Brooklyn, NY – New Book Highlights Holocaust Miracles

Brooklyn, NY – Isser Handler knows exactly where he’ll be next Tuesday, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

“In synagogue,” said Handler, who lives in Midwood, “praying for another year of life. At 87, what can you look forward to? Turning 88.”

Sixty-four years ago, Handler started his New Year in Satmar, Romania, heading for the cellar of a Catholic friend who hid him during the Holocaust. Planes were on the way to bomb the city, Handler recalled.

His friend grabbed his hand and said, “Isser, today is your biggest holiday of the year. Pray to your God we should escape the bombs.

“So, I tell you, you wouldn’t believe it,” Handler continued, “the next house went completely down. Our house wasn’t even touched.

“I don’t know if that was a miracle. I don’t know why it happened,” he said. “I don’t consider myself a miracle…but thank God, I made it. I’m here.”

Handler may doubt the miracle of his survival, but his niece, Judith Leventhal, of Ditmas Park, does not. She and Yitta Halberstam, of Kensington, say all survivors are miracles. Because their numbers are dwindling as they age, Leventhal and Halberstam wanted to be sure some of their miracle stories were told.

The two women have just published “Small Miracles of the Holocaust: Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope, and Survival.” The seventh in a series of books the women have co-authored, this one contains 60 accounts of survivors and of those who helped them.

The authors are quick to point out the majority of Holocaust victims obviously did not experience survival miracles.

“We’re not trying to be Pollyannas,” said Halberstam. Both she and Leventhal are children of survivors. “But the stories of the horrors have been told many times over. The stories of the good triumphing over the evil haven’t been told enough.”

Since Brooklyn has the largest number of survivors in the U.S., the women said they had no trouble finding people to interview. The accounts of nine Brooklynites, including Handler, are in the 272-page book.

Speaking of small miracles, Leventhal said she considered it no coincidence the book was released months earlier than originally planned.

“Rosh Hashanah is about beseeching God and finding God. We gain inspiration from the fact that God is everywhere all the time. Sometimes, it’s not obvious. During the Holocaust, it certainly was not obvious,” she said.

“But if we can find the hand of God crafting miracles even in the darkest of times and gain inspiration from that, we can see that certainly in our day now, God’s hand is there. All we have to do is open our eyes to the coincidences that happen in our lives and we see that the hand of God is always there.”