Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 18:07:14 -0500
From: Bernie

In 2000 I started to attend services at Beth Ora in St-Laurent. The first week I
knew no one, and so, as was my habit in school, I chose a seat in the back row.
The man sitting next to me introduced himself as Mo Kaiser (many of you might
have known him as the manager of "Miss Montreal" and the owner of
"Pumpernik's"). He asked if I spoke yiddish. I told him I had not spoken yiddish
for a long time, but it was my mother tongue and I was a student of Jewish
Peoples' school. From then on, every Saturday he would tell me stories of his
capture, incarceration and eventual liberation from Auschwitz.
He told me early on that his wife was a Canadian and couldn't speak yiddish, and
that his children couldn't speak yiddish. He said he could only tell his stories
in yiddish, otherwise he felt he was not honouring his parents and family who
had spoken yiddish and had been killed, murdered and burned in the Holocaust.
Every week he told me stories, and every week he cried.

At some poiint I told him my only Holocast-related story (attached). Both my
parents came to Canada as teenagers in 1927. Neither of them had any family left
in Europe and so they had no stories to tell.

Shortly after that I suggested he have his son contact the Shoa Project and that
he record his stories. Mo started, and eventually recorded some 30 hours of
stories, all in yiddish. He told me that his wife and children could not
understand the stories and he had told them to send the tapes to the Shoa
Project after he died. He said it was his legacy to his parents.
Mo passed away several years ago and his funeral was very well attended, mainly
as a tribute to his years as a restauranteur. I sat at the back and silently
retold his stories to me in yiddish.

At Beth Ora we held 2 yearly Holocaust memorial events. My oldest granddaughter
spoke at one of these about the exploits of my brother-in-law's mother. I was on
the committee until I eventually left the Synagogue.

I am not the child of Holocaust survivor, but I felt, through Mo, his pain.

Bernie