Holocaust Survivor Has Bar Mitzvah To Remember Slain Family — At 83
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — An 83-year-old Holocaust survivor living in northern Israel celebrated at a Safed synagogue his bar mitzah ceremony 70 years after its die moment.
A few dozen friends and family, as well as Safed’s police commissioner, accompanied Hanoch Shachar to a local synagogue where many of them sang and danced with him before he had his first aliyah l’Torah – the act of reading from the holy book at synagogue after being called to do so from the bimah, or podium.
Jewish boys typically have an aliyah l’Torah when they turn 13, an age that in Judaism is when a boy becomes a man.
“I saw something was missing in my life, a tree, a branch, real parents,” Shachar, who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic, told the Israel Broadcasting Corporation during the event for a report that was aired Thursday. “Every Jew has a bar mitzvah at their right age, and I never had one,” he said. His entire family perished in the Holocaust.
Hannah Shachar, the man’s wife, said she was “very excited because it’s his dream, to have a bar mitzvah.”
Shachar brought with him to synagogue a violin that belonged to a boy who died in the Holocaust, he said. The dead boy’s parents gave Shachar the violin when he was a boy. “This violin is my way of asking Hashem why he took the talented boy who owned this instrument,” he told the film crew, using the Hebrew word for God.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
