Why this Passover has deeper meaning for 3 metro Phoenix Jewish families touched by Holocaust
During the early 1940s in a village, in what is now Ukraine, Rise Stillman and her family would illuminate candles above their Seder dinner, marking the commencement of the eight-day celebration of Passover by the Jewish faithful.
Stillman and her younger siblings would marvel as they heard about Moses parting the Red Sea to free the Hebrew slaves from Pharaoh in Egypt.
"We loved it," said Stillman, a 94-year-old Scottsdale resident, in an interview with The Arizona Republic.
Stillman's life took a dark turn at the age of 14 when she was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"This was when, unfortunately, the freedom was taken away," Stillman said.
As Passover begins Monday at sundown, Phoenix-area Jews, whose families were uprooted by the Holocaust, are seeing the Israel-Hamas war as another battle in the long Jewish fight for sovereignty.
Praying for peace
At Auschwitz, a piece of bread and broth constituted the daily meal, where days blurred together, leaving Stillman unaware of Passover's arrival.
"You kept on wishing and hoping because you missed your family," Stillman said. "I always thought that this is going to end someday."
Every year, Stillman’s parents would meticulously go over the meaning of each ritual within the Seder, which in Hebrew means "order."
Each of the six items on the ornate Seder plate symbolizes something different: the apple, nut, and wine paste known as charoset represent the brick and mortar made by Jewish slaves, while horseradish stands in for the bitterness of slave life and is called maror.
Food was scarce during Passover 1943 as Adolf Hitler's forces approached, yet Stillman's parents managed to serve all of the traditional Seder foods. The children would stay up until midnight as their parents regaled them with stories about the ancient Hebrews, and the family would conclude by praying for peace and freedom.
In September 1943, Stillman left home to assist her aunt, who had broken her hip. Although she desired to reunite with her immediate family, her cousin cautioned her against leaving, as Nazis were actively searching for Jews.
Passover 1944 marked her final celebration in Europe. Early one morning during that Passover, a pair of Nazi soldiers appeared at the aunt's door. They seized both women, including Stillman, intending to transport them to Auschwitz, the Polish concentration camp where over a million perished. Stillman's aunt was promptly executed. The girl stayed with her cousin at Auschwitz for a week before losing all contact with her forever.
Reflecting on how she never reunited with her family, Stillman quickly remembered a day when she was transported to dig trenches approximately 44 miles from Auschwitz, in Krakow.
Suddenly, she heard her name being called out. Turning her head, she spotted her father among other forced laborers, clad in prison uniforms, on the roadside. For a brief moment, father and daughter locked eyes, but neither dared to move closer, aware that they would be shot dead if they did.
Longing to be free
Israeli-American and Scottsdale resident Zohar Raz, 68, recounted the slow onset of death for prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp, as told by his late father, Zerubawel Rosenzweig. Imprisoned in 1944 at the camp near Munich, the Lithuanian-born Rosenzweig was 18 years old.
During Passover 1945, and as the war neared its end, Raz said, the Nazis, "for some strange reason" gave his starving father a condensed milk container. Rosenzweig commemorated the Seder by removing the container’s blue-lettered wrapper. On the back, and in Hebrew, he penned his thoughts on longing to be free:
"Today is the 3rd of April, 45, when we are starting to feel, when an echo is starting to penetrate like a lightning bolt, the echo of the breath of freedom that the new world is starting to breathe. We are still inside a medieval prison, with hope, but not knowing the direction to freedom. … One's soul wraps itself in grief and sorrow when thinking about it. After four years of wandering, prison, hunger, cold, hard labor, persecution of all kinds, now it will be the end of us."
Rosenzweig’s mother was killed at a death camp, he survived until liberation from Dachau several weeks after Passover 1945. At the age of 19, he relocated to Israel and enlisted in the army. Rising through the ranks, he secured a high-level engineering role with a phone company and later became a father of two.
Some years before Rosenzweig’s death at 74 in 2000, his family learned about his words on Passover 1945. Now in Raz's possession, he considers the yellowed paper to be one of the few existing first-person documents completed by a concentration camp survivor.
His father’s writing serves to "remind us that it wasn't that long ago that our ancestors were slaves. We’re talking about one generation behind," Raz said. "Not 2,000 years ago. We’re talking 70, 80 years ago."
For the last 15 or so years, Rosenzweig’s family reads his concentration camp letter during the Seder’s four questions. This portion of the dinner opens up discussion about the holiday’s significance. During the part addressing Hebrew slavery, the family reads Rosenzweig's words. However, Raz no longer reads it during the dinner."I don’t want to get too emotional," he said.
Escaping persecution
Lessons about oppression against Jews throughout history — the pharaoh, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet pogroms and Nazism — remain at the forefront of the Seder.
During their conversation with The Republic on the afternoon of April 13, Hana and Frank Lange, whose parents escaped Nazi persecution for being Jewish, tuned into TV news broadcasts reporting on Iran's drone attacks on Israel.
"For every generation, there has been tyrants that have risen up to destroy us," former Israeli resident Hana Lange, 75, said as she paraphrased the Haggadah, which is the text detailing the Passover rituals and their meaning. "We are still here even though every generation has its pharaoh."
The Seder rituals evoke the feeling of liberation the enslaved Israelites experienced, the Langes explained. The couple, who have two sons and three granddaughters, expect their Seder dinner table to have an empty chair to remember those who remain hostage under Hamas.
"I think this year, there’s gonna be a lot of people adding special prayers regarding what's going on," Frank Lange, 77, said.
The Langes showcased their brightly colored Seder ritual items in the living room of their Phoenix home. A mezuzah, which is an encased Torah text, is affixed on a doorpost to a guest bedroom. Dishes, pots, pans and food used in the Seder dinner are stored there to safeguard them from touching items for everyday cooking just as Passover practice mandates.
Hana Lange’s family fled Poland in 1939 for Russia and returned upon the war’s end. Born thereafter, she and her family eventually settled in Israel when she was 8 — the same age as the State of Israel’s establishment. Frank Lange, meanwhile, was born in Minnesota to a father who left Berlin in 1936 and a mother whose family found asylum in the U.S. after the Nazis took control of Vienna in 1939.
Mourning the departed
Rise Stillman, who last visited Israel in 2000, is familiar with the bombings Hamas and other groups have perpetrated against Israelis for decades.
The roots of the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict stretch back over a century to World War I when Britain's government assigned the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to Jews aiming to reclaim their ancestral homeland. The three Abrahamic faiths in the land each have holy sites where Palestinians also lay a stake.
But Stillman was especially shaken by the brutality of Oct. 7. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden have deemed the day Hamas killed about 1,200 within Israel the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust.
Out of the more than 240 hostages Hamas seized in their raid into Israel, 100 have been released and the other 100 thought to still be living remain held in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces have suffered 604 casualties, including 260 in battle, as of Thursday, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"There was so much hatred in this," Stillman said of Oct. 7, adding she mourns the Palestinian innocents caught in the crossfire. "I feel horrible for every death."
According to the United Nations, as of April 5, there have been 33,091 Palestinians, including combatants, killed in the Gaza Strip. The UN’s source is the Gaza Ministry of Health, part of the Hamas-controlled government.
Reconciling with the enormity of suffering in the Holocaust where 6 million Jews perished, Stillman initially reasoned all the carnage was not in vain.
However, the vitriol Stillman saw sowed against Jews leading up to the Holocaust is worryingly similar to the climate she sees today, she shared. The aggression against Israel and Ukraine, as well as the emergence of autocratic leaders in Russia and Hungary, has Stillman concerned a road is slowly being paved not unlike the one that led to World War II.
"It’s going back to that way, very gradually," she said.
Brightening bleak times
Stillman is among approximately 65 Holocaust survivors in metro Phoenix, according to February records from the Phoenix Holocaust Association. She and other forced laborers were liberated in April 1945 by the International Red Cross. But she remained bound to the horrors of the Holocaust.
"It took a while to regain your humanity," Stillman said.
Newfound freedom eventually brought her to stay in 1948 with family in Ohio where she married two years later and then had a son. By 1969, she would be a widow. Stillman relocated to Scottsdale in 1985 and her son gave her a "very beautiful and bright" granddaughter.
The Passover traditions Stillman inherited from her parents are now carried on by her son. Stillman is planning on making her usual salmon patties to bring over for Seder at her son’s nearby home.
Despite how bleak the times may seem for Israelis, the candles of the Seder brighten Stillman’s memory of the greatest story her parents ever told her as a child.
"The Israelites, even though they wandered in the desert for 40 years, they did get the land, the promised land," Stillman said.
Reach breaking news reporter Jose R. Gonzalez at jose.gonzalez@gannett.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @jrgzztx.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: These families recall Holocaust past, reckon with present this Passover
