembers his grandmother Rebecca Zatlin and his great-grandfather Barney Singer, owner of what used to be Singer general store in Glen Cove.
Barney first went to Hicksville when he came from Lithuania, but there were no Jews there in the late 1880s. So he came to Glen Cove. He was a peddler. He went to farms along the North Shore and made enough money to bring his wife, Pearl, and two kids, Benjamin and Rebecca, from Lithuania. He sold everything from clothes to pots and pans. Everything was on credit. One farmhand would owe 50 cents. Everything was done on a handshake. In 1901, he gave up the peddling and opened the general store. My grandmother was from the countryside in Lithuania; that is why she loved it here in Glen Cove. Her father died at a young age and left her, her brother Benjamin and their mother to run the store. Most of my family came over by boat through Ellis Island. They came to Glen Cove and they stayed. Although we were Jewish and in the minority, there was a sense of community here.Fighting Prejudice in Eastport
Lloyd Gerard, 67, owner of an antique shop in Eastport, talks about anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan. He said some of the men who worked with his father, Lawrence Goldstein, and his grandfather, Harry Goldstein, in their general store in the '20s were Klansmen. Harry Goldstein opened the store on Main Street in 1885.
I remember asking my grandfather how he managed to survive in the heyday of the Klan. He said no one would dare touch him or the store because if they did, no one would sell them sheets on credit like he did.

The big thing that everybody heard of is the funeral for a Klan member in the '20s. There are pictures with everyone in the Klan's regalia, even the horses . . .

I can recall being chased home from school by other kids. I remember when it stopped. It was right after my bar mitzvah in 1944. School started right after that, and here we have the same four to five kids chasing me home from school calling me dirty names. Then I remembered four to five days earlier the rabbi had said, ``Lloyd, today you are a man.'' So I said, ``What am I running for?'' and I stopped. I don't know who was more surprised, them or me.

Fists came first. I won that one. I had broken some kid's nose. His nose started bleeding and that ended it. That's when it stopped.

That's when I realized if you stand up for yourself, you don't have to take it. Also, I was about the same size then as I am now - 5-foot-11 and 190 pounds.

That ended all that overt anti-Semitism, but it continued in other forms. To think violence is an answer to anti-Semitism is ridiculous.

Synagogues Grow in Great Neck
Jesse Kahn, 96, a resident of Great Neck for more than 60 years, remembers the early days.
My mother and father came here from Hungary in 1901. We lived in the city. My family was very poor. I attended PS 188 and on Friday nights we went to school with our towels and soap to get a free hot shower.

I married my wife in 1929 and moved to Great Neck in 1931. When we moved to Great Neck, it was so solid in recognizing Sunday closure that you could not buy a carton of milk on that day. There were no synagogues and no hospitals. My temple, Temple Beth-El, had no building of its own. Instead, we had services in the community church. In 1932, we moved into a building of our own.

Originally, the Catholics were not too receptive to the influx of Jewish people. But as time went on, our rabbi organized a clergy group and they would exchange pulpits, which is a practice they still carry on to this day. That made matters a little easier.

One year Martin Luther King Jr. was invited by our rabbi to give a speech at the temple. There was an overwhelming crowd that came out.

After some time, we found our temple was increasing its membership and we had to hold double sessions for High Holy Days. We petitioned to build a second temple and that gave birth to Temple Emanuel. Both Beth-El and Emanuel were Reform.

In the meantime, Temple Israel was founded, and out of the necessity for the Orthodox Jews, the Great Neck Synagogue was formed. The influx of Jewish people kept increasing from time to time. Every one of these religious institutions emphasized bringing up their children with a strong feeling of religious involvement and supplying the needs of the less fortunate.

The women were the backbone of the creation of the temple. They also took the first step by showing the community the need for having a place where pre-kindergarten children could meet.

I was the attorney for Temple Beth-El. I graduated from NYU law school in 1924. I would draw up all the contracts for the employees.

My compensation for being the temple's attorney has been being able to sit on the board with highly knowledgeable people. Most of my success has to be attributed to the associations I formed as a volunteer.

`I Decided We Would Start Our Own Shul'
Rita Newborn, 72, of Plainview, is one of the founding members of the Plainview Jewish Center.

When the developers advertised the property, they said we would be near churches, synagogues and schools. When we moved to Plainview in 1953, there was only one school. We also realized there were no temples.

As we unpacked, yontif was almost upon us. My husband Sol asked what we were going to do for the holidays. He suggested we go to to his parents' home in Brooklyn. But I decided we would start our own shul.

I hung a sign in the developer's office for the first Plainview Jewish Center meeting, which was to be held at my house. We didn't think we would get more than about 10 families. We noticed the people moving in neighborhood had names like Smith, Candiotti and Donniger. But 40 families arrived at our house that night.

My husband was voted president of the center and we started thinking about finding a place to meet. There was a chicken farmer named Dave Weltz and he was part of Plainview's Fire Department. He took my husband down there just a couple of weeks before the High Holy Days, and they were able to get the department to lend us the firehouse for meetings.

They washed the floors, parked the fire truck outside and even made an ark where we put the Torah for Rosh Hashanah. We had no official rabbi at this point, but since we had come from the city with our own Jewish roots, my husband served as reader and shofar-bleuser, while Murray Weingarten became our first cantor.

We later moved services into a vegetable barn, which David owned. We paid a dollar a year for rent. The barn was dedicated for its use and rabbis from all over the Island came to help dedicate it.

One Chanukah I pulled out my blender and David brought me a steel drum filled with potatoes and a case of eggs. I mixed up the batter, used the stove in the barn, and we had potato pancakes. It was a fun time.

My husband was very active with the congregation and I was active within the sisterhood. I joined the choir and I've been singing there for more than 35 years.