Jessica
Our granddaughter Jessica recently celebrated her Bas Mitzvah. Here is what I said:
Thirty-six years ago at your Uncle Jeremy's Bar Mitzvah, I was privileged to retell our mother Lotte Wolfgang’s amazing story about her family's wonderful life in Germany in the 1920's and 30's. She described how it changed with the rise of fascism. She wrote about her father’s arrest on Kristallnacht 1938 and, along with her sister Lily, hearing the mob jeer at him and thousands of other Jewish arrestees. Lotte said it was a noise louder than she had ever heard then and since. She described their last-minute airplane flight from Germany in June 1939, three months before the beginning of World War II.
I will not retell this story, but I have a copy for you. I will rephrase what I said about it then:
The Wolfgangs’ apartment building, handbag factory, and their cars and chauffeur are a vanishing, distant dream. The last surviving family member born in Germany, your great grandmother’s sister Lilly, passed away in 2014. When the plane left Germany in 1939, it a carried a family that almost had been wiped out. In America that spark lit a torch. Lotte, Lilly and brother Richard, who became an internationally known professor of chemistry at Yale, raised the next generation, all of whom graduated from college and went on to successful professions and academic careers. At Jeremy's Bar Mitzvah, the torch was passed to him.
Today, while the threat of fascism rises anew, that torch is passed again. This time to you. Use it well and pass it on.
Here is a link about our family trip to Frankfurt in 2001, which includes what I said at Jeremy’s Bar Mitzvah in 1987: