When he was a teenager in 1912, Grandpa Manny left his shtetl of Stepin in Ukraine and sailed alone on the Lusitania to New York. Eventually he brought over his parents and sisters, but then there was a quarrel and Manny never mentioned his parents again. Even decades later, after the aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who stayed in Stepin were shot by Germans and Ukrainians and thrown into a pit in the forest, Manny clung to his tradition of not mentioning the past.
In the Stepiner Memory Book written by survivors, Manny’s mother’s family is represented by a small black circle on a cream page. The circle is labeled with their family name and locates their house next to the marketplace. If we could expand the circle and look through it back into the past, we would see an energetic, angry family, known for its quick skill with a sharp retort and its tough children who lived by their wits and succeeded.
Manny was a Levite, descended from the priests of the Great Temple. He had a special role in the Stepiner synagogue in Brooklyn and didn’t like having to build furniture at the Waldorf-Astoria on Shabbat. He belonged to the Stepiner Society, which required him to visit the sick and support even poorer Jews. His sons argued with him over religion, which they did not want. His daughters argued with him over the way he wanted to choose everyone’s furniture after they got married.
When America entered the Second World War, Grandpa Manny abandoned his carpentry business to help the war effort. All the relatives he was still speaking to tried to talk him out of it. Too old to enlist in the US Navy, he went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, building warships. He worked long hours insulating huge ships with asbestos to protect their boiler rooms and dining halls from fires during an enemy attack. After the war Manny went back to his own carpentry. But years later, the asbestos he’d breathed in the navy yard killed him.
The 600 murdered Jews of Stepin are memorialized in the Ukrainian forest with a stone next to the mass grave. On the stone is an epitaph reminding visitors that martyrdom restores the soul to innocence. As it says: They were all Holy and Pure.
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2023
***If you have something to say, or a story to share, our comments page is the place to leave it!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2023 Leora Freedman 
