BIOGRAPHY: A WISE CHILD

My father was originally called Lazar, a name found amongst European Christians and Jews and derives from the Hebrew אֶלְעָזָר (Elʿazar or Eleazar), meaning “God has helped”.

He always associated his Polish-Lithuanian origins with his deceased grandmother and his three great-aunts who helped his mother Fayga Pekarsky at his birth in an obscure Polish village. If they had lived long enough Riftse, Chaiste and Froomste (née Gröenblatt) would have died in the Holocaust in their 80’s. .

In my experience my father was consciously unworried by, and denied the significance of the Holocaust because he believed that the dead live on, and, besides his assumption was that Jews were or should behave like Jewish Christians following Jesus’ doctrine of loving the neighbour – in my father’s opinion all neighbours irrespective of how anti-Semites behaved towards Jews. ....

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