Yesterday I met my pen pal of more than nine years. After the death of my father Sam Nussbaum, z”l, in December of 2002, my mother and I were looking at his files of saved paper clippings and correspondences and we came across a letter sent to my father in April of 1989. It was sent to him by Max Garcia, an architect in San Francisco. They shared something very special in common. They were both liberated on May 6, 1945, from the Ebensee Labor camp in Ebensee, Austria. They were liberated by the “F” Company of the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Group commanded by Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.

I called Mr. Garcia and introduced myself and asked if my father ever responded to his letter. He said he did not. He mentioned that he was in close contact with some members of the 3rd Cavalry. He gave me the name of one member in particular, Mr. Robert Persinger, who lives an hour west of Chicago. I was elated. Although my father chose not to pursue any communication with Mr. Garcia and others who he may have met through him, I decided that I wanted to and that I needed to contact them. I could actually speak to someone who was there on the eventful day. I could speak to someone who saved my father.

In January 2003 I made the call to Mr. Persinger. It was a very emotional moment for me. As it turns out, Mr. Persinger was a platoon sergeant and tank commander. His tank was the first one into the camp. The following are words he spoke at the 60th Anniversary Memorial Service at Ebensee, Austria, on May 6, 2005:

“As we approached on the gravel road to the camp we saw masses of human beings that appeared almost like ghosts standing in mud and filth up to their ankles behind the high wire fence. They were dressed in filthy striped clothes and some in partial clothing barely covering their bodies. They appeared so thin and sickly, it was evident that they were starving. Their bodies were just skin and bones. We stopped our tank and observed for a period of time trying to decide what we would do with the mass of prisoners surrounding our tanks. Both tank crews were hesitant to accept or to make contact with these poor starving individuals. None of us had ever seen human beings in this terrible situation before. We started to toss rations and energy bars to them until our supply was depleted. At first we refused to dismount and wade through the quagmire of mud and around all of the dead bodies. Besides that the stench of all of the dead bodies made it almost unbearable. We had seen terrible sights from combat across Europe but what we were observing was a climax to the things that human beings do to their fellow man. It was beyond anyone’s imagination that such horrible crimes could be committed.

“The Army medical hospitals arrived quickly along with other Army quartermaster units to provide services to get the prisoners on the road to recovery. We stayed with them and helped them for two weeks to nourish them before we received orders to return to the States and prepare for invading Japan with Gen. Patton and his Third Army.”

Mr. Persinger was invited, along with other WWII veterans, to accompany the 2012 March of the Living group that traveled to Poland on April 16. This is the first time the organizers asked veterans to accompany the group. For the 25th time, a group of young Jewish adults on this march will see and hear from survivors and other eye-witnesses what the Nazis did to European Jewry not that long ago. They must bear witness to the atrocities. We must never forget. The world must never forget.

I was honored to personally meet Mr. Persinger and his son Allen as they arrived at JFK airport from Chicago before leaving on the March. We went to dinner and once again I listened to this gentle and humble man relate his memories of that day and how it changed his life. Those memories are etched in his mind forever.

For years we have spoken on the phone and emailed one another. I have sent him gifts every Christmas as a very small token of my family’s appreciation to him for his service to his country and to the survivors whom he directly saved. Unbeknownst to him, he and his comrades helped my father and the other survivors restore their hope in humanity. As I have told him many times over the years, there is a saying in the Talmud which states that “…whoever saves a life it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a). He saved my little world.

When I finally met Mr. Persinger, I cried to him. I hugged him. I thanked him over and over again for saving my father and so many others.

But, I miss my biggest hero, my Dad. This thank you was for you Dad.

Bonnie Nussbaum Mannis grew up in Kansas City and is the daughter of Elizabeth Nussbaum and the late Sam Nussbaum. She is a member of the first graduating class of the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy. She now lives in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Visiting Rabbi Margolies

Shortly before the start of Pesach, I visited at Village Shalom Rabbi Margolies,  our community’s esteemed senior rabbi.   Although ailing, he read with me a Torah portion that bears a resemblance to an issue that is on the minds of most Americans as the Supreme Court accepts the challenge of judicial review of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I turned to Parashat Ki Sisa and we concentrated on the exigetical definition of the verb yetan.  The rabbi carefully read in Hebrew the phrase containing the mitvah that all who have reached the age of 20 are to be counted in the census and yetan a half shekel of which the wealthy shall not increase and the destitute shall not decrease this amount.

Upon questioning, he responded that yetan, the masculine future form of the verb “to give,”  means “He must give, there is no fooling around here; it is  a matter of equity, a major tenet of the Torah.”   To my question is it a tax?”  the rabbi responded, “It is an offering, but it is a tax.”   We now await the Supreme Court’s decision as to whether the required purchasing of a health care policy is a tax, a penalty or a tax-penalty within the framework of the relevant constitutional clauses.

Harris Winitz
Kansas City, Mo.

As SAFEHOME’s volunteer manager and Jewish outreach coordinator, I would like to thank the Flo Harris Foundation for funding SAFEHOME’s Jewish Outreach Program this past year. This money, and the foundation’s foresight in understanding the importance of this project, helps SAFEHOME save lives. It helps people survive and overcome domestic abuse, one of those topics that no one wants to talk about publicly. It is so important people understand that tragedies result from domestic violence. It’s even more important for me to emphasize these things can and do happen in the Jewish community.

Here’s just one example. On Oct. 27, 2011, The Chronicle published a small article about a murder-suicide that took place on Oct. 18 in Lewisboro, N.Y., a small town in upscale Westchester County. Sam Friedlander killed his wife Amy, his children Gregory and Molly, and then he killed himself.

This horrible incident resonated with me on a number of levels. First, it took place during the Jewish High Holiday season.Second, Westchester County and Johnson County share a similar profile. Third, it affected me because of the amount of outreach I do through SAFEHOME in our own Jewish community. Fourth, it appeared after The Chronicle published an article by Jewish Women’s International regarding the High Holidays and National Domestic Violence Awareness Month both being in October.

Even after such an incident occurs, I’ve discovered people don’t want to talk about domestic violence or even use the label “domestic violence.” Such is the case with the Friedlanders. No one ever used the term domestic violence regarding the Friedlanders, yet descriptive words relating to domestic violence —such as controlling — were used often. Some articles also pointed to past trouble in the relationship when police were called to the home for domestic disturbances.

I tried, with no success, to discuss the Friedlanders with the newspaper reporter there. I wanted to know why domestic violence was never mentioned in any of the newspaper reports of the incident. If I could find references alluding to previous domestic situations, why couldn’t someone else?

I also contacted rabbis, cantors and agencies in New York City and the Westchester County area inquiring whether Jewish agencies do community outreach relating to domestic violence. Once again I hit a brick wall. Very few returned my calls or emails. Two people from Jewish agencies whom I successfully reached mentioned that the murders could have been related to domestic abuse, but the subject was too painful and no one really wanted to talk about it publicly.

Another person from a NY agency told me that domestic violence in the Jewish community was a hard topic for people to discuss. I agree that it’s a very difficult subject. But I’d rather discuss available services and resources for people in domestic violence situations than ways to honor the memory of two children after the fact.

Here in Johnson County a murder-suicide happened not far from Congregation Beth Shalom in January. The senior pastor of the couple’s church contacted me at SAFEHOME, asking me how to incorporate information regarding domestic violence into the eulogy. He wanted the eulogy to include an educational piece about community resources. This Overland Park tragedy also resulted in some of the church’s clergy visiting SAFEHOME to learn more about our services and to see the facility so they could speak knowledgeably during counseling sessions. I continue to feel frustrated and wonder why we have to experience a misfortune or death in order to put laws in place, or in this case, get the word out about available resources and services.

These incidents in Westchester County’s Jewish community and here in Overland Park cause incredible sadness. In the Jewish community, we can hope that the Friedlander legacy will be the knowledge that continued education regarding the prevention of domestic violence is important.

This brings me full circle back to my opening sentence, expressing SAFEHOME’s appreciation to the Flo Harris Foundation for funding the Jewish Outreach Program this past year. It enables SAFEHOME to save lives. We continue to hope others will see the importance of outreach programming, and choose to fund it in the future.

Susan Lebovitz, CVM, is volunteer manager and Jewish outreach coordinator for SAFEHOME. SAFEHOME’s mission is to break the cycle of domestic violence and partner abuse for victims and their children by providing shelter, advocacy, counseling and prevention education in our community.

QUESTION: Even though Passover (Pesach) is just over I would like to ask a seder question. Why do we use a roasted lamb bone on the seder plate? Some people have the tradition of eating lamb and others of not eating lamb at the seder.

ANSWER: The seder plate contains symbols of various aspects of our Exodus experience. The roasted lamb bone reminds us of the paschal lamb offering that took place in the Temple and took place prior to that during the Exodus from Egypt. The lamb was slaughtered on the eve of Passover and eaten as part of the seder Passover evening experience.

A whole variety of traditions have evolved over the years regarding the lamb and the seder. For most people the lamb is strictly a lamb bone, it is roasted or barbecued prior to the seder and simply a plate symbol.

There were traditions in Europe where in some communities people went out of their way to eat lamb at the seder. I must say, however, that these communities were in the minority. Generally speaking most communities forbade eating lamb at the seder because we no longer have a Temple, there is no longer a paschal lamb offering and mixed signals could be picked up by eating lamb at the seder.

Some individuals have gone way beyond that and since the lamb bone is roasted actually do not eat roasted foods at the seder. I have always felt that this is excessive. The tradition is, generally speaking, not to eat roasted lamb and actually it is more a barbecued kind of lamb that was offered at the Temple. To forbid all roasted meats, and some people do, seems quite an extreme interpretation from what was originally just not eating roasted lamb. Nevertheless, I know people that eat only boiled chicken and the like at the seder because of this interpretation.

These are all customs and traditions and not law. They vary from community to community in Europe in that today the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people with those traditions have carried these customs to our modern day seder.

“The Vices,” by Lawrence Douglas. (Other Press, 2011.)

The unreliable narrator is a standard device in fiction, and often in memoirs. In “The Vices,” Lawrence Douglas’ second novel and a runner-up for last year’s National Jewish Book Award for fiction, everybody is distorting the truth. The unnamed narrator is a professor at a small liberal arts college in New England whose closest friend Oliver Vice is presumed dead, having disappeared from the Queen Mary II during a storm at sea.

Vice was a distinguished professor of philosophy. His mother Francizka Nagy, who was also on the ship, was the self-proclaimed daughter of Hungarian aristocrats who perished during World War II. No one knows if Oliver Vice jumped or fell accidentally. Therefore, our narrator decides to investigate the truth about the Vice family and use the information he uncovers to write his next novel

This very readable novel immediately engages the reader as our narrator describes his first meeting with Vice and demonstrates that our narrator has some truth issues of his own as well. Oliver and his twin brother Bartholomew refer to their father Victor Vice as the BF (birth father) of whom they claim to have no memories. Who was he, an art dealer with a shady past of something even more unsavory. Why does our unnamed narrator inflate his abilities and his own family’s accomplishments? Where does Francizka’s wealth come from? As the reader observes Oliver Vice attract one woman after another — including the narrator’s wife — the novel spins along gathering speed and each character continues to conflate his or her background and abilities with those of friends, relatives and even casual bystanders.

The reader knows immediately that the narrator and his wife are Jewish, but while Oliver Vice has a terminally-ill former step-father who is also Jewish, the novel does not at first reveal its intrinsic Jewish nature. It will, however, become clear as our narrator continues to unearth the Vice family history that the Jewish nature of what he learns colors everyone’s behavior. Then, when our narrator finally understands the pathologies that underlay the characters of Oliver, his brother, mother and family friends, writing a novel based on the Vices becomes an untenable task.

This elegant witty novel is a delight to read. The author is a professor of law at Amherst College whose first novel “The Catastrophist” also featured a protagonist who couldn’t get it right. He has come to fiction late, but his novels are all the better for his maturity and in addition he also has a lovely sense of humor. I would seriously recommend this novel for book clubs.

Andrea Kempf is a retired librarian who speaks throughout the community on various topics related to books and reading.

Understanding Islamic philosophy

My compliments to Sheila Romano Horing and her articles of March 22, “Obama is bluffing on Iran,” and March 29, “Islamic indoctrination of hate at work in Toulouse.”

Horing is one of the few who understands the Islamic philosophy of world domination. How long will it be before anti-Semitic Christians realize they are next after Jews on the Muslim agenda? Please continue to inform the uninformed with Horing’s articles.

Albert Silverman
Leawood, Kan

(Editor’s Note: Erin Margolin was one of 18 people, including two staff members, from the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City who attended TribeFest in Las Vegas late last month. TribeFest is Jewish Federations of North America’s conference for 21 to 45-year-olds, designed to engage, educate and inspire them to become active in the Federation system and in organized Jewish life.)

When my best friend, Meg Shaw, first mentioned TribeFest several months ago, I rolled my eyes and cut her off. “Oy and no,” I sighed. “I’ve got a new baby, I’m exhausted. And the twins…” I trailed off. Excuses are easy to find when you’re new to something or you’re secretly afraid. To her credit, Meg didn’t take no for an answer and kept nagging me to join her in Vegas for the conference. There was also the Jewish guilt prodding me along, chirping in my ear, “You’re the president of Temple Israel. You need to go, learn something, immerse yourself and spend some quality time with other Jews from KC.”

Eventually I capitulated, which wasn’t too hard, given that the Jewish Federation graciously subsidized the cost of my conference ticket; I shared a hotel room with Meg, and the direct flights on Southwest were convenient and cheap. I desperately wanted to bring something back to Rabbi Cukierkorn and our congregation, my fellow board members, my family, my community — even something just for me. Not anything tangible, mind you; instead, some wise and powerful message.

And you know what? I brought back so much more than I have the space to share with you. But one person stands out — Talia Leman, the CEO (Chief Executive Optimist) of Random Kid, a non-profit organization that leverages the power of youth to solve problems in the world. Talia hails from a small town in Iowa and began years ago as just that — a random kid. Now, at the age of 16, she’s won the National Jefferson Award, which is akin to the Nobel Prize for public service.

At the tender age of 10, Talia spearheaded a campaign to raise money for the Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina. She decided to trick-or-treat for coins instead of candy and enlisted her friends’ help, who then turned to their friends, and word quickly got around. A grocery store chain printed 8.5 million trick-or-treat bags in 13 states, and NPR and CNN got wind of Talia’s plan and interviewed her. Her initial fundraising goal? One million dollars (GASP!). But she didn’t raise that. She didn’t raise half a million dollars. She raised $10 million along with the help of other kids from all over the country.

When asked why she called it “Random Kid,” Talia explained, “Because when we believe in the power we each have, we have the greatest power of all.” She went on to say, “We need to be free enough and brave enough to take a step sideways, where the unexpected might happen.”

My takeaway? It’s time for me, my congregation, my family, you, all of us — to stop thinking that we alone have nothing valuable to contribute. It’s time to step up and do something, to effect change. To start a trend. What if we all made this promise to ourselves? Imagine what we could do for our Jewish community, for our families and for the entire world.

Last year the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City sent seven people to TribeFest. This year there were 18 of us, so more than double. Next year I’ll be going again and you should, too. Ask yourself how  you can “step sideways” in our community. How can you get out of your rut, think outside of your own little box? How can you set off a ripple of change? I assure you it’s not necessary to raise $10 million dollars. Baby steps. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming!

Just promise me — no, promise yourself — that you will stop and think. I know from experience that it’s all too easy to hide behind our families, jobs and our kids’ extracurricular activities. But when you lie down in bed at night, what do you dream of as you’re falling asleep?

I dream of being someone like Talia Leman. My baby steps are small: I’m a J-LEAD member and the president of my synagogue, Temple Israel; I’ve taken Ayeka and B’not Kehila classes; I’ve co-chaired the Jewish Federation Women’s Division annual Note-A-Thon and participated in that project several times. Yes, I have three young children now, but what will my life look like in a few short years? Look out. Because I’m just a random kid too. A random kid who’s daring to dream big.

In addition to finding Erin Margolin volunteering at various organizations around Kansas City, you can find her blog at http://www.erinmargolin.com.

In 1993, five years before Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die, a rock was thrown through the window of a home displaying a menorah in Billings, Mont. The people of Billings rose in silent protest and paper menorahs appeared in windows all over town.

Nothing much changed for Jewish families in Billings in the aftermath of this event. Nothing much except the reassurance that there were people in their town who had a deep capacity for compassion.
Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot.

The most straightforward statement of the principle of compassion in the Torah is Leviticus 19:18; “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This ethic of reciprocity, this “golden rule,” is said to exist in every world religion.

And that’s fitting because the question of how to treat others is a universal human question. In a Jewish context, the ethical approach to compassion is referred to as “accomplishing a mitzvah.” In its most literal meaning, to accomplish a mitzvah is to carry out one of the 613 Commandments of Sinai. But Jewish texts and teachings take the notion of a mitzvah further; any act motivated by spontaneous kindness toward another person can be considered the moral equivalent of one of the original commandments. Translated this way, mitzvah means “good deed.”

In Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Ben Azzai is cited as saying, “Run to perform even a minor mitzvah, and flee from sin; for one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah, and one sin leads to another sin; for the consequence of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, and the consequence of a sin is a sin.”

Run to perform even a minor mitzvah. Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot.

The problems of the world are huge and overwhelming. Watching the evening news can be bewildering; story after story about the human capacity for hate, greed and violence. Hate is complex. It’s big. It can seem unconquerable. The power of “The Laramie Project” lies in the fact that the plays do not gloss over that complexity, that largeness, that invincibility. “The Laramie Project” plays face it all head on. They don’t pretend to heal the wound with a contrived set of pat answers; instead they rip the scab forcefully off the wound and leave the audience free to decide how best to heal.

Perhaps one way to heal is to walk out of this theater newly resolved to do good deeds; to re-enter the world determined to find ways to accomplish a mitzvah. Even tiny good deeds can make a difference; holding open a door, smiling at a passerby. And if you pay enough attention to the world around you to smile or hold open a door, chances are you’ll be well-placed to notice opportunities for more good deeds.

Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot.

There’s a story in the Talmud in which a young man walks up to Rabbi Hillel and promises to convert to Judaism if the rabbi will teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel lifts one foot off the ground and replies, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your comrade; this is the whole Torah in its entirety; the rest is commentary: go learn.”
Go. Learn.

And, as Plato said, be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Krista Lang Blackwood is director of cultural arts at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City.

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander. (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,2012)

I was reading the title story of Nathan Englander’s latest collection of short fiction, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” wondering where he was going with his rambling tale of a reunion between two old school friends and their husbands — one couple secularized, the other haredi — when suddenly I got to the end, and I sat there stunned, unable to read on for several minutes. Such is the nature of an Englander story. He may seem to be going nowhere, but like a gymnast sticking a perfect landing, he brings it all together in the final paragraphs.

The story, despite its title, is not really about Anne Frank, who is here a metonym for the Holocaust. The title is rather an allusion to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as if to suggest that even when Jews make small talk, consciousness of the Holocaust is always in the background.

The second story, perhaps the best in the collection of eight, is “Sister Hills,” a chronicle of the relationship between two families in an Israeli “settlement.” It revolves around an ancient Jewish superstition that the angel of death can be fooled. In this story, a woman “sells” her ailing daughter to a neighbor for that purpose, with unintended consequences. Set against the tragic circumstances of Israel’s unending state of war, the story veers deftly between comic absurdity and tragedy.

What I especially like about Englander’s stories is the extent to which he is immersed in Jewish culture, not as backdrop but as the essence of his characters’ identities. (I have heard that my paternal grandmother, not a particularly religious person, had a rabbi come to the house to change my aunt’s name under similar circumstances.) For the most part, the stories are Jewish to the extent that they would not make sense if transferred to another culture.

Probably the most provocative story in the collection is the final one, “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” which tackles in a non-judgmental way the difficult moral choices people make in wartime and the way in which the experience of the Holocaust and the ongoing conflict with the Arab nations affect those choices.

Another story which I found particularly powerful was “The Reader,” a surrealistic tale of an author who goes on a book tour only to find that no one cares about his work except for one devotee who follows him from town to town. Despite the story’s discouraging view of the state of literature in modern society, the author manages to find an uplifting message: “Author reads for Seattle; it has always been his city. He reads for the buyer, who has always believed. Author reads one more time to his old man. He smiles at his reader, and reads on through the tears. Author reads on. And Author reads on.”

With his first book, “For Relief of Unbearable Urges,” Nathan Englander marked himself as an important young writer to be watched. With this second volume, he has earned a place beside authors such as Bernard Malamud and I.B. Singer as one of the most important Jewish story-tellers of our era.

Puzzling rebuttal

The reply of Sheldon Roufa (March 29) to Shoula Horing’s article of March 22 is puzzling. He states that her facts are wrong, but fails to point out one single wrong fact. Curious. He states that she beats the drums for war with Iran, whereas a fair reading of her article nowhere finds her making such a demand, either specifically or by inference. He states that her position is that the United States should start a war with Iran immediately. These allegations appear nowhere in her article.

The thrust of her article is that Obama does not back Israel, and if, after careful consideration of all alternatives, Israel does strike at the Iranian nuclear facilities, it will be without the support of the United States. This has now become clearer.

Very recently, information was leaked to the press that Israel had entered into an agreement with Azerbaijan for use of its facilities as a staging base for aircraft should Israel attack Iran. It is inconceivable that Israel leaked this information. That the Obama administration leaked it seems the most likely explanation, particularly considering it was leaked to the American, not the Israeli, press.

Why would they do this? The answer is obvious. This leak of highly sensitive information makes it extremely difficult for Israel to achieve tactical surprise, forcing Israel to revise its plans, perhaps delaying their timetable at least until after the election.

Is there any proof the Obama administration leaked this? Absolutely not. But at the very least, the source of the leak is highly suspicious. This agreement with Azerbaijan can only have been known by very few. The question is, qui bono? Who gains? Taken with all the other actions (as opposed to empty words) of the Obama administration, what we have here is more than just another straw in the wind. Combined with the evidence outlined in Horing’s article, and elsewhere, it is increasingly clear that Israel stands alone as long as Obama is president. Should he be re-elected, the Jewish vote will no longer be a concern to him. When voting in November, this fact should be uppermost in the minds of those who have any concern at all for the survival of Israel.

Obama has now announced yet another in the endless round of negotiations with Iran. Tick tock. Tick tock.

Lee Levin
Overland Park, Kan.