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When a breast cancer diagnosis knocked me down, a network of Jewish women lifted me up
(JTA) — On the way home from the hospital where I was given my diagnosis of grade 2 invasive lobular breast cancer, I directed my husband, through my tears, to stop at the kosher store.
“I don’t want to see anyone right now,” I said, knowing the inevitability of running into someone we knew in the small Jewish community where we live, “so can you go in?” He pulled into the parking lot. “We need challah,” I reminded him. It was Thursday, after all. The next evening was Shabbat. Time doesn’t stand still for cancer.
My hospital appointment took place two days after the front page of the New York Times declared: “When Should Women Get Regular Mammograms: At 40, U.S. Panel Now Says.” I was 48. Breast cancer has long been the second most common cancer for women, after skin cancer. It is also the most lethal after lung cancer. Statistically, though, most women affected are postmenopausal, so unless there was a specific reason to test early, women were screened regularly from the age of 50. Now, the advice has changed. Breast cancer is rising in younger women. For women in their 40s, the rate of increase between 2015 and 2019 doubled from the previous decade to 2 per cent per year.
Why is this happening? Air pollution? Microplastics? Chemicals in our food? We don’t know.
In the days following my appointment, there was a proliferation of articles about the topic. Importantly, doctors explained that the cancer women are diagnosed with in their 40s tends to be a more aggressive type of cancer. Cancers in premenopausal women grow faster; many breast cancers, like mine, are hormone sensitive. (Got estrogen? Bad luck for you.)
When I posted the news about my diagnosis — on Facebook, because I’m an oversharing type — I was stunned by the number of friends my age, more discreet about their lives, who sent me messages to tell me they had recently gone through the same thing. Everyone had advice. “If you can do a lumpectomy, you’re very lucky. It’s not a major operation, and you’ll preserve your breast.” “Cut it all off! Immediately! Just get rid of all it and you’ll never worry again! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in mammogram scanxiety?” “Ask plastic surgeons for pictures, and pick the cutest new boobs out there. You won’t regret it.” “The radiation burns—that’s something no one ever tells you. Get yourself some Lubriderm and lidocaine, mix into a slurry, slap it on a panty liner, and tuck it in your sports bra.”
I’m not sure why I thought I was immune. Or maybe I didn’t — maybe I just never gave it much thought. Even when I found the lump on my breast, I was dismissive. I went to the doctor, and she asked if anyone in my family had had breast cancer. “Oh, who knows? They were all murdered,” I said blithely. Her eyes bugged. “In the Holocaust,” I added. “Your…mother? Grandmother? Sisters?” “Oh! No, no history of breast cancer in my immediate family.”
Add to that, my mother and sister both tested negative for the BRCA gene mutations, and that’s my Ashkenazi side. The thing is, though, most women who test positive for breast cancer have no family history of it.
But also, I’d done everything right! If you look through the preventative measures, I took all of them. I had three kids by 35, and I breastfed them. I have a healthy, mostly plant-based diet; I walk and cycle everywhere. I’m not a drinker or smoker. I eat so many blueberries!
Several of the articles that have been published in recent days are emphasizing the particular danger for Black women, with good reason: They have twice the mortality rate of white women. But as I did my research, I realized that Jewish women should also be on high alert. We’ve long known that one in forty Ashkenazi women has the BRCA gene mutation, significantly raising the risk of breast cancer (50% of women with the gene mutation will get breast cancer) as well ovarian cancer, which is much harder to detect and far more deadly. So many of my friends who reached out to me to tell me of their breast cancer experiences are Jewish; interestingly, not one has the BRCA mutation. Are these high numbers indicative or anecdotal? Are Jewish women generally more susceptible to breast cancer? This seems to be an important area of future research.
For me, that research will come too late — as did the guidance. For now, I have to accept that this cancer diagnosis is part of my life, that just as I will pick up challah every Thursday, I will wake every morning and take my hormone-blocking Tamoxifen. I will lose sleep every night about which surgery to have until I have the surgery, and then I will lose sleep every night about whether it was fully successful. And there’s plenty more in store for me that isn’t pretty; so it goes.
But here’s a good thing that’s already come out of this diagnosis: When the responses to my Facebook post flooded in, they were not only along the lines of “Refuah shleimah” and “I’ve just been through this too,” but also, “Thank you for sharing! I’m going to book my mammogram right now!”
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Israelis pause for a different kind of siren: the one marking Holocaust memorial day
(JTA) — For the last six weeks, whenever Israelis have heard a siren, they were instructed to run to their nearest bomb shelter. On Tuesday, a siren instead brought them to a halt.
The two-minute siren was the one sounded annually on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day. In keeping with a national tradition, Israelis stopped whatever they were doing for a moment of silence to remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Drivers exited their cars on the streets; shoppers froze in grocery store aisles; and people strolling the streets paused where they were.
Even for seasoned Israelis, the dissonance was strong this year. Hillel Fuld, an Israeli influencer, wrote that he was initially unnerved to see so many people failing to follow the guidance about what to do when a missile is incoming.
“I exited my car and was about to lie down when I realized, that’s not a siren warning of a missile. That’s a siren remembering the six million!” he wrote.
“I felt that emotional confusion that every Israeli knows too well. Sadness. Devastation. Hopelessness,” Fuld continued. “And at the same time, tremendous pride, optimism, and unity.”
This year’s Yom HaShoah is the first since all Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, were freed from Gaza. Some of the freed hostages, including Eli Sharabi, participated in small remembrance gatherings known as Zikaron Basalon. Others posted symbols of Jewish survival, including Sagui Dekel-Chen, whose wife posted pictures of him alongside his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and Elkana Bohbot, who with his wife announced that he is expecting a child.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israelis pause for a different kind of siren: the one marking Holocaust memorial day appeared first on The Forward.
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Many children killed in the Holocaust had no one to say Kaddish for them. These Jews have stepped up.
(JTA) — As each week’s Shabbat morning service comes to a close at Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach, Florida, an unusual tradition unfolds as the congregation prepares to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Rabbi Alan Bell asks to stand all those reciting the prayer on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. He also asks other congregants to stand, too: those who have taken it upon themselves to recite Kaddish for a child up to the age of 17 who was murdered in the Holocaust and for whom there are no living relatives to recite it.
The Conservative synagogue calls the program Remember a Child, and at least a third of members in the 150-family congregation participate. Most recite the mourner’s prayer on the date of the child’s burial as well as on Yizkor, the special memorial prayer for the departed recited in the synagogue four times a year.
But some recite the Mourner’s Kaddish far more often.
Bell and his wife Susan have “adopted” a girl named Renee Albersheim who was born in 1930 in Berlin. They do not know when she died, only that it was in the Kovno Ghetto in German-occupied Lithuania. As a result, Susan Bell said, they recite Kaddish for her each time Kaddish is recited — multiple times a day and sometimes multiple times in a single service.
It’s become a family tradition. “When each of our granddaughters became bat mitzvah we got each a child to show them that children their age were dying [in the Holocaust],” Susan Bell said.
“They were girls from different places in the world — one was from Greece and the other from Romania — and they had the same first name as my granddaughters,” she continued. “I wanted to show the girls how widespread the Holocaust was; it was a learning experience for them.”
The Nazis murdered an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children during the Holocaust, many of whom died alongside everyone else in their family. That left no one traditionally assumed by Jewish law to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish on their behalf — siblings, parents or, for adults, children and spouses.
Rabbi Alan Bell and his wife Susan Bell lead a Holocaust remembrance initiative at Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Courtesy)
At Beth El, those who participate in Remember a Child think of themselves as having “adopted” a child who was murdered more than eight decades ago. Cheryl Finkelstein, who helmed the project for many years since it launched as a Men’s Club initiative about 40 years ago, said she found those who opted in tended to “take this very seriously” and grow deeply connected to the child they have committed to remembering.
“When I sent one woman a photo of the child she had ‘adopted,’ she wrapped her arms around it and waited until the paper was warm,” Finkelstein recalled. “It breaks your heart.”
The project has gained attention far beyond the synagogue’s walls, and elicited a range of mourning practices that go beyond reciting the traditional prayer.
“We had a number of people who are not Jewish who felt strongly that they wanted to be engaged in this,” Finkelstein added. “One of those women wrote a poem about her ‘child,’ imagining her as a little girl who chased butterflies, living in a world of innocence. And another woman purchased aging software and used it on a photo of the child she had adopted to see what the child would have looked like as an adult.”
Having taken over the initiative from Finkelstein, Susan Bell has sought to gather as much information as she can about roughly 15 of the children whom congregants have “adopted,” starting with a page of testimony assembled by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.
Ari Rabinovitch, head of Yad Vashem’s international media section, said the names of the children murdered in the Holocaust and for whom there is no one to say Kaddish are kept in the organization’s online names database, which has 587,226 names of children up to and including age 17.
Rabinovitch noted that Yad Vashem has prepared a list of names — both children and adults — with details about them for use in Holocaust name reading ceremonies. “It is not uncommon for groups to access lists of names on their own for memorial services,” he said. But the memorial does not track how they are used, or how many synagogues may have adopted a practice like Beth El’s.
Bell believes at least some have. A Beth El member promoted the project on business trips, she said.
“Several of those synagogues picked it up but I don’t know if any have continued it,” she said. “It takes a toll on you when you do the research and learn what happened to each of these children.”
Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel emeritus to the World Jewish Congress who was born in 1948 to survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is an outspoken advocate for such a commemoration. He believes every synagogue should incorporate some mention of the Holocaust during Shabbat services, to ensure that its legacy is woven into the ongoing fabric of Jewish life — and he sees the Kaddish for child victims at Beth El as one powerful way to do that.
“It’s important in whatever way to bring into our consciousness that we are not letting it become just another event in Jewish history, just another occurrence, just another tragedy, just another pogrom,” Rosensaft added. “Because if that happens, in another generation the Holocaust will be a statistic and basically a catchphrase for people to throw around.”
As Holocaust memory is increasingly contested in the public sphere and the trauma of the Holocaust is joined by other tragedies for the Jews, Rosensaft’s vision has grown uncertain. But Finkelstein said she knew of at least one case where Remember a Child is likely to have impact into the next generation.
One Beth El congregant who “adopted” a child murdered by the Nazis “put in his will that his son was to say Kaddish for the child after he dies,” she said. “He put the instructions in his safe deposit box so that his son would take them out along with the keys to his house.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Many children killed in the Holocaust had no one to say Kaddish for them. These Jews have stepped up. appeared first on The Forward.
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VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish
די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך האָט דער „ייִדישפּיל“־טעאַטער אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ פֿון אַ „יום־השואה“־אַקאַדעמיע וואָס די טרופּע האָט דורכגעפֿירט אין 2022. די טעמע פֿון דער פּראָגראַם איז געווען מאָמענטן פֿון ליבע בײַ ייִדן אין די געטאָס און קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן.
אינעם ווידעאָ לייענען די אַקטיאָרן פֿאָר זכרונות פֿון לעבן געבליבענע ווי אויך ייִדישע לידער אָנגעשריבן בשעת דעם חורבן. זיי באַשרײַבן ווי אַזוי געליבטע פּאָרלעך האָבן זיך געטראָפֿן בשתּיקה; רירנדיקע מאָמענטן פֿון געזעגענען זיך און ווי די לעבן געבליבענע האָבן זיך באַמיט מיט אַלע כּוחות צו געפֿינען די געליבטע נאָך דער באַפֿרײַונג.
דער ווידעאָ הייבט זיך אָן מיט אַ באַגריסונג פֿונעם תּל־אָבֿיבֿער בירגערמײַסטער, רון חולדאי, אויף העברעיִש, אָבער די פּראָגראַם גופֿא איז אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש.
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