INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
Tampa Bay- January 21, 2018
Holocaust Survivors
Rabbi Anne Feibelman is the rabbi and chaplain at Aviva: A Campus for Senior Life in Sarasota. She received her smicha from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her M.A. from Stanford University in documentary filmmaking and her B.A. from Brown University. Rabbi Anne spent six years in Israel, and has interviewed Holocaust survivors for archives internationally. Rabbi Anne is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents, Leonard Feibelman, of blessed memory, and Marguerite Levy Feibelman were both born in Mannheim, Germany in 1922 and 1924. Rabbi Anne is honored to be a part of this ceremony, to honor those who survived and to remember who did not survive.
During the Candle Lighting Ceremony, each survivor will be escorted by a Consul as follows:
- Consul General of China, Li-Ginagmin, is escorting Betty Grebenschikoff- When her childhood was shattered by Nazi violence against Jews, the family was forced to flee to China in 1939. Shanghai was the only open port at that time.
- Consul General of Germany, Annette Klein, is escorting John Rinde. John turned 7 in the Lwow ghetto, confined with other Jews from his town of Prsemusl, Poland. His family managed to flee to Lubin, Poland, where they forged identity papers and lived as Catholics with a more Polish-sounding name until 1944. His family moved to France for 6 years and in 1952 moved to US.
- Consul General of France, Clement Leclerk, is escorting Carolyn Kaplan. Carolyn was only seven years old when Nazi soldiers entered her classroom in Germany demanding to know the identity of Jewish students so they could denounce little Carolyn as a dirty Jew. Later Carolyn was chased and harassed — abuse which culminated in a Nazi soldier attempting to strangle her and throw her from a moving train. The family made their way to America only to learn that all of Carolyn’s mother’s family were murdered by the Nazis. Later Carolyn returned to Germany to the village of her birth where she taught German children about her experiences and the dangers of intolerance.
- Consul General of Canada, Susan Harper, is escorting Toni Rinde. Toni Rinde, daughter of an Army officer from Przemusl, Poland, was given to strangers when she was 16 months old. They renamed her Marisha and brought her up Catholic from 1941 to 1944. Her parents fought the Germans with a band of partisans hiding out in a forest. Toni came to the U.S in 1947.
- Consul General of Greece, Dimitrios Sparos is escorting Helen Kalfus, Helen was still a young child, when she was threatened with deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. When her father was murdered in Dachau and her mother became suicidal, little Helen saved her mother’s life. Thanks to the generosity of Italy’s national airline, Al Italia – Helen, her husband Paul and their baby daughter Renata finally realized their dream – they came to the United States
- Consul General of Peru , Jorge Geldres is escorting Helen Borenstein. Helen was born in Lodz, Poland. Her entire family was deported to GALIZIA, and then to a ghetto. The ghetto was turned into a concentration camp. Helen was interned in MAJDANEK death camp, AUSCHWITZ, MULHAUSEN, and BERGEN BELSEN .On April 15, 1945, six years after the Nazi invasion of Poland, she was liberated by the British. Her husband also survived and located Helen with the help from the Red Cross. He picked her up at Bergen Belsen and they went to a DP camp in Stuttgart, Germany. It took three years in the DP camp for their visa to arrive so they could emigrate to the US. Helen’s husband died in 1995.