With the recent release of the 20th-anniversary edition of Schindler’s List, my family has been circulating emails discussing my grandfather’s “Kiddush heard around the world.” For most people who watch Spielberg’s emotionally charged film, the opening scene of the Kiddush being recited with Shabbat candles burning in the background functions as a somber memorial to a vanished world. However, for our family, that scene is one of the most meaningful ways we memorialize my late grandfather, a Holocaust survivor named Emil Katz, whose familiar Friday-night family Kiddush led to a series of unlikely encounters involving Steven Spielberg, the Wu Tang Clan, and two-time Academy Award-winner Rabbi Marvin Hier.
Emil was born in 1917 in Nyíracsád, a small town approximately 35 km northeast of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. He spent his early years learning in the local cheder and a nearby yeshiva before he began working as a printer. In 1939, he was drafted into the Hungarian Labor Battalion, a branch of the Hungarian Army reserved for Jewish men to perform dangerous tasks for the Nazi army, like clearing minefields on the Russian front. Surviving this ordeal because of his assignment to a regional army bakery, he avoided deportation in May of 1944 to Auschwitz, where the majority of his large extended family were murdered. Upon liberation by the Russian Army, Emil found and married Eva Gelberger, a distant relative who survived the camps. After living in a DP Camp in Austria for a few years, they ultimately settled in Los Angeles, where Emil worked as a bookbinder and raised my father and his two siblings. He remained an observant Jew, an active participant in local synagogue life and a lay cantor who led High Holiday services. In 1993, Emil was a still-vigorous 76 years old, serving as gabbai of the 6 a.m. daily minyan at Beth Jacob of Beverly Hills, helping run the shul’s gift shop, volunteering at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and finding time to indulge in baking, his favorite pastime.
No comments:
Post a Comment