Holocaust center flag is survivor's gift

Marku Weingarten was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, living in a camp for displaced people in Germany after World War II, when about 40 young girls in the camp stitched a flag of the soon-to-be-created state of Israel.

Weingarten had left his native Romania a couple of years earlier with the dream of reaching the Jewish homeland, and when he departed from the refugee camp the girls gave him their flag. He eventually boarded a small fishing boat in France and made his way to Israel, landing just two weeks after the state was created in 1948.

Today, more than 60 years later, the flag is on display in Glen Cove, at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. Weingarten, 81, who lives in Israel, had given the flag to his daughter, Sigal Shmuely, who lives in Sea Cliff.

Shmuely said, during an event at the center Friday marking Holocaust Day of Remembrance, that the flag meant too much for her to keep personally. She wanted the public to see it, learn its history and understand how amid the horrors of the Holocaust there were also stories of survival, solidarity and hope.

The flag "is not something that is his or mine," Shmuely said. "It's part of our heritage" of the Jewish people.

Weingarten, who has been visiting Long Island for the Passover holy days and is also known by his adopted Hebrew name, Mordechai Carmeli, appeared at the center to mark the recent installation of the flag and help the organization mark the Day of Remembrance. The center's Michelle Pinto said many Americans are not even aware of Remembrance Day, which is celebrated May 1. It is aimed at honoring the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and the millions of non-Jews who also perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Howard Maier, chairman of the board of the center, called the Day of Remembrance "one of the most solemn days of the Jewish calendar."

Shmuely said her father managed to survive the Holocaust in part by hiding his identity as a Jew and gaining the help of a German officer who gave him work in a German military camp in Romania. He later sold nuts he plucked from trees to help his family eat.

Weingarten's story shows both "the evils of the Holocaust and the triumphal joy of survival," Pinto said.

As he stood in the museum Friday gazing at the flag, Weingarten, who speaks little English and is in poor health, said the flag made him "feel love. I feel excitement."