Holocaust survivors find solace at Club 2600 in Brooklyn

New York. The Merkaz Hasimcha is a nondescript brick building in the middle of a nondescript neighborhood full of brick buildings, somewhere in the endless sea of ​​faceless neighborhoods between the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island. The area is called Midwood, and the only thing that distinguishes it from nearby areas such as Flatbush, Mapleton or Homecrest, is that in the small shops on the main shopping street, Avenue M, no Spanish or Arabic is spoken. the owners and sellers, but Yiddish, Russian or Hebrew.

The festive clothes of old gentlemen

On a typical Tuesday morning, the mood in the neighborhood is rather sleepy; the children are still at school and the people in the offices haven’t started their lunch yet. The pizzas in the snack bar on the corner are still being cooked, the sellers in the various hat shops are standing on the street and chatting. Just outside the Merkaz Hasimcha – an event hall where weddings or bat mitzvah celebrations usually take place – there is a lot of activity. Minibuses and taxis pull up here every minute and stream elderly gentlemen in festive clothes onto the pavement. The great hall of Merkaz Hasimcha does not open for another hour, but guests are happy to wait in the hall. They have been looking forward to today, the Club 2600 meeting, all month.

Anchor in the new world

The name comes from the original address of the nearby monthly meeting at 2600 Ocean Avenue. Holocaust survivors from the neighborhoods of southern Brooklyn came together there for the first time more than 20 years ago. It was here, especially in the Jews of Brighton Beach, that most of the survivors of the United States from Eastern Europe found their first anchorage in the new world after World War II and well into the 1950s.

Brighton Beach, east of Coney Island, has been a heavily Jewish neighborhood since the turn of the century. Here, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were able to break out of the narrowness and squalor of the classic immigrant neighborhoods and afford light and airy, medium-sized single-family homes by the sea. . When Holocaust survivors from the DP camps – the camps for displaced persons – came to the US in the late 1940s, the Brighton Beach community was their natural port of call. Russian, Polish and Yiddish were spoken here, and the community centers and neighbors helped to build a new life.

Many of these people moved to nearby neighborhoods along Ocean Parkway, the main thoroughfare between downtown Brooklyn and the ocean. Many made the jump to Manhattan or even left New York all the way to California. But to this day an unusually large number of people remain in Brighton Beach and the surrounding areas. About 70 percent of the 14,000 survivors who are still in New York live here. These are the ones who stayed in South Brooklyn, but not necessarily the ones who got very rich.

Borough Park: Many Orthodox Jews live in southwest Brooklyn.

Those: IMAGO/Carballo,

Since the first meetings in a small room at 2600 Ocean Avenue, the number of participants has increased dramatically, against statistical logic. When the ballroom door opens at 12 o’clock sharp, around 20 large oval tables are set, each of which can accommodate up to twelve people. The rush is so great that Zehava Birman Wallace, the organizer from the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Greater Coney Island, has to remind people again and again not to leave empty seats until the everyone get a seat.

Word of the meeting, funded by the Claims Conference, which manages compensation from the German federal government, has spread. Holocaust survivors come from all over the city to eat and dance and celebrate life. “Many of our clients,” says Birman Wallace, “struggle with loneliness and depression.” The monthly occupation is an anchor in their lives, especially if, like many of this age, they are widowed.

Food and transport services

However, several of the survivors in the JCC catchment area are struggling not only emotionally, but also economically. About 40 percent of men and women live at or near the poverty line—far more than the estimated 10 percent of the total US population who are at risk of extreme poverty. It is suspected that there is a direct connection to the severe trauma. The JCC, one of New York’s largest Holocaust survivor care programs with a budget of $118 million, has about 3,000 “clients,” as Zehava Birman Wallace calls the people under her care You can get hot food delivered, transport services are arranged and help with processing health insurance claims.

In 1890: Park East Synagogue Manhattan.

“It’s very much needed,” says Birman Wallace. She receives ten applications almost every week, and last year the waiting list temporarily grew to 275 names. “To cover all the needs, we would need about $10 million more. ” The greatest need is now, as the survivors are very old.

However, this evening is intended to forget worries. The room is decorated with colorful balloons, and popular hits such as “My Way” and “Hava Nagila” by Frank Sinatra can be heard from the speakers. Several young people from the local high school walk around the room handing out raffle tickets. Live waiters scurry around handing out food.

Trauma and the will to live

On this day, only a few people talk about the painful past that is common to everyone here, even if this past will shape the mood of the room. The efforts of the hosts from the JCC to warm the atmosphere can only poorly disguise the fact that a mass of collective trauma has come together here, the likes of which are rarely seen anywhere in the world. But with this heaviness, there is also a spirit very willing to live and courage to live.

Married for 75 years

Hedwig Weiss, for example, exudes an infectious positive energy. The 95-year-old looks much younger. In her elegant, tight woolen dress, she would score points at any Manhattan cocktail party. She talks smart and laughs a lot. She has a big smile on her face when she reports that she has been married to her husband Jacob, who is sitting next to her, for 75 years. Jacob can’t follow the whole conversation because of hearing loss, but he looks at his wife with such love in his eyes that you know he understands her.

She can only quickly tell the story of the two. Jacob and Hedwig come from small towns in the Czech Republic and met in Budapest in the early 1940s. They survived the war there; Hedwig doesn’t want to go into details. “It wasn’t nice,” she says briefly, and for the first time her expression darkens briefly. They came to the US through Palestine in the early 1950s. Pennyless, sure, but at least they had each other. Hedwig first got by with any job she could find and eventually financed her studies in fashion school herself. She worked as a fashion tailor, but that was a long time ago; after all, they’ve both been retired for decades.

After all, a man wants to talk about the past without being asked. Avi Felsman, in a dark suit and with a neatly trimmed beard, approaches the reporter with his own initiative. And then a barrage of stories explode from him that always seem to push to the surface, always on the verge of exploding.

Dance after dessert

Avi Felsam tells what it was like when the Nazis came to his village in Lucow in Poland in 1939. There were 45 trucks full of German soldiers. He describes how there were indiscriminate shootings after a Polish soldier shot a German soldier. He tells how Josef’s father, after several months spent in a camp, came back and fled east with the family, further and further, how they survived the war as farmers in Siberia. Finally, he tells us how the Felsmans returned to Lucow after the war and found no one there. Except for her, the whole family had died in the camps.

Depending on your own way of dealing with the past

Avi gets more and more into his story, looking the listener in the eyes with a piercing gaze and finally, directed at no one in particular but the universe, which ‘ ask the simple question: “How could something like this be?” How could educated people allow something like that?” Finally, his wife grabs his sleeve and tries to get his attention, taking him around the hall to greet acquaintances.

So everyone here in the 2600 Club has their own way of dealing with the past and with life. The longer the party goes on, the more it spreads. If you’re still able to walk, get up after dessert and dance a little to the sounds of a Hammond organ played by an entertainer. You can feel the joy of being alive, being here.

After two hours it is over, the spring sun is shining warmly over Avenue M. The guests slowly, almost lazily, flow into the street to get into their journey. No one wants to go home just yet, a home that is often lonely and cold. What many people are left with is the memory and knowledge that this club exists. Next month there will be another meeting with people who understand what it means to live.