University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The peril of acceptance: American Jewry assimilation trends 60 years after the holocaust

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The peril of acceptance: American Jewry assimilation trends 60 years after the holocaust

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THE PERIL OF ACCEPTANCE:
AMERICAN JEWRY ASSIMILATION TRENDS 60 YEARS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

by

Lara Shellene Berman

A Professional Project Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(BROADCAST JOURNALISM)

May 2008

Copyright 2008 Lara Shellene Berman

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you so much to my parents, Joseph and Julie Berman, whose unconditional love
and support is a constant source of strength and inspiration. I feel so lucky and grateful to have
you both in my life. You are there for me e-v-e-r-y time and I do not know how all the love I have
for you both is able to fit inside me.
Thank you to my committee chair, Ed Cray, for your patience and commitment to my
thesis. Thank you to my committee members Jonathan Kotler and Sharon Gillerman for pointing
out my assumptions and demanding objectivity when my own passion seeped into the piece a
tad too much. The insight and feedback you all provided improved the quality of this article and
your availability and work ethic gave me the opportunity to make this piece as strong as possible.
Thank you to Gail Holtzman, Naava Piatka, Julie Meetal and Amy Yukich for sharing
your stories with me so honestly and thoroughly. Your raw candidness and vulnerability imbued
this work with the passion required to communicate the gravity and visceral nature of this
subject matter.
Thank you to Elliot Dlin, Paula Fern, Klaire Firestone, Flo Kinsler and Rabbi Shlomo
Seidenfeld for meeting with me and for ultimately adding the elements that rounded out my
article with insight, wisdom and context.
Finally, thank you to my friends for supporting me, listening and offering ideas, and
displaying true patience as I disappeared for days (ok, weeks) at a time to research, interview,
write and re-write.
I love you all, you’re beautiful!

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ii

Abstract……………………….………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………. iv

Article…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..................................... 1

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. ……………. 28

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ABSTRACT

Jews have always been aware of persecutions and historically have clung together as a
community to pass their culture from one generation to the next.
In contemporary America, however, Jews rarely experience prejudice due to their
religious identity. Rather, Jews are so fully integrated into American life that they have
intermarried, the associated stigma in secular America so imperceptible.
But now that American Jews finally enjoy a quality of life defined by acceptance and
equality, many have chosen to move away from the religion they are at last free to practice.
The Holocaust still a recent memory, some Jews fear that this assimilation presents a
threat greater than the violent annihilations of the camps. It is extermination by choice.
America’s acceptance has caused Jews, in these early years of the 21
st
century, to wonder
why they should preserve Judaism and Jewish culture. If assimilation is the ultimate approval,
why should they resist it? What of Jewish culture must survive? The answers to these questions,
as the following profiles of three children of Holocaust survivors attest, arise viscerally; the
answers are personal, even primal, each a unique expression attempting to define what it means
to be a Jew.

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Just 60 years ago, in early 1948, there was no Israel; a homeland for the Jews was
still a dream as old as bible stories or familial tales. Sixty years ago, the world was awash
in the wake of the Holocaust, the nightmare still fresh. Only three years before, the Allies
of World War II unearthed thousands of murdered Jews in mass graves and discovered
camps filled to capacity with the living dead, emaciated bodies still walking, skeletons
truly. The onrushing allied armies found the prisoners of Hitler’s Third Reich staring with
indomitable eyes sunken in cavernous sockets of the tormented on the brink of death.
They had survived the death camps with tales so atrocious, the world refused to hear or
believe them.
From the shadow of death, they resurrected themselves, fighting for and winning a
country where their voices were heard and their children could lead Jewish lives without
persecution. “Stay Jewish. That’s my message. Stay Jewish. Remain a Jew and make sure
that you carry that forward to the future so that we don’t die,” Klaire Firestone said of the
main message she strives to impart.
The child of survivors, Firestone grew up in Los Angeles, but not until she was 13
did she begin hearing her father’s stories from Mauthausen concentration camp, her
grandfather’s experiences in Theresienstadt and her mother and uncle’s memories from
Auschwitz. They still woke up to the war in nightmares, resolving silently that the only
people Jews could truly depend on were other Jews; only in their own lay safety.
To replace those who died, to live the lives they lost and to ensure continuity,
marrying within the faith became a core value in many survivor families. “My father made
it very clear,” Firestone said. “You marry someone who’s not Jewish, I sit shiva [mourn],
then I jump out the window.” The Jewish people had nearly been annihilated; there was
too much at stake for misunderstanding.

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But as Israel celebrates its 60
th
anniversary, many people are tired of hearing about
the Holocaust. As time elapses, the Holocaust is transitioning from a modern-day massacre
whose victims have names to a faceless and sleepy junior-high text book reading.
Annihilations of yesteryears do not compel many contemporary, American Jews to resist
the secular and convenient American lifestyle in favor of preserving their heritage. And
while assimilation has always been a part of Jewish history, some fear Jewish traditions are
corroding beyond recognition.
America’s value system of equality and freedom of religion and expression means
Jews do not have to choose between their faith and patriotism. And the country’s ideals
provide the space for Jews to enjoy a quality of life they never before experienced. For
decades, Jews have enjoyed acceptance, integration and fairness in America which has
allowed them to prosper. But now that American Jews have choices and acceptance, many
see no reason to cling to their religious heritage. Comprising less than 1 percent of the
world’s population, losing any Jews to intermarriage or assimilation seems a risky gamble.
“We should not complete the job that Hitler started for ourselves,” Firestone said.
Jews still have vocal enemies and global anti-Semitism is on the rise, according to
a March 2008 release by the State Department. But distance and the luxury of acceptance
have made anti-Semitism a remote reality for American Jews, particularly in urban areas
where their numbers are larger. So the following profiles attest.

Gail Holtzman, California
Gail Holtzman sat in the second-generation meeting surrounded by other children
of Holocaust survivors crying. Despite having attended these gatherings for over a decade,
she still could not discuss the Holocaust without tears.

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“Gail, you weren’t really there,” a fellow attendee reminded her.
A tear rolled down her cheek, beginning a steady stream, “But, yet, I feel that I was.
I dreamed about it when I was a kid, dreamt that I was in the Holocaust, that I was there.”
For Holtzman, “It’s not just something that happened to my parents.”
Holtzman, like many second-generation survivors is the daughter of aging parents
facing an ethical dilemma: Her mother and father, who prayed to lead a Jewish life as they
lived from moment to moment, daily dodging the threat of death, are declining; her
children, only two generations later are intermarrying. Holtzman fears she has let her
parents down by contributing to Jewish assimilation, whose varying, but often grim
numbers cause some demographers to predict the end of the Jewish people, not in a violent
Holocaust, but in a silent and gradual extinction by choice.
“I am the first child of theirs that survived,” Holtzman said. After her parents, Sam
and Ann married, they fled from their native Poland in 1939, when their own parents urged
them to run away from the impending danger. They had heard stories of massacres and
mysterious deportations and sensed the storm clouds coming closer. “Save yourselves,”
they warned. “We don’t know what’s going to be here.” Ann and Sam left their families,
unsure of where they were going. Two aunts chose to remain with the family regardless of
the consequences; they were all killed by the Nazis. Sam and Ann persevered, crossing
Belarus and Russia’s Ural Mountains, ultimately spending much of the war in Siberia, in a
Russian work camp where their first child died of typhus.
After the war, anti-Semitism still ran rampant throughout Europe and countries,
like Poland, did not want to accept refugees or returning Jewish Poles. “They went back to
Poland to see what they could find,” Holtzman said of her parents. “But the Poles were
killing Jews more than the Germans. They were killing people in the streets. The Poles had

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taken their homes; there was nothing to go back to,” her parents told her. Sam and Ann
fled to a German displaced persons’ camp where Holtzman was born.
The couple wanted to move to Israel, but the fledgling country needed workers to
build a new state. According to her parents, because they had a young child, they did not
feel they were good candidates for the kibbutz, the community that most interested them.
Instead, they signed up to go to America. Because they had no family in the States, the
United Jewish Appeal sponsored them. The Holtzman family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania,
and joined a small Jewish community, including about 20 survivor families.
If some survivors rarely mentioned the Holocaust, Sam and Ann spoke of the
horrors and losses so frequently that Holtzman grew familiar with the stories, imagined
herself in the camps, often feeling she had actually been there herself. Holtzman, like many
other second-generation survivors, through her parents’ stories has memories of
experiences she did not physically endure. As a young child she witnessed persecutions
and murders through her parents’ stories, but had difficulty fully absorbing the
information. “I heard everything, and in repetition. But, in my case, I didn’t want to hear it.
I mean, I listened, I was there; but, it was too much.”
Although they were finally in America, the war was like an additional family
member, whose presence caused everyone to behave and communicate differently. Every
meal was accompanied by a story about the absence of food during the war and Ann and
Sam’s endeavors to steal or bribe others for leftovers and scraps. Complaining or asking for
toys became unacceptable behaviors in the Holtzman household. “How could you ask your
parents for things when they had nothing?” Holtzman remembered. She felt proud and
awestruck by her parents’ resilience and strength, their ability to learn a new language and
create a life with hope and optimism. Yet, she simultaneously felt they were fragile and,
having already been through hell, she did not want to bring them any further grief or pain.

5
She strived to excel in school and be as biddable as possible, “You didn’t want to give them
anything else to worry about. And you couldn’t get in any trouble. You just couldn’t do
that to them.” In this way, Holtzman assumed the parental role, attempting to shield her
mother and father from pain.
Certain expectations were implicit in Holtzman’s household and the pressure to
succeed was palpable. “You have to make it; they’re counting on you.”
Education, for instance, was of paramount importance, “My dad didn’t want me to
work; he only wanted me to get an education. And we weren’t wealthy, but he wanted me
to just study and not have any distractions.”
Another expectation, explicitly stated to avoid misunderstanding, was that
Holtzman marry another Jew. “Being a Holocaust survivor’s child and marrying someone
who’s not Jewish? That’s not…” She trailed off, staring down into her coffee mug, unable to
finish her sentence or quell her tears.
Holtzman’s silence reflects a past that still conjures up feelings of shame and
discomfort. As a young woman, she married a man who was not Jewish soon after
graduating college. “That’s what I regret in my life,” she said of the marriage. Two years
and two children later, Holtzman divorced the father. As a single mother, she worked full-
time to provide a Jewish life to her children, maintaining a kosher household, belonging to
two synagogues, taking the kids there on Shabbat, and enrolling them in Jewish day
schools, Sunday schools and summer camps. Her parents also lived at home providing the
same Jewish education she grew up with as a child, complete with stories from the
Holocaust.
“You can ask me to this day and I don’t know why,” Holtzman said regarding her
choice to intermarry. When asked if her decision came from a place of rebellion she
replied, “If it is, it’s really subconscious. I didn’t want to hurt my parents.”

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But the choice to intermarry has shaped her future, leaving her feeling incapable of
interfering as her children pursue interfaith relationships. “I can’t say anything because I
didn’t marry someone who was Jewish and their father’s not Jewish,” she said matter-of-
factly. “Why did I do that?” she still asks herself. “I made a bad choice, a really bad choice.”
Despite Holtzman’s efforts to provide a Jewish upbringing for her children, her
daughter, Amy Yukich, nevertheless chose to follow in her mother’s footsteps and also
married outside the faith. “I swore it wouldn’t be a repeat,” Yukich said. She knew the pain
it caused her mother, yet rationalized, “I was determined to make it different and make it
work. That was her and this is me.”
In the absence of her father, Yukich’s grandparents assumed a quasi-parental role
in her life. She fondly remembers her grandfather leading Passover seders and hearing
about how he held down four jobs and washed dishes when he first came to America. She
credits her grandparents with instilling in her the strong work ethic that supports her
today and says she feels proud to come from such strength and resilience. Through their
stories and lessons, she grew to appreciate the food on her table, the roof over her head and
the closeness of her family.
But whereas Holtzman cannot explain where her motivation to intermarry came
from, Yukich is clear, “I was trying to rebel.” After spending a lifetime in Jewish, Los
Angeles neighborhoods and attending Jewish schools, she felt the need to “be different, do
different”; she associated independence with breaking the rules. Yukich lived up to other
familial expectations, getting an education, beginning her own editing company, becoming
self sufficient, making good investments and having children. But in her household, with
survivor grandparents and her mother’s guilt a constant reminder, marrying outside the
faith was the ultimate rebellion.

7
“I remember when I called them up and told them I was getting married they were
like, ‘We’re not coming to the wedding.’ It broke my heart,” Yukich said. Although her
grandparents ultimately attended and supported her decision, their disappointment was
understood.
“Peace, love, marry whoever you want, whatever feels good,” Yukich said regarding
her attitude at the time. But now, she isn’t sure. Six year later, Yukich works with her
husband in their editing business, but concedes that despite her best efforts, there’s a
missing connection between herself and her husband Bert, “I love my husband—he’s a
great person, he’s a great guy, but there’s a disconnect.” Yukich’s frustration appears when
Bert seems unable to understand what her grandparents went through, incapable of
grasping the family’s quirks and inner workings. And the challenge has been exacerbated
now that Yukich and her husband have a child, and Bert does not want to raise the child
Jewish.
Yukich and her husband discussed religion before getting married, but once their
daughter arrived, Bert had a change of heart and reneged on his earlier agreement to rear
any children they raised with a Jewish upbringing. The issue has grown into a stress-
inducing riff in their marriage.
Much of Yukich’s family perished for being Jewish and one of the core values of
her upbringing was a commitment to Judaism’s survival. With so few Jews in the world
relative to the global population, each Jew’s actions become exponentially more important;
one child who is not raised Jewish ends that line of Jews, impeding what could have been a
ripple effect of repopulating lost Jews of yesteryears and jeopardizing Judaism’s existence
in the future. Many progeny of survivors believe, based on history’s example that they
cannot rely on posterity to ensure Judaism’s continuation; the responsibility of
contributing to Judaism’s heartiness lies squarely on their shoulders.

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Yukich’s last survivor grandparent, her grandfather, passed away in the fall of
2007, adding to Yukich’s confusion. His death’s impact was larger than she expected for
she had assumed he would be there to impart Judaic traditions, lessons and culture to her
children as he had for her mother and herself.
“It’s been devastating,” Yukich cried. Now she feels the pressure of instilling a
Jewish identity in her daughter alone; and without her husband’s help, she feels ill-
equipped to do it. “It’s a religion but it’s really beyond that. It’s a culture. It’s a life.” And
the reality that her daughter may not understand that life frightens both Yukich and
Holtzman. Both feel responsible; both wondering if they are the last links in the chain
their family fought so hard to preserve.

Naava Piatka, New Jersey
Bright, textured paintings of turquoise and blush filled three walls of her
waterfront, New Jersey apartment; windowed sliding doors made up the fourth side of the
living room, framing Manhattan’s towering cityscape across the Hudson River.
“They’ll entertain the jesters there,” Naava Piatka said, looking out toward New
York City’s twinkling lights. “You can be crazy and out of the box and it’s appreciated. It’s
not small-town mentality where you have to stay the same, not make waves.”
The lively room matched its owner. The broad-smiling woman capped by a mess
of red hair is three parts artist, author and actress and one part self-doubter. The everyday
struggles of this lavish woman have caused her to reevaluate her outlook, revamp her
ideals and question previously held assumptions.
“I don’t know what’s important about Judaism right now in this particular day
and age,” she said, biting into a cracker. She knows her comment is unusual for the

9
daughter of Holocaust survivors; she knows some Jews would find her comment
blasphemous, ignorant and disrespectful of the dead. But she has reached the point in life
where she does not care about appeasement—her remarks are not made flippantly. She has
carefully mulled over her experiences, searching for meaning, explanation and lessons; and
her conclusions surprise herself as well. She will no doubt question them too, in time.
In her youth, Piatka believed that she needed to be the “bearer of the flame” of
Judaism and made some of her major life choices in line with that belief. She married a Jew,
and later in life, wrote a musical to tell her mother’s story, and a book to tell her father’s.
Although she values Judaism for its core values of justice and learning, she does not buy
into what she considers a “paranoid mentality” that assimilation could seriously threaten
the Jewish people.
Her thinking runs deep. Despite having lived in Israel, she questions the Jewish
state’s necessity and feels it is time for the 5,000-plus-year-old religion to be reinterpreted.
Unsatisfied with Jews’ recent contributions to humanity she pointedly questions, “Tell me
the reason why we need to perpetuate a Jewish community, what do we stand for? What
are we manifesting? How are we doing that? How are we saying: I am a Jew; this is what I
represent?”
Piatka relishes her unconventional outlook, as it was one the traits she admired
most in her father, Xavier Piatka. Xavier came from an assimilated family in Vilna, Poland,
now part of Lithuania, a thriving and rich center of Jewish culture and community.
Xavier’s father was a doctor from an Orthodox family, his mother very liberal minded. His
family was relatively wealthy, involved in humanitarian work and ideologically
progressive, sending Xavier to the public, Catholic school instead of Hebrew school.
“They were not a shtetl [small-town Yiddish] mentality,” Piatka said categorically.
Xavier went on to study journalism, wrote for the Polish newspaper and joined Zionist

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movements like Beitar that later played an important role in the creation of the state of
Israel.
Meanwhile, Piatka’s mother was famous actress and singer, Chayela Rosenthal,
who later starred in the Vilna Ghetto Theater, performing her brother Leyb’s original
Yiddish plays and songs. Her family was poorer and uneducated, but her brother’s
writings garnered him, and consequently her, attention. As a writer, his left, socialist
leanings also led to his arrest several times, but his popular songs kept Vilna audiences
entertained. Chayela sang many of Leyb’s songs and her talent made her a local celebrity.
Although Xavier wrote about Chayela for the paper, they did not meet until after
the war.
In 1941, after an initial massacre of five to ten thousand people to cleanse Vilna of
its poorer Jews, the Nazis funneled the city’s remaining Jewish population into the old
Jewish quarter. There in the Vilna ghetto, Chayela continued to sing for the people. And
although some of the ghetto’s leaders resented her for “perform[ing] theater in a
graveyard!” most appreciated her irrepressible vivaciousness. She became the “wunderkind
of the Vilna ghetto,” or the “songstress of hope.” After the war, survivors would testify that
her theater was a miracle.
Xavier, due to his father’s connections as a doctor, held a higher position, handing
out work permits. Yet even while both were confined to the Vilna ghetto, they moved in
different circles; her world was enveloped by Yiddish culture and his by youth movements
and social activism.
After the ghetto was liquidated, Xavier spent the war in Stuthoff, the first
extermination camp outside of Germany. Chayela spent the rest of the war in Kaiserwald,
a forced labor camp. That is all Piatka knew of her parent’s history until she reached her
early forties. Her parents never spoke of the war, never mentioned the Holocaust.

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She did not know her mother was a famous singer who brought life and comfort to
the Jews of Vilna as they awaited deportation. She did not know of her celebrated uncle
who refused to be quiet. Chayela never spoke of the war. Piatka only learned her mother’s
stories from her father after her death. Piatka learned how her mother was forced to march
with other women into the Baltic Ocean to drown. And despite having seen the small
portrait of a young man under the glass of her mother’s vanity all her life, she only later
learned that man was her Uncle Leyb, her mother’s brother and kindred spirit who was
killed the day before liberation at Klooger concentration camp.
“There was this collusion of silence,” Piatka remembered. “You knew that there
was something painful but you didn’t want to go there because you didn’t want to cause
more pain. It was a taboo. You just put it behind you, locked it away and moved on.”
(Holocaust scholars explain that many survivors remained silent about their
Holocaust experiences because grieving was not an adaptive response; the despair of fully
examining the horrors, comprehending the loss and digesting the brutality would have
been paralyzing. For many, survival required building a wall between the past and present
and focusing all efforts and attention on the creation of a future.)
“They were both on the death march and by luck, fate, destiny, whatever, they
survived,” Piatka said. At war’s end, Xavier and Chayela were both in a displaced person’s
camp recovering from typhus. Xavier heard there were some Vilna girls in the camp, and
upon finding them, met Chayela whom he had written about in their previous life.
She was performing at the camp in an attempt to keep the memories of Vilna alive
when American actress Molly Picon – a star of New York’s Yiddish theater – happened to
see her act. Picon invited Chayela to audition for well-known impresario Sol Hurok who
immediately booked her to perform in Paris.

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The couple welcomed the opportunity to leave the camp. In Paris, Xavier resumed
his journalism and Chayela sang her Yiddish songs in cabaret acts. Invited to perform in
South Africa, Xavier and Chayela decided during that trip to leave Europe behind and
establish their future in South Africa. Daughters Naava and Zola were born in Cape Town,
and grew up unaware of their parents’ struggle and success.
Though left unspoken, the war loomed. Immigrants visited their home in South
Africa, speaking different languages. The family went to Holocaust memorials frequently.
Hints were dropped whenever Piatka asked why she did not have any grandparents or
family. “They were killed by the Nazis,” her mother would reply without further
explanation.
Piatka knew from a young age that something terrible had happened and it was
clear that their immigrant friends had been through some kind of tragedy. But details of
what happened or how, were missing. “I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know,” Piatka said
and postulated, “They could speak about it amongst themselves, but to pass it on to a
child? I think it was just too painful. They were emotional to start off with, so any little
thing would bring tears and drama.”
Her parents’ sensitivity put pressure on Piatka to heed her parents’ feelings by
doing her best to be perfect, “I didn’t want to bring any more shame, humiliation or upset.”
As a child, she received straight A’s and was the model child in school. Other parents
scolded their own children, “Why can’t you be more like Naava?” According to Piatka,
many of her attempts to express her feelings were met with invalidating remarks.
“The Holocaust trumps everything,” she said, remembering a time when she told
her mother, in typical adolescent fashion, that she was getting on her nerves. Her mother
replied, “What nerves? You shouldn’t have any nerves.” Gratefulness was encouraged,
petulance was disparaged.

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Piatka commonly felt frustration with her mother. Unaware of her story, Piatka
often regarded her mother as a bourgeois simpleton, only concerned with looking her best
and impressing the neighbors because “they’re always looking”; Piatka did not share those
values, but rather patronizingly associated them with an insular, Jewish mental attitude,
the “shtetl-thinking” of which she wanted no part. In addition to resenting her own sense
of differentness by being Jewish and the child of immigrants, she also felt ashamed of her
mother’s foreignness and lack of English manners.
Instead, Piatka attached herself to her father, admiring his intellectual interests in
literature, justice and the arts. She later learned he was not silent about the Holocaust
outside of the home; He wrote about the war for Holocaust Remembrance Day and later
published a book filled with the stories of Cape Town’s Holocaust survivors. Piatka
appreciated his perspective on life which she found evolved and mature. Unlike her
mother, he was a closet rebel and did not care what others thought. He taught her to speak
out, not necessarily politically, but humanitarianly. “You have to forgive, not forget,” he
would later tell Piatka regarding the Holocaust. (He could even have a German girlfriend
after Chayela’s death in 1979.)
The family was not religious, but Piatka was expected to marry someone Jewish.
After a stint in Israel after college and despite her own preference for non-Jewish men, she
found a Jewish man she loved, married him and moved to the United States in 1977. “They
liked him. I could marry him for them; to give them more nachas [pride]. Because I had to
get married—24 years old on the shelf,” she recalled.
At the time, Piatka aimed to leave South Africa to flee from apartheid and begin a
family. She appreciated the community and continuity Judaism represented and raised her
children more religiously than she had been brought up herself.

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But after achieving these goals, Piatka wondered if that was all there was to life.
She had a husband, three children, a life in the suburbs and her art professionally, but
something was missing. Then, during one of her father’s visits from South Africa, she saw
his careworn age and realized he would not be there forever. Beyond the awareness that he
was in the war, her father’s story was still a mystery; she felt a sense of urgency to record
his stories.
Piatka enthusiastically tackled this new project with the intention of writing a
book. But as she listened to her father, she learned for the first time about her mother,
Chayela the singer, comedienne and actress. Coincidentally, a filmmaker contacted her at
that time, asking if the family had any of Leyb Rosenthal’s music because she was putting
together a movie and wanted to base some characters on her uncle and mother.
It was the first time Piatka realized who her mother was; strangers wanted to
memorialize her! She became “possessed,” putting together a one-woman show dotted
with Yiddish music and sayings that she starred in, “Better Don’t Talk.”
That title, taken from one of Leyb’s popular songs, was intentionally ironic for
Chayela’s silence was what ultimately compelled Piatka to resurrect her stories. Her
message was to show how people could survive and transcend. She toured the show
throughout the United States and internationally, from Australia to Germany and even to
Vilna, Poland. Piatka received rave reviews and a self-fulfillment she had only of late
realized was missing from her life.
She continued to collect her father’s stories, but instinctively knew the book
would not fully materialize until after her father’s death. And then it happened. In 1999,
Piatka lost the two men in her life. Her father passed away and, in a “big and nasty and
ugly” divorce, she separated from her husband of 22 years. “It was incredibly heavy,” she
said. But it sparked a new incarnation in her thinking.

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Looking at love again for the first time since her early twenties, she noticed holes
in her previously held beliefs. Judaism in her forties felt more like a club membership than
a religion to Piatka; she enjoyed the philosophy and community but found the practice of
the religion limited and narrow minded. Now with her children grown, her observance
became negligible. She no longer belonged to a temple, preferring to dabble in numerous
belief systems—from Buddhism to self-improvement strategies like the Landmark Forum.
Past principles, such as the notion that Jews should marry other Jews to replenish those
murdered during the Holocaust and to perpetuate a culture and religion nearly erased,
began to ring hollow. “There’s an agenda underneath it; it’s a guilt thing. It’s very negative;
it’s a strategy and it’s melodramatic,” Piatka said, suggesting such tactics were
manipulative tools of coercion. “People say, ‘they died’ so you should live a Jewish life. My
parents lived, they survived. That has been a pressure. If I haven’t been living, I feel I’m not
living up to that gift of life.”
Others, like Rabbi Shlomo Seidenfeld of Los Angeles, agree that the Holocaust is
not a strong enough reason for maintaining one’s faith, “I understand that argument, but
it’s an argument that comes way too late because even when it works, it’s a very shaky
foundation.” Piatka learned that firsthand when her marriage crumbled after life’s
obstacles proved too challenging for faith alone to conquer.
But her new perspective was tested when her daughter decided to intermarry. “If
the guy loves and supports and brings my daughter pleasure and security and whatever
one calls love and there’s a friendship there, then more power to them. Because that’s a
rarity in this world that a person feels fulfilled and satisfied with another human being,”
she said. But she quickly added that she was glad her daughter intermarried after both of
her parents died; they would not see the Christmas tree in their granddaughter’s home,
topped by an angel Piatka gave them.

16
Confronted with pessimistic demographics that show the children of
intermarriages abandon their Jewish heritage, Piatka shrugs the idea away, “I don’t buy it.
I just have this knowing that…we are [a] weed—we’ll always be there, we’ll always pop
up. It’s a movement or a religion that refuses to die. Even if reduced, we come back. It’s like
survival of the fittest—you get the strongest strain, and, boy, are we going to come back
more powerful, better than ever.”
Piatka is a proponent of assimilation saying that Jews have more to learn in the
diaspora than by remaining insular. Acknowledging no grey in between, she asserted that
those who intermarried were the ones who always saved the Jews historically, and cited
the Holocaust itself as an enormous wake-up call that finally caused Jews to get out of
their small, “shtetl thinking” and get into the larger world where they grew into the
prominent and successful people of today.
Piatka’s ordinarily cheerful perspective turned critical when discussing Judaism’s
role in the modern world. “I lived in Israel and I loved Israel, but it’s a concept of having a
homeland based on paranoia and fear: basically, ‘they’re out to get us so we need our own
homeland.’ So, what if we lived without fear?”
Piatka warned against the “us vs. them” mentality she feels many contemporary
Jews subscribe to and says modern Israel is a den of dysfunction with so many factions
that the country, aside from its external enemies, is internally pitted against itself—Jew vs.
Jew, secular vs. religious, Zionist vs. extreme Orthodox. She confutes the criteria the Beit
Din [Israel’s rabbinical court] uses to qualify whether or not a person is Jewish; and
admonishes the religious who do not accept the secular, and the secular who not accept
the religious. “It’s not working these days,” she says. “My view of Judaism is that it can
deal with a good kick in the tush.” But, she says shaking her head with a knowing and
disdainful chortle, "the very essence of Judaism is about keeping it the same.”

17
Such dissidence led Piatka to wonder if Jews’ gift to the world isn’t knowledge of
the outsider, showing others how to adapt and succeed anywhere despite obstacles and
challenges. “What’s the point of killing each other over a piece of land? It’s just more
killing, more of the same. It’s the definition of insanity. How long has Israel been fighting?”
she said. And so her solution is to stop—to quit fighting, to give up the struggle for
preservation, to relinquish Israel and embrace life in the diaspora.
Despite her own father’s role in the Zionist Beitar movement, which suggested a
commitment to the preservation of Jewish life and Israel, Piatka can hardly see the Jewish
people or country’s viability through the gloomy haze of her dissent.
Although Piatka knows the Holocaust and Judaism are part of her “like the color
of my hair,” these days she chooses to place herself above the Jewish community at large.
“My personal philosophy and a Jewish one is that if you save one life, you have saved the
world. And I interpret that to mean that if I brighten, awaken and enlighten myself—that
will awaken the world. However you get there, amen.”
But an old memory recently re-discovered during a self-improvement seminar may
provide insight into why Piatka feels so willing leave the fate of Judaism to chance:
“One of my defining moments was when I went to
school one day. It must have been my first day of school; I was
five years old and I loved school…I’m happy. I go and I see the
kids are sitting there on early arrival, my Christian friends, and
they’re yelling at me, ‘Go back Naava! You can’t stay here, it’s a
Jewish holiday!’ My parents didn’t know for some reason…
I felt mortified. Like a) I felt stupid, because I did
something wrong, and b) because my parents did that…I felt
really bad. So I think there’s always been a part of me that
sought approval from the Christian community. I have this deep
seated need to prove, ‘Hey! I belong here!’”

Here, in the Jersey ramparts, across the Hudson from Manhattan,
where the jesters play.

18
Julie Meetal, Texas
It’s the stuff romance novels are made of, with all the drama of a grand epic.
In Hungary, a young man, Laszlo Mittelman of Debrecen, proposed marriage to
Magda Ehrlich, a young lady from the nearby town of Szolnok. It was 1942. But their
engagement and bright futures were shattered by the Third Reich’s invasion and
occupation of Hungary.
In the wake of the conquest, Magda and her family were deported from the
Szolnok ghetto and taken to concentration camps.
The 19-year-old girl and her 23-year-old fiancée feared the unknown before them;
would they ever see each other again? Their daughter shared their story; her parents’
experience would shape her life and purpose.
Despite her internment, Magda Ehrlich demanded that her mother and sister also
be granted reprieve when, during selections, a Nazi SS officer pulled her from the “left line”
headed toward the gas chambers, and directed her toward the “right line,” and work camp.
Her act of defiance succeeded; the officer assented and the three remained together.
With her mother and sister, Magda spent a year in the German extermination
camps of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. Despite the potentially fatal consequences,
Magda’s resistance continued. In the concentration camps, she left screws out of airplane
dials and sewed the zippers on Nazi pants on backwards during forced labor; anything to
defy her captors’ will.
Laszlo, a Hungarian soldier, but also an underground-resistance worker smuggled
Jews out of Hungary. Separated from the Hungarian troops along with the other Jewish
soldiers, Laszlo too was a slave laborer. He was laying land mines on the Russian front
when he managed to escape on foot into Poland. Once there, he joined the underground

19
resistance as a partisan with General Bor, the leader of the Warsaw uprising. On a mission
in Warsaw, Laszlo was shot thirteen times and again captured by the Germans. Normally
so methodical, they did not discover the young man was Jewish. Thinking he was merely a
Polish peasant, the Germans sent him to a field hospital in Lodz. But Laszlo’s physician
found out his true identity. When they stripped Laszlo of his bloody pants, his
circumcision revealed his Jewish roots. The doctor, understanding that his actions, if
discovered, would cost him his life, nevertheless kept the wounded Jew quarantined and
saved his life. The bullets had mangled Laszlo’s legs; his doctor advised amputation. But
despite his delirium, Laszlo adamantly refused, choosing death over the loss of his limbs.
Instead, with the doctor’s help, Laszlo painfully regained the strength in his legs.
Then, luck struck again. The Russians were approaching when the Hungarian
doctor, ostensibly a collaborationist, risked his life again by telling Laszlo of their advances
and urged the young man to flee in the middle of the night. Laszlo heeded the doctor’s
warning.
Twice saved and fully healed, Laszlo escaped and rejoined the Polish resistance
movement where he served until the war ended.
The war over, Laszlo wanted to thank the doctor who jeopardized his own life to
save his. Remembering the physician was Hungarian, Laszlo searched all over Hungary,
but to no avail. Instead, he returned to Debrecen to see who and what was left of his life.
For the rest of his years, Laszlo Mittelman would look, hoping to have the opportunity to
reunite with his rescuer, and to express his gratitude.
All the while, Magda, Laszlo’s intended, and her sister had survived Auschwitz’s
horrors. (Her mother, too old to be used for slave labor, was exterminated.) At war’s end,
Magda made her way back to Hungary; she too moved from town to town, from Szolnok
to Budapest, searching for family and friends who survived the Holocaust. At each town

20
she left a note for Laszlo, just in case he was alive, telling him where she was going next to
look for him.
Laszlo too was looking for Magda. He arrived in cities only to learn that she had
just left. Still he trudged on.
They had each evaded death numerous times. They had persevered and endured
the ravages of tortured imprisonment and witnessed humanity at its worst. But they had
survived. Finally, three years after their engagement was torn apart by war and prejudice,
the couple found each other in early July, 1945. This time, they would not wait. They were
married within a week on July 11
th
in Debrecen by a justice of the peace. No family
attended the overdue union; they did not yet know if any of their family survived.
They optimistically began again and soon had their first child, a boy named
Abraham. It was a fresh beginning, one with new promise. Passionate about the creation of
the state of Israel and fearful of the encroaching Communist regime in Hungary, they
became refugees. With their two-year-old son and whatever belongings they could carry,
they trekked through Austria and Italy, across the Adriatic to Yugoslavia, through Albania
and Greece toward Turkey, where they finally boarded a boat to Israel. All the while the
country called to them as they dreamt of building a life that would never be taken away
again.
Their struggle paid off. Their daughter, Julie was born in Israel and they lived in
Sha’ar Yashuv, a town in northern Israel at the base of the Golan Heights on the border of
Syria. Before the Six-Day-War, Arab children, perched on the mountain top, shot at Julie
on her way to school, forcing her to run and hide in the bomb shelter across from her
home. Laszlo had to walk his five-year-old daughter to school in the mornings with an Uzi
on his back to protect her from the Arab neighbors’ attacks.

21
Julie understood there were people who would kill her if given the opportunity.
And Israel’s Six-Day-War, whose capture of the Golan Heights ended her daily ordeal,
taught her the importance of a homeland, strength, strategy and protection. Julie was
growing into a consummate Zionist, a lover of Israel; but her father was tired of living life
with a gun strapped to his back. So when his son, Abraham approached the age of 18, the
same age Laszlo had been when he first clutched a gun in his fist, Laszlo decided it was
enough; he did not want his son to follow in his footsteps, spending his days fixed to a
weapon. To avoid his son’s mandatory Israeli-army requirement, Laszlo applied for visas to
America and Australia where their remaining family had relocated. The papers for America
came in first and the Mittelmans moved to Queens, New York.
Laszlo crafted furniture as a carpenter. Magda worked as a beautician. Abraham
became a physician. Julie pursued fashion design and art, but she was angry. Her heart was
still in Israel and from the moment she set foot in New York, she promised herself she
would return to her true home where she belonged. In the States she felt foreign, different.
As an adolescent she did everything she could to maintain her Judaism or, more
specifically, her Zionism. She joined the Beitar movement and the Zionist Organization of
America, feeling most connected to people who appreciated Israel’s importance and were
committed to its survival. She understood the stakes, and eagerly awaited her return to
Israel to fight in the army, to speak Hebrew and to drink in the Mediterranean sun, waters
and people. Just 12 years old, she began counting the years until her return. But life had
another idea in mind.
***
Three, sad, black and blue hued figures sketched by pencil huddle together in
oversized, striped uniforms; their yellow stars bringing the only color to this framed poster
above the bureau. A graphic Israeli flag and white dove against a royal blue background are

22
underlined by the white words ‘Peace’ written three times in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
And finally, an enormous gilded frame flanks a chart made of brightly colored silk squares,
each box containing one of God’s 72 names; according to Jewish mysticism each of the
names embodies a different aspect of God’s light, from unconditional love to certainty to
immortality.
This gallery is her office. Some of the pieces she has created herself, others not, but
they all represent important messages to Julie Meetal, now married in Texas. Each work
has been carefully chosen for what it says and conveys and represents. Like Meetal herself,
the art inspires consciousness, purpose and action. Nothing in the room is timid; each
piece pushes the viewer toward action—incites him to think, remember or awaken.
Meetal’s large, twinkling doe eyes and bright, half-moon smile belie a feisty and
passionate spirit. She resides in Mansfield, a small town outside of Dallas, but her Zionist
fervor still burns brightly. She is an activist and avid consumer of Middle Eastern news
and developments; she supports Zionist causes and speaks out about the Jewish point of
view in assorted forums and inter-faith groups.
Yet living in a primarily Christian town in the heart of Texas’ “bible belt” has
intensified the challenge of raising a strong Jewish family. With only a miniscule Jewish
community at hand, the responsibility of raising her children with a solid Jewish identity
fell to Meetal and her husband Joseph alone. An exterior support network to reinforce
Judaic traditions and values was absent. As a result, the environment Meetal and her
husband created at home became critically important.
“I wanted my kids to know that they were Jewish and be proud of it,” Meetal said.
Toward that end, Meetal took their two children on trips to Israel as they were growing
up, sent them to Jewish summer camps and encouraged their involvement in various
Jewish youth organizations. The children grew close to Meetal’s parents, Laszlo and

23
Magda, and the family frequently discussed the history, beauty and challenges facing the
state of Israel. “I felt if I teach my kids about where they come from and who they are and
their history, that they’d know why it was important to marry Jewish and continue being
Jewish,” she said.
Meetal and her husband clearly stated their expectation that the children marry
Jews when the time arrived; but as both children are now in their twenties, they can only
wait to see if their son and daughter will heed their advice.
Aside from her own belief that intermarriage adds unnecessary challenges to
marriage, there is another reason why Meetal hopes her children will marry within the
faith. “Because of my family’s history, I think I would feel like all my family died for
nothing,” she said of how she would react if her children choose to intermarry. “I’d feel like
we’re not as victorious as I always felt we were,” she said with a lump rising in her throat.
“We need to survive. So many died because they were Jewish. Our survival is our victory,”
she explained.
For years, Meetal has searched for a way to explain the Holocaust. The only
answer that has brought her peace, the only effect that makes the incomprehensible
endurable is the creation of the state of Israel. Meetal resolved that it took a nightmare like
the Holocaust for the world and Jews alike to recognize that the Jewish people needed and
deserved a place of their own. “Here we are 60 years later and we’re growing, we’re
thriving, we’re having children and we have a Jewish state…Every time you have a Jewish
child born to a Jewish family, it’s another victory and Hitler wasn’t successful. We are
victorious,” she said unequivocally.
Growing up in New York, Meetal’s parents were fiercely protective of their
daughter. Unlike other survivor families, Meetal’s parents “never, never, never” pressured

24
her to be perfect or held the Holocaust over her head; they never said, “You should be
happy with what you have.”
The only visible residue of the Holocaust that Meetal remembers was her parents’
intense over-protectiveness after they moved to America. Her parents always had to know
who she was with, what she was doing, where she was going and what time she would be
home. It was an enormous change from their attitude in Israel. “In Israel, everybody was a
child of survivors, so we were all the same,” Meetal said remembering how she roamed all
over their town freely without curfews and with only minimal restrictions. Her parents
had always trusted that as long as she was with other Jews, she would be safe.
In America that comfort level disappeared and her parents hovered over her
activities. All friends, boys and girls alike, had to be Jewish. Although she did eventually
have a few non-Jewish friends, her parents’ disapproval was evident. “His [her father’s]
reasoning was that you’re going to be with your girlfriends. If they’re not Jewish then
you’re going to meet non-Jewish boys and we don’t want that,” Meetal explained.
The only true safety and dependability lay with one’s own. “Never believe it
cannot happen here.” Meetal’s parents would remind her. “We always thought it could
never happen to us. After all, we were good, little Hungarians.”
In Bible-belt Texas, Meetal still heeds this lesson. She does not believe the world
has changed so much since World War II. “Unfortunately, Israel and the Jews still have
the same enemies,” she said citing Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose anti-Jewish and
anti-Israel rhetoric reminds Meetal of Hitler in early Nazi-Germany. Just as Mein Kampf,
Hitler’s manifesto, outlined his cold-blooded intentions and was not taken seriously,
Meetal worries Ahmadinejad’s clearly spoken aims are also falling on deaf ears. Meetal is
unsure that any lasting lessons were learned from Hitlerism. “Anti-Semitism is still around

25
and if you turn your back and become complacent, it’ll bite you again. History will teach
you that you can’t chill out,” she warned. But her worries do not merely lie overseas.
In pre-Nazi Germany assimilated Jews often identified themselves as German first;
Jewish second. Meetal notices that modern, Americanized Jews too frequently consider
themselves Americans first and foremost. “That’s fine, except you should always know
who you are,” Meetal said. “Because unfortunately, if you look at history, the world has
always reminded the Jews who they were and I think it’s dangerous to forget that.”
Meetal does not try to convince anyone of her rightness, “You’re either Jewish or
you’re not. And if you’re not, you don’t get it.”
Many of Meetal’s friends’ children have intermarried and learning of high, Jewish-
American assimilation statistics ignites her frustration. “What did they die for?” she said
exasperatedly. “They fought and died so we could be Jewish and less than 60 years later,
their grandchildren find being Jewish so superfluous, they don’t even feel compelled to
marry Jewish or raise their kids Jewish? It’s scary.” That fear inspired Meetal to educate
others about the Holocaust at a time when, in her opinion, the world is all too ready to
forget.
For years, Meetal searched for someone to tell her parents’ stories, but when the
appropriate channel never emerged, she resolved to communicate their stories herself
through her own form, art. She could not remain silent; many people in Texas whom she
encountered even in the early 1990s did not know of the Holocaust. What started as three
paintings, one for her mother, one for her father and one representing the outcome, has
turned into an 11-piece exhibit that will travel around the country to museums and
universities to educate audiences about the Holocaust. To Meetal, “A picture is worth 6
million words.”

26
She hopes her art will illustrate what anti-Semitism and hatred are capable of. She
aims to show people that the Holocaust cannot be forgotten and that complacency is not
an option. She wants patrons to see her parents’ struggle but not view them, or the other
Jews, dead or alive, as victims. She knows of the resistance and bravery that transpired in
the camps and wants viewers to understand that the Jews did not surrender themselves,
obediently accepting their fate like sheep to slaughter. “The Holocaust made me stronger. I
have a survivor mentality. And when I tell people that I come from Israel, I feel like I’m
telling you how strong I am. I’m not coming from a victim mentality. I have always felt like
a winner, always felt very proud. Look, we’re here.” And she wants to ensure Jews
continue to proudly be here.
But in Mansfield, for many of her Texan friends, Meetal was the first Jew they had
ever met, and restricting her children’s friends to Jews was impossible; though she says she
would not have wanted to enforce that severity anyway.
Meetal’s true wish is that her children will marry Jewish not out of obligation, but
out of a sincere love for their history, their people and their identity, hoping they have
internalized the lessons she and her husband strived to impart and, despite all of the
choices America offers, will desire a Jewish partner and life for themselves. She prays they
have absorbed the faith that always made her own choice clear, “It [Judaism] is a mindset.
It’s a culture, it’s a feeling, it’s a knowledge, it’s an identity. It’s who you are, it’s your soul,
it’s a life.”

Conclusion
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” Stalin once said. As the
Holocaust fades into history, its significance dwindles, then deteriorates into a mere

27
statistic. The slow and gradual assimilation of American Jews, potentially an extinction
by choice, remains a palpable tragedy to those who struggled to preserve the Jewish faith.
“We fight so hard for the environment not to wipe out a single flower that’s on the
endangered list, why would we wipe out ourselves?” Firestone asked rhetorically, not truly
expecting an answer.
To the children of survivors, the Holocaust was part of the fabric of their lives. “It’s
inextricable from me. Me, the Holocaust,” Firestone said.
Future generations will not have a personal connection to the Holocaust: the
survivors, one by one, are dying and will probably be gone within the next 15 years, old age
having already stolen and confused many of their memories and lessons. Now their
children too are reaching retirement.
The fear hangs in the air. The generation charged with maintaining Jewish culture,
wisdom and worth, suffers from a lack of commitment and appreciation for what is at
stake. The children of the survivors fear American Jews will relinquish their rich past
through carelessness and apathy or, more consciously, through laziness or convenience.
“The only protection against assimilation is to develop a real relationship with Judaism,”
Rabbi Seidenfeld of Los Angeles said.
These are not tidy endings. Older Jews argue that Jewish heritage and tradition
must be preserved. The young shrug, not denying they are Jews, but nonetheless opting for
the freedom of choice that melting-pot America offers.

28
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Jews have always been aware of persecutions and historically have clung together as a community to pass their culture from one generation to the next.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Berman, Lara Shellene (author)

Core Title The peril of acceptance: American Jewry assimilation trends 60 years after the holocaust

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Broadcast Journalism)

Publication Date 05/06/2008

Defense Date 04/01/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag assimilation,holocaust,Jewish,OAI-PMH Harvest,second generation

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Cray, Edward (committee chair), Gillerman, Sharon (committee member), Kotler, Jonathan (committee member)

Creator Email lara.berman@sbcglobal.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1231

Unique identifier UC1292092

Identifier etd-Berman-20080506 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-68812 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1231 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Berman-20080506.pdf

Dmrecord 68812

Document Type Thesis

Rights Berman, Lara Shellene

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu