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Today is June 21, 2022. My name is Joshua Furman. I'm the curator of the Houston Jewish History Archive at Rice University, and today I am joined by Ellen Fishman Trachtenberg. Ellen, how are you? I'm good. Nice to have you, Josh. Nice to be here. We're in

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your home, uh, in the Fondren Southwest neighborhood on Dandelion, and we're gonna be talking about growing up in New Orleans, coming to Houston, and your decades of community involvement with the Soviet Jewry movement and Beth Yeshurun and with, uh, Holocaust Museum Houston, and, uh, life in

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the Fondren Southwest neighborhood. So, why don't we start? Tell me a little bit about your family history. How did your family get to New Orleans? My grandfather, my father's father, escaped from the Russian Army. He escaped by train and made it to London, and he had

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an uncle named Blitz, who was in New Orleans. So, he came in 1906. He went in 1906 to New Orleans, because his uncle was there, but he left most of his family. Well, uh, two sis, two brothers and a sister got out, but two sisters were left and his parents.

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So, then my grandmother arrived with her family from Romania, from Roman, Romania and they met and got married in 1909, and then my father was born in 1910. Now, my mother's family, her mother was born in Chicago, but they came originally from Poland, and then my grandfather's family

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came from Poland. So, they moved to New Orleans, I mean, my grandmother moved to New Orleans with all her family from Chicago. So, we've, we've been in New Orleans a long time. Yeah. And how did the, how did the Fishman family make a living? My, when my grandfather came, he was

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in the construction business. And then my father was an architect and then he went in business with my grandfather. He had a company A.L. Fishman Plastering Contractors. So, my father went in business with him. Okay. And then my father's brother was an attorney, and then my mother's uncle,

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my mother's brother, my uncle Harold Aronson, was an attorney, and my, um, other uncle, Herman Rabin, was a doctor. He was a surgeon. So, the Rabin, Aronson, Fishman clan were, you know, we were all part of New Orleans, the Jewish community there. And what part of the city did you grow up

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in? Uptown. Um, the first house we lived in, my grandfather on my mother's side was a builder. So, the first place we lived he built two duplexes. So we lived in one and my mother's brother and sister lived in the other one. So, we all lived together. So,

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we were six first cousins who grew up like brothers and sisters, and then my father's brother's wife was an only child, so they had two kids. So, they became part of it. So, we were eight cousins, and we were always together. So then in 1954, my

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grandfather had one lot split with two daughters. So, and it was two doors down from his duplex. So, my father was an architect so he built a duplex with one bottom floor for my aunt and uncle and the top for us. So, we were always living together. It was great.

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And I forgot to ask when you were born. Um, April 9, 1945. Okay. And the funny thing about that is, uh, when I was, not funny, but when I was born, I was very sick. So on April 12, the nurses came in my mother's hospital room crying and she thought I had

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died, but it was, uh, Franklin Roosevelt who had died. So, she was very relieved to hear that it was he. Wow. So. Okay. All right. And, um, which, uh, which synagogue or temple in the city did you grow up attending? Well, we grew up Reform. We belong to Gates of Prayer. Sure. Where Rabbi Loewy, uh, was then. Um, but my father and his father

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and my uncle went to Gates of Prayer, um, Beth Israel, which is the Orthodox shul. So we would go to Gates of Prayer in the morning and everybody was quiet and sitting there and listening, paying attention. Then we'd go to shul in the afternoon to see my father and my grandparents, and the

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men were all downstairs. They were looking up at the women upstairs. Everybody was talking. Everybody was walking around and I didn't know which was the religious one and which wasn't. It was very strange for me. So, you know, they were all Orthodox and my grandparents, one set

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kept kosher. But then you know, we, we grew up reform. So, in New Orleans that probably meant eating a lot of, uh, yeah. That was one of our favorite things to do. We'd go out with all the aunts and uncles and cousins on a Sunday, and my uncle had a patient who

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had this seafood restaurant, Swanson's. We would sit out there, and there was, it was the only time we could get two soft drinks, because you first start with the boiled crabs and shrimp, and you get one drink, and then you start with the fried oysters and fried shrimp loaves, and then

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you could get another drink. So, we would spend a couple hours out there. Was that the restaurant rule or the family rule? No, the family rule. Okay. Yeah, but we did a lot of things together. So, I, it's like I had three houses. I felt comfortable walking in and opening the refrigerator. I had

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three sets of parents besides mine. Yeah. It was great. Yeah, those are great memories. All right. Why don't you take us now from Louisiana to Texas? How did you get across the border? Well, I went to Newcomb for two years, and then I transferred to University of Texas

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my junior year, and then I graduated a semester early, and I came, went back to New Orleans and I took a computer programming course, because I hadn't had any in college. And then in August '67, I moved to Houston, because there wasn't really a Jewish singles population in

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New Orleans. And I, and I had known some people from Texas, and I was going to room with my roommate from college and so I moved to Houston in '67, and became a computer programmer analyst. And then um Dan started law school in Austin at the same

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time. He was at Tulane when I was there but we didn't know each other. Okay. And so then when he started law school in Austin when I moved here and then when he graduated, he, from several people, we got connected and we lived in the same complex. So

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we got married in 1971. I'm trying to wrap my head around what it must have been like to be a young woman and a computer, working in computers in 1967. There weren't many of us and it was interesting because there was, when I worked in American General, there

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were a couple. In fact, my boss was named Ellen and it was like, "Big Ellen, Little Ellen, Old Ellen, well, how do we do that?" And then when I moved to Houston National Bank, which did have some Jews working there, Mr Shlenker, and um Stewart, Aaron, um there was one other

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woman in the department with me. But I remember one time my boss called me over because we had like a company coffee room. And my boss called me over. He said, "The president of the bank pulled me over. He wanted to hire you to

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be his secretary." And I said, "Well what did you tell him?" He said, "Well, I told him you weren't a secretary." You know, it was, we weren't paid like the men were, and we had to do the same work. I mean we had to go in after

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hours if something happened with the program but I loved the work, and I loved being able to have an occupation that I could designate, you know, "What do you do?" "I'm a computer programmer analyst." So I loved it. What were computers even like in those days? Okay we started on

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the IBM 1490 with the punch cards. And then, while I was at American General, we transferred to the IBM 360. And I know you know the answer, you just want to record it. So, there was a whole room, huge computer room for the computer

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and the disk drives were huge, and, I mean, it was mainframe computers, and it took up like a half a floor of a downtown office building. So you know I remember the IBM salesman told me one time, she said, "You know, by the time you have kids and

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they go to college, by the time you have kids and they go to college, they'll each take their own computer to college." And I thought she was crazy. And I wish I'd bought stock in IB, IBM. But it was a great occupation for a woman back

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then. So and I learned COBOL and you know it was interesting because you know the guys kind of treated us differently. We just, the other girl and I, the other lady and I at Houston National Bank, I mean she was really good. So she taught me a lot. But you know it

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was tough. I'm sure. I'm sure it was. But it was great. I mean, I loved it. It was fun. So when did you and Dan get married and where did you live afterwards? We got married in New Orleans, March 6th, 1971. And the week before we got

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married, his father had emergency surgery and his mother got sick the Thursday before and I had had the measles, so some of my cousins weren't coming. So we had a home wedding at my house, about 90 people and then we first lived in the Creole Apartments

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on Yorktown and then we moved to, when I got pregnant, we moved to 6219 Bankside, which is in Fondren One. And it was, it was a great street, a great neighborhood, and there were a lot of other young families over there. And then

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in 1983, we built this house. So, a lot of the people, the Jewish families, who lived in Fondren One, moved over here to Fondren Three, because the kids started going to Welch, which wasn't that far away. So it was, it was more of a, it

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wasn't a religious community then. It was more of, because Young Israel was still on Bob White. They hadn't moved to this area yet. So, it was a lot of people who were from Beth Yeshurun who were in this neighborhood. Yeah the sense I get is that

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you know, at the time, this was seen as the sort of next frontier for the Jewish community as it's sort of moving further and further west. So um you know Meyerland was sort of older and for a lot of young couples starting out, you know,

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this was a good a very good place to move. Like you said, a good, good elementary school, Welch to send kids to. And people got new housing stock. Yeah. But then there was there was an exodus that I guess kind of took place in the maybe late '70s or early '80s.

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Would that be accurate? Not late '70s no, it would be early '90s I think. You think early '90s? Yeah because after the kids were bar mitzvahed, and after they went to Welch, they, people started moving out. Yeah, I would think at least the '90s maybe. They weren't, they were giving their houses away then.

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I mean you were lucky if you got $150,000 for it. I mean we were lucky when we built our house. We shared three lots with our neighbors next door. So we have a lot and a half. Our house, you know, our house, at the time, it was one of

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the bigger ones in the neighborhood. And why why were families leaving at that time? Um you know, I think a lot of it was school. I mean the kids are graduated from, they wanted to get into Bellaire. No, they didn't want to go to, to

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Fondren June, you know, to what, what was the college, the high school? Westbury, they didn't want to go to Westbury. A lot of it for school reasons or some families were doing better and they wanted to live in West U or be closer in town, because it is

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further away, you know. It takes at least 15 minutes to get to 610 to get anyplace, so people were tired of driving. But it was a great community before then. It was easy to get carpools and all the kids were outside playing. My boys used

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to play football out in the yard all the time. It was fun. Did you ever think about moving? I don't. Dan does. But you know, we didn't flood. We didn't with Harvey and the other one. We didn't have a hard time during the freeze and I don't know where I'd

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go. I mean, we have our dog who requires the yard. And Dan still rides his bike a lot, and I just like the privacy of our home. Eventually we'll have to. But I mean now houses are moving up because the Orthodox community is bringing in sometimes like 30 families a

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year. So there are a lot of larger families who are looking for houses. I mean people used to knock on my door and now you can get more for your house than you could before but I don't know where I want to go. Yeah, there's been a,

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it's been a pretty substantial growth of the, of the Orthodox community around Young Israel in the past. I mean even just what the last 10 years would you say? Yeah, I mean when Young Israel moved over here they, and we, we're associate members of Young Israel because we

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wanted them to do well in the community and we wanted to feel a part of the people who go there. So once they moved over here they started bringing people because you had to walk. They're all shomer Shabbos. And then Chabad had been here before and then

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Beth Rambam was a Sephardic shul that was built in Braesridge. And now there's a break away from Young Israel, mainly of the Torch rabbis and they're two houses away in a house. It's called HEIMISH. HEIMISH. And that's, that's a minyan, that's two houses away from your house?

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Yeah, it's in a house, two houses away, where the menorah is. You'll see the menorah. Yeah, so you know, they've been kind of controversial because you know during Covid they didn't wear masks. They didn't social distance, and I forgot this is a tape. Um yeah, so but yeah, it's a very

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beautiful community on Shabbat, you have hundreds of kids now because they opened the school, Torat Emet School. And then they opened a girls school, Torah Girls Academy, and then they redid Young Israel where it's a huge synagogue now and there are a lot of

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institutions here. And for the Orthodox community, but there was a concerted effort made by some of the Orthodox people to recruit young Jewish couples, young Orthodox couples to come to Houston. And we've talked to a lot of them who have moved here, and they like it because there are

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a lot of, it's easier than living in New York. It's less expensive, and there are a lot of Jewish institutions. They're happy here. Great, a lot of interesting change. So now they cut down, there were some, we had some, we call it our forest, on the other side of

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the Young of Israel and they cut down all those trees and they're planning to build 120 houses, more houses there. And I think a lot of them are already commissioned, already sold. Really? Even though it's just, it's still dirt, isn't it? Well they're clearing the way, they're

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clearing the way, pretty incredible. So it's a changing community, but there are hundreds of kids. It's really fun when coming home and I see them coming out of school and they're all on the scooters and they're all walking home and on Shabbat, all the girls are walking

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around and doing things with the girls and the boys are playing ball. It's fun, it's nice. Alright, why don't we turn now to talking about your activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Tell us about how your interest in the plight of Soviet Jews began and why for you it was

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personal. I was always fascinated by Russia because my grandfather was from Russia and you know, he, I didn't know enough back then to ask him too many questions, but he was from Belogoradka, which is near Kiev. And you know, I had heard that, you know, people

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are named after their occupations, so I asked him if we had been fishermen, he said, "No Fishman was a very common name in Russia." So I'm just always fascinated by Russia. And then I realized when I started hearing about the Refuseniks and the Jews wanting

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to get out and what happened to them and that could have been my family. I mean we could have been stuck there if my grandfather hadn't had the courage to leave his family and leave everything he knew and come by himself. Well, I wouldn't be here

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actually, but you know what I mean. I know what you mean. So I just took it very personally and I was very lucky. I was at the right place at the right time to get active because the CRC director at the time, Art Abramson, was a friend of ours and he

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was putting together um you know committees and I chaired a Soviet Jewry committee for Federation. In fact, it was the first joint Federation synagogue committee where the rabbis would come to our meetings to try to play in the Soviet Jewry agenda. And then um Joyce Gilbert

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and Judy Goldman were instrumental in creating Houston Action for Soviet Jewry. I mean they were phenomenal. If they hadn't worked so hard, we wouldn't have had that. So that was more of a grassroots operation and that was sponsored through the council of the National Council of, I can't

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remember the name, but there were two. There was the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, and the Union of Councils. So, you know, I was kind of active in both of them. And then to mentioned Beth Yeshurun, Rabbi Grundfast from Beth Yeshurun asked me if I

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would chair. He got very engaged in in the Soviet Jewry movement and knowing I was active in the others, asked if I would chair a new one at Beth Yeshurun. And so we did some different things there. We had a ping pong tournament for Pavel, who

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was a Refusenik who was a ping pong champion. We planted a freedom tree. I mean each group that I worked with had different responsibilities and could do different things. The Federation, I remember, you know, they were involved with resettlement and giving money to Jewish Family Service for

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the resettlement process. And I went to one of them. They had Wednesday meetings and I went to one and then the new arrivals were going around saying their names. All of a sudden this man said, "Trachtenberg, Trachtenberg," and so we were wondering if we were related.

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And the grandfather spoke Yiddish. So I got my father in law who spoke Yiddish, them to speak to find out if we were related and we weren't. But they ended up, when they came over the Ellis Island spelled their name T-R-A-K and we're

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T-R-A-C-H. So they're the other Trachtenbergs in the city. It just seemed very personal to me. I mean we and the more, you know, I read about it and then for my 40th birthday, my mother said, "Well what do you want for your birthday?"

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I said, "We want to go to Russia." So she gave us the trip of a lifetime. So we went in 1980, 1985. And we had gone to Poland in 1980, and met Dan's relatives in Poland and seen the camps, but '85 we were going to see people and we

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went at the time of the Moscow Book Festival because the two biggest exhibits at the Moscow Book Festival are the Israeli publishers and the Jewish American publishers. So the Jewish American publishers are very in tune with the Soviet Jewry movement and they were trying to get

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Jewish books into the homes of the Soviet Jews. It was so bad. I mean if anybody had a copy of Exodus, which was the book that really turned a lot of Soviet Jews into wanting to go to Israel because they felt a pride in it. I

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mean they had to meet surreptitiously on a street corner to pass the book on to somebody else to read. So it was no mean feat to get Jewish books into Soviet homes. So how did this, let me actually let me back you up a second. So

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when you and Dan went in '85, was that did you go, did you go alone as a pair, or was that part of a group? It was sponsored by the National Conference of Soviet Jewry under the auspices of the Community Relations Committee of Houston. And Denis Braham, who at

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the time chaired the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, he had gone before and he was taking a group and you went in groups of five or six. So in our group was Denis and Dan and then Rosellen Hoffman Brown, who was a famous writer and

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Bette Pesikoff who was a local attorney. So there were different groups going from Houston. Some of the synagogues had their own group go, but we were all expected to be trained by the CRC to know what to do, what to expect. When we went

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the National Conference would send names and addresses and phone numbers of people we were supposed to call, and they sent some bios, some information about them. And the Soviet Jews had no idea who or when anybody was coming. They'd get a phone call from us in a phone

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booth and say, "You know we're a friend and would like to come see you, come on." So, but we had all these instructions on how to behave, especially about the passport control, how intimidating they could be, you know, and they'd pressure you. So of course I messed all of

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that up, because when I got there, instead of being intimidated, I had to use the restroom. So they had to, I had to go by guard downstairs to the restroom. So you know, I think I intimidated him more than he intimidated me. But because other groups went

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and you have to be careful of what you took, because they would check your suitcases and one group got in trouble because they took too many Jewish books. We also took things that they could sell to live on. I mean they could on the exchange market in Russia, we

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took cartons of cigarettes or blue jeans or other things that they could sell because when they applied to leave, most of them lost their jobs. So they depended on strangers, on us to support them. So can you remember any of the specific meetings or conversations that you

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had with Refuseniks on that trip? What kinds of things did they tell you? Well, it's interesting because you know when we're first going Art had said, "Well we found some lawyers for Denis and Dan and Bette to talk to. And then we found a writer for

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Rosellen to talk to." And I said, "Do you have anything for a little old housewife?" You know? And it turns out wherever we went, most of them were computer programmers. So we got to talk to them. There are different levels of people we met. There was Dr. Lerner

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who was a brilliant, internationally known scientists who had been allowed to travel to international meetings even after he applied. He was that famous. And so we would talk to him and Denis did most of the talking with him because we would talk about international issues in Russia I mean in

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Israel and more a high level meetings. There was one man, Uri Kellman in Leningrad who talked about, he was planning to go to Israel and he was a director, a film director and he had been beaten on the way to his wife's to his in-laws house.

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And he had been tortured. I don't know tortured but beaten and he was just looking forward to be able to work in his own um um um career again. Then, Anatoly Genis, we twinned our son. In those days, one of the things Houston Action did with the conference is bar

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and bat mitzvah kids in the United States and other countries. And other Jewish communities would twin their bar and bat mitzvah with Russian kids who couldn't have one. So we would get the names, we'd write letters and we were twins with Sema Genis. And so we

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got to meet his family and they were really poor. I mean Sema was a computer programmer, very intellectual, I think a Ph.D. and he was cleaning subways to make a living, to support his family. And his wife was very depressed and you know, we just talked about

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survival with them. So each family was different. One of the first people we met was Avram Kagan in Leningrad. It was Leningrad then, not St. Petersburg and he um he could receive and send mail. So I gave you some of the letters for the, for your archives of

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letters that I exchanged with Avram, and they all had, some of them had dogs and I felt an instant connection. So we're talking to Avram and he said, "Wait a minute. What are y'all doing now?" I said, "Nothing." He said, "Well let's go to a birthday party." So it

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was Abe, um, I'm going crazy with names. Taratuta, it was Abe Taratuta's birthday party. So it was a rainy, cold night in Leningrad, and we got into a bus and went to Taratuta's birthday party. And we actually saw some of the group from Dallas who

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had come to Houston for training. They were at the birthday party too. So I remember um Ida, I talked to her and she had said that she always wanted to, she had heard about Hadassah, and she had always wanted to be in Hadassah. So when

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I came back and I talked to people at Hadassah and then there was another group that went, I think Rhoda Goldberg was in the group, and they made her a life member of Hadassah. Then they went back and she was pleased. And everybody we met had gotten out.

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I mean we ended up getting to see almost all of them either in Israel or in Houston, but each family had different needs. They were in different places. So you never knew who you were going to meet. I've talked to some other people who

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took trips like this. I've talked to Joyce and I've talked with Denis. Other than, you mentioned in passport control were you, were you followed at any point? Oh, yeah. Did you have a sense that the KGB was tracking you? Oh, yeah you could spot them. I mean we spotted them and I remember

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um, well Dan would remember more, because one of them followed him, but they all had on leather coats, brown leather coats and black shoes and they're bald. And especially at the book fair. When we went to the book fairs, they were there because they were watching

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to see which Soviet Jews were there. Because in the book fair you couldn't buy the books, the Refuseniks would stand in line for hours just to be able to look at the book, especially in the Israeli exhibit. At the Israeli exhibit, they had Israeli music going all

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the time and It was lively and it was crowded. And most of the other exhibits weren't loud and crowded but the Jews would just stand there for hours just to be able to look at the books. So the FBI, I mean the KGB were always there and

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taking note of who went there and then they were looking to see who else was there besides the Refuseniks. And then Dan and Denis, I don't know if he told you this story, went to the American Consulate one time and the consulate pulled out the board, the

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white board, you write something on it and then, you know the kids have it and you erase it. Because you think the room is bugged? Oh because everything is bugged. You know everything is bugged. This is the American Consulate doing that at the consul. So yeah, I mean we go to bed at night and

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you know everything was bugged. You had to be careful. And there were key ladies on the floor of every, of the hotel, by the elevators in every hotel that you had to leave your key with them and then you'd have to go pick it up. So

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you know people couldn't just come into your room and come and visit and stuff like that. It was very controlled. It's interesting because we went back and then we'd go to the stores and there's a line for, to look at something, another line to buy it,

00:29:13.490 - 00:29:29.000

to try it on, and another line to buy it. But there was nothing in the stores. I mean there's hardly anything. We went back to St. Petersburg when we were on a cruise in the Baltic and it was amazing because they didn't, it was so different. I

00:29:29.000 - 00:29:45.200

mean they had um computer bars open and people, there were a lot of things. They had them all. I'm guessing this was 1990s or early 2000s? Yeah, early 2000s, I'm trying to think when we went, early 2000s and it was like you know, in fact our

00:29:45.210 - 00:30:02.800

guide hadn't even been born yet. She didn't know about the Refuseniks and what life was like. I mean she had all these internet bars rather and they had sweaters and clothes, whatever they wanted. It was entirely different. But then I went to Kharkiv in, about ten years

00:30:02.800 - 00:30:18.620

ago with the Jewish Federation group, and we were remarking there when we were there in '85 they followed us around and we felt like we were being watched. And then in Kharkiv there was a bus showing us where to go, taking us places and a Russian orchestra

00:30:18.620 - 00:30:40.850

singing to us. I mean it was a big difference, big change. Very dramatic change it sounds like. So you came back and how did you spread word, raise awareness in the community about what you saw? We took slides, we had a slide show and we would

00:30:40.850 - 00:30:55.800

go anyplace anybody wanted us to talk and I remember we went to A & M one time and I spoke at Hadassah, I spoke to the Yiddish club at the J. We spoke to whoever wanted to hear. Most people who did go on trips would come back and talk

00:30:55.800 - 00:31:11.080

too, because that was really important. But every year there was a concert for Soviet Jewry. In fact, we talked about this before, there was a plane, there was a big day, I can't remember the day, you probably have it, the day in Washington where half a million

00:31:11.080 - 00:31:32.530

people went. The Freedom Sunday Rally? Yeah, yeah, December '87. Okay, thank you. So Houston chartered a plane and I couldn't go. Dan and my two older boys went, but I was chairing the committee and every year we had a concert in honor and in support of

00:31:32.530 - 00:31:45.840

Soviet Jewry. So I was in charge of the concert that night. So I had to stay here and we had Savon come. Other years, we had Mary from Peter, Paul, and Mary, and another year we had Peter Yarrow. I mean sometimes these were

00:31:45.840 - 00:32:00.790

organized by the national movement, they would get the people involved but back then people were anxious to hear because you know the people really wanted to know what was going on and to see pictures of real people. It was an amazing experience. Yeah, no, it was

00:32:00.790 - 00:32:16.160

a different time. Today we take it for granted that we have 24 hours news. News is everywhere and it wasn't like that and certainly not in a closed society like the Soviet Union. The one event that was nice, one of the girls at Beth Yeshurun was being, and

00:32:16.160 - 00:32:28.400

she went to Emery/Weiner, was being bat mitzvahed and she found out that her twin, the girl she had been twinned with had gotten out and was living in Chicago. So Houston Action, I don't remember who had the idea, "Well let's bring her down to see if

00:32:28.400 - 00:32:43.640

they could be b'nei mitzvahed together." So we did and it was very generous of the Houston girl to give up having all the attention because this would bring attention but it was just a tear jerker ceremony and she and her family came down. She had a

00:32:43.640 - 00:32:56.870

Rabbi who had been helping her with her bat mitzvah up there and he had talked to the Rabbi here and she and her family went to visit Emery/Weiner school to talk and we made a whole weekend of activities for her, and it was just everybody was just sitting

00:32:57.020 - 00:33:20.320

there crying. It was just so nice. That's incredible. You mentioned earlier that here in Houston there was the sort of more grassroots Houston Action for Soviet Jewry and then you had, at the Federation level, a committee that was working with the National Conference. And from

00:33:20.320 - 00:33:38.970

what I've been able to gather, you know, both both groups are working toward similar goals, but using different strategies and um, sometimes it sounds like maybe there were some tensions. Can you talk to that? I don't really remember too many tensions. Maybe it's convenient memory. We

00:33:38.970 - 00:33:56.940

had different things that we could do. Like Houston Action was more hands on and we could organize protests and organize rallies and things like that. The National Conference, we were more governed by national rules and the national governance of the organization. And each synagogue, I

00:33:56.940 - 00:34:11.840

know Beth Yeshurun had a Soviet Jewry committee. I think Beth Israel did too. I think, and for sure Brith Shalom must have because Rabbi Osadchey was very active in the movement. So even though there might have been tensions at a very high level, I mean if

00:34:11.840 - 00:34:25.340

we had them, it didn't stop us from doing what we were doing. I mean, I think we all wanted the same thing. We all wanted to get everybody free and get everybody out of there. We just had different ways we could do it. Yeah, I know that

00:34:25.340 - 00:34:43.640

Houston Action was involved in some, some boycott and some protests actions. Did you ever taken any of those? I'm sure I probably did. I mean I was active in Houston Action at the same time I was chairing the Federation, at the same time I was chairing Beth Yeshurun, so

00:34:43.640 - 00:35:02.650

so sometimes activities got confused. Sure, of course. But we would all, we would all, especially the Federation, would bring in speakers of the conference, Russian speakers and Refuseniks who had gotten out who had come to the community to talk and they were very well greeted when

00:35:02.650 - 00:35:22.700

they came. Yeah, let's talk now about resettlement and about the Soviet Jews who came to Houston and you know how the community worked to help them acclimate. Jewish Family Service was the main person in resettlement. They got funded by the Jewish Federation. And then different people, Mallory Robinson

00:35:22.700 - 00:35:41.680

was one who was very active in the resettlement program as a staff person in JFS. And people would donate apartments. They had collections for furniture for clothes or whatever we could give them. And you know, one time we found out that the Braeswood Church, the Assembly Church

00:35:41.680 - 00:36:02.100

on Fondren was also giving to our Russians because they were, and you know they were double dipping. You know, they they came from an environment where you took whatever you could from the government, not maliciously just 'cause they needed everything and they didn't understand that the church was trying to convert them.

00:36:02.110 - 00:36:17.150

They were trying to win them to become members of the church. That's why, that's why they were giving them things so they talked. But then they came up with a program. I don't remember if it was national or local about families adopting Russian families because we wanted

00:36:17.150 - 00:36:35.240

to acculturate them into being Jewish because most of them did not have a background of being Jewish. They knew they were Jewish culturally but they didn't know religion wise. So you know families would adopt the families and you'd invite them to your home for Shabbat or for

00:36:35.240 - 00:36:51.710

the holidays and be there for them and form a relationship. And it worked. It worked. A lot of families stayed very close for years. Where did, where did the Russian Jews who came to Houston, where did they tend to live? And what do you think were some of

00:36:51.710 - 00:37:07.890

the hardest parts of the acclimation process for them? Well a lot of the older ones lived in Goldberg Towers on Fondren. Um a lot of them lived in apartments like Nob Hill and places in this area because you know they have a lot of Jewish apartment

00:37:07.890 - 00:37:19.000

owners and they wanted to be close to the JCC and the other Jewish institutions. I mean it was really hard for a lot them. You know you had asked me this before, what were some of the hardest things for them, going to a

00:37:19.010 - 00:37:36.900

grocery store. I mean they were overwhelmed because you have all these products. They didn't know where to start. Twelve kinds of bread. Right, where before they had to stand in line to get stale bread, you know, so a lot of volunteers would take them shopping, take them to grocery stores and do that.

00:37:36.900 - 00:37:55.730

There were a lot of volunteers who helped. I think each family was assigned a volunteer or volunteer a couple of families through JFS, who would help get them settled and acclimated. And I think they got free rentals and stuff for like six months, um, free apartments

00:37:55.730 - 00:38:12.910

and free food. They were supported by the community for six months and then, you know, they had a job service to try to help them find jobs and I think through JFS too. So it was hard on them, especially the older ones, the grandparents who came with

00:38:12.910 - 00:38:29.620

the younger ones. They, most of them went to the JCC and they could speak Russian with you know the other people and have some kind of Russian culture programs there. But it was hard. It was no doubt hard but made easier by the work that you

00:38:29.620 - 00:38:45.940

and so many other people were doing. Well, you know, we all felt an affinity. Most of us have roots in Russia. You know if you ask most Jewish families it's Russia or Poland. So we all felt that they were our relatives, they were our cousins. So it was

00:38:45.940 - 00:39:00.410

tough on them. I mean the children acclimated better. So they got entry into the Jewish day schools and got to be, they learned English quicker. So what was hard for the families was the children would become like the parents of the family because they could

00:39:00.410 - 00:39:24.450

interpret and they would understand things and it was hard in the family function um that the children were talking instead of the parents. So there were a lot of problems for them. Why don't we go ahead and turn now to talking about Holocaust Museum Houston. So take us

00:39:24.450 - 00:39:48.460

back to long before this community had a Holocaust Museum. What were some of the earliest conversations about um creating one and who was involved in those conversations? The person who did the most was Siege Izakson. He had been head of the survivor community forever, the

00:39:48.470 - 00:40:09.580

survivors group for like 25 years and he had gathered a group of like, Ruth Steinfeld, Lea Weems, Mady Deutch, and Edith Mincberg, and some of them, And they were a group and they would on some level go speak to schools. It was very unstructured. Then, in 1981

00:40:09.590 - 00:40:28.440

Israel had the first International Survivor Conference. So Seige and I remember Ruth and Leah and Seige and maybe, I mean a whole bunch of survivors went to Israel for that conference and they came back, I remember Seige saying, "We have to have a museum." And he talked about it wherever he

00:40:28.440 - 00:40:43.000

went. And one time I was sitting next to him at a meeting and said, "You know, if you ever do something let me know, I'd like to be a part of it." And years later he remembered. So the first organized um museum was like in the

00:40:43.000 - 00:41:02.110

late '80s, '87 or '88 when the Federation under the auspices of the CRC and Avrom Wisenberg organized a committee to talk about the feasibility of building a museum here, and we would go to different museums. There were many established. There was one in Chicago and

00:41:02.110 - 00:41:17.590

one in Dallas I think was before us and one in Miami. I don't remember, but whenever we went places, we'd always go look at the museums and see what they were like and come back and see what we wanted. And then we made a motion to the Federation

00:41:17.600 - 00:41:36.690

to build a museum and to build it on top of the Federation building. Okay, so this would have been on like the JCC campus itself, Braeswood? Right. And that was our motion, you know, we weren't very wide eyed then. I mean we really were thinking

00:41:36.700 - 00:41:56.880

small. So, in 1990 Sandra Weiner became president of the Federation and she untabled it and she created a board. And Marty Fein, who, two parents of his were survivors, and he was a prominent real estate man, he became the first chair of the museum. And Lydia Osadchey, she was

00:41:56.880 - 00:42:18.320

the first director, and that's when I was asked to be on, a vice president on the board and I was co-chair of content and scope, which I had no idea what that meant. So we started you know getting organized and luckily the education chairs, David Bell

00:42:18.320 - 00:42:35.410

and I think Susie Zimmerman, they started having seminars for teachers before we even had a building to get teachers interested in teaching about the Holocaust. And so they'd, you know, be waiting for us to open the doors and they'd be our first customers to come bring the schools

00:42:35.420 - 00:42:53.690

because we were geared to having school children. And then one of the first things we decided was not to build on top of the, of the Federation building. We wanted this to be a community wide museum and we weren't building it for the Jewish community. We were building it for

00:42:53.690 - 00:43:09.510

the whole community to educate everybody. And Ed Wulfe was very active on the board, and he was head of the real estate committee. He was head of the location committee. Later he became chair and he was very dynamic and his committee eventually found a facility, It had

00:43:09.510 - 00:43:25.630

been an old doctor's office on Caroline and we bought that property. And but I mean, we had already started trying to design a museum before we even knew where we were going to be. For my role in terms of, you know, the content and scope committee became

00:43:25.630 - 00:43:45.230

the exhibit, the permanent exhibit committee. And Sandra Weiner gave us some good advice as usual, and we hired your friend Avi Decter, who was a historian, museum historian to come and get us organized because we were all over the place. We needed a focus and he was,

00:43:45.240 - 00:43:57.240

his job was to meet with us, for us to decide what we wanted. And he would come up with a concept statement which is a written document of saying who we are and what we want, which is what you give to a design team, so they

00:43:57.240 - 00:44:16.610

know what you're doing. So we started off with a committee of about 40 people, some second gen, some survivors, some regular people, and Avi would come in, and we'd have some really heated discussions about what was our purpose, what was our goal. I mean we ended up knowing

00:44:16.610 - 00:44:36.040

we wanted to be an educational facility more than a museum. I mean, our first name was Holocaust Education Center and Memorial Museum. That was our first name um to show that we were putting education over museum. So we knew we wanted to focus on the 1.5 million

00:44:36.040 - 00:44:53.570

children who were killed in the Holocaust because that was unique to the Holocaust. Other genocides had children die, but this was the systematic murder of 1.5 million children. So we knew, how do you explain the Holocaust to people? I mean, it's so overwhelming. So we

00:44:53.570 - 00:45:14.100

decided to use our own survivors to tell the story. So we had gotten a small grant, I think like $10,000, and we started doing oral histories, and we got a connection with Rice University, Brian Huberman there and he recorded over 300 of our testimonies for almost nothing.

00:45:14.100 - 00:45:31.830

I mean Brian got really involved in it, and was generous, so wonderful. And these were done in the library? In the media center, in the media center. When, give us a sense of the chronology again, because we had started in the late '80s and 1990 and now the recording of

00:45:31.830 - 00:45:57.650

the oral histories started when? We started like in 1990, '91. We started with the oral histories. Let me backtrack. We opened in '96. So we started working on the core between '90, between '92 and '94. I mean we we did the whole design within two years. So yeah

00:45:57.650 - 00:46:12.940

between, I mean we had six years between, from when we became a museum to when we actually opened, which was really not much time at all. So the oral histories we started doing as soon as we had that seed money. So that was like 1990 we started with oral

00:46:12.940 - 00:46:27.960

histories. Because I know when we were working on the core to use the oral histories, we had about 100 of them done then. So that was the basis the museum. So we knew we wanted to have a Texas flavor and have this be about our survivors.

00:46:27.970 - 00:46:45.340

So somebody suggested it should be about one survivor, about Seige, and we said no because every survivor is different and we didn't want to divide the community. We wanted, We didn't want just the wealthy survivors who could afford to give the museum to be remembered. We wanted all the survivors.

00:46:45.350 - 00:47:02.160

So I remember doing a spreadsheet of how many survivors stories we used when we opened whether it was through an artifact or oral history, or a quote or whatever and we had used like 75 or something. Wow, how did you, how did you go about identifying the

00:47:02.160 - 00:47:26.630

survivors to speak with, and I mean I can, I can only imagine some of the very difficult and traumatic conversations that you would have had with survivors. So how do you, how do you prepare them for that? Well, Yale University, the Fortunoff Library at Yale, we

00:47:26.770 - 00:47:40.790

had a connection with them and they came down and trained our first original class of oral historians, of people who were going to do the oral histories. And I was in that class and the deal was that they would come train us and we would give them

00:47:40.790 - 00:47:58.440

copies of all of our tapes. So that lasted for a few years and then somehow we stopped giving them the copies, but they came down and trained us. Now, Seige, by then the survivors group was very well organized and actually they were the ones who, especially

00:47:58.440 - 00:48:12.290

Ruth Steinfeld, she would be the one who called the survivors and schedule them and ask them to give their testimonies. So at first we only did Houston survivors and then towards the end like someone had an uncle in New Jersey who came and I did one

00:48:12.290 - 00:48:28.840

of an Israeli lady whose daughter-in-law suggested her when she came to visit. So, we started branching out and then we started doing liberators which is an entirely different story. But it was really hard. I remember talking to some and then we would do

00:48:28.840 - 00:48:41.680

a pre-interview so we'd get the name. Like if you're, like if I was going to do an oral history, they'd call me, and say, "This is the person." And I had an oral history preview sheet and I would call them and talk to them and get some information

00:48:41.680 - 00:48:57.470

because sometimes when they're in the camera, they don't remember the dates and the order of the camps and stuff. So we would try and get that information and have it written. Um but there were some who were very willing to do it. There were

00:48:57.480 - 00:49:10.720

many who had to get talked into it. And one way I would try and talk them into it, because they were so nervous, I said, "If you tell us, you don't have to tell anybody else, because we'll have it on film, and you know you need

00:49:10.720 - 00:49:26.510

this for your grandchildren." At the same time we were doing our oral histories, Shoah Foundation was also doing some. So a lot of our survivors were doing both of them but we had a different approach. The Shoah Foundation asked a lot of questions. They're more interested

00:49:26.510 - 00:49:40.790

in in factual data like, "What was it like at the camp? What date did you get there?" You know, things like that where we did more, we used the other method is like we just guided them and asked them to talk. I mean we kind of

00:49:40.790 - 00:49:55.900

divided it in three sections in our mind. We did life before, and then the experience during the camp, and then what happened after the Holocaust. Because that was important too, to see what happened to them. You know how it affected their lives and what became of them.

00:49:56.120 - 00:50:15.650

So that's, in our mind, how we kind of divided up the oral histories. Are there, are there one or two anecdotes from those interviews that have stayed with you? Oh gosh, there's so many. I remember Naomi Warren, when I was doing her interview, it was the first

00:50:15.650 - 00:50:30.580

time, I don't know if you know her son Benjamin and Helen Spector, they asked to be in the interview and we usually didn't do that. We used to start off where there were two interviewers to one survivor, and then we had too many people to be

00:50:30.580 - 00:50:45.530

interviewed, so we just did a one on one. So, I remember they came in and I was very nervous about it. I mean I was very nervous doing the interview because I had one shot, you know? I didn't have another time and you want to get

00:50:45.530 - 00:51:01.360

it right. And you want to put them at ease because so many times after the interview you would take them for coffee for lunch and they'd be so relaxed then they would talk more. Then the stories would come out. I was wishing I had filmed it. So Benjamin and Helen were there and we had the tape. The

00:51:01.360 - 00:51:17.040

camera had a tape, because they were recording on tape, and on audio and some camera the museum bought that Rice used. We kept it at Rice and you know every half hour would have to change tapes. So during one of the breaks, Benjamin said to his mother, "Well

00:51:17.050 - 00:51:32.490

did you tell her about the last time you saw your mother?" And I wouldn't have known to ask that. And so I mean it was emotional. She was talking about being on a truck being driven away and she saw her mother's beautiful gray eyes looking at her

00:51:32.490 - 00:51:47.240

and you know that I'll never forget and Naomi just had so many amazing things to say that you always have to have hope. Even when you think there's no hope, there's always hope. And she survived two years of Auschwitz. Um the other one I remember so

00:51:47.250 - 00:52:00.060

vividly was Walter Kase, because he was just really handsome, and I hadn't done the interview. Lidya Osadchey had done the pre-interview. So I had never seen him till he walked into Rice and I looked at him. He looked like my Uncle Herman who was

00:52:00.060 - 00:52:15.800

the doctor. He was dressed beautifully. He was just handsome with his gray hair and then his name had been Rubinowitz. His family had been Rubinowitz. My uncle had been Rubinowitz from Poland. And I just kept thinking of my uncle the whole time and Walter, he had

00:52:15.800 - 00:52:32.410

a way to connect with students. I mean on his own he would go speak maybe 150 to 200 times a year on his own to students, and he had a way of getting through to them. He would, because I'd be at the museum working, and he'd come in after

00:52:32.850 - 00:52:51.250

a speech and show me these letters. They're saying, "I was gonna kill myself, but after I heard you talk, I decided I needed to live." I mean these survivors could get through to kids where nobody else could. And Walter especially was one of them. And he

00:52:51.260 - 00:53:06.770

talked about how he survived with his father and they were liberated together from, I can't remember the last one he was in. But that a month in the hospital, he woke up one morning, and his father had died in the bed next to him and he didn't

00:53:06.770 - 00:53:23.280

know what he was going to do. He was 14. He didn't know anything about life. Where was he going to go? And I mean his accounts are so vivid. I mean I'm surprised after all these years that certain ones I really remember. Oh yeah, have you,

00:53:23.280 - 00:53:41.940

have you had any conversations, you know, years later with the children or grandchildren of the survivors, and how they feel about the fact that you or someone else recorded these interviews while you could? I mean it's so important. They were, they were so grateful to get their, because

00:53:41.940 - 00:53:58.550

we gave each family a copy of the audio. They each got their own tape and then we sent them all to the Shoah Foundation to have them digitized. Because of some, I remember one person I talked to is Mark Gottesman's uncle and he came down from

00:53:58.550 - 00:54:15.400

New Jersey and he was tough. I mean he was just a very strong-willed person and they finally talked him into letting us do his oral history. I was doing it and I was really nervous because I remember, you know, you're thinking so hard about what

00:54:15.400 - 00:54:29.220

you're gonna ask next and you know, you're kind of trying to think and remember at the same time. And I said something about, "Your sister." He said, "Well I told you her name already." But he did not want to do this and his family forced him to do

00:54:29.220 - 00:54:47.010

it. And after it's over he was so relieved. He said, "I am so relieved, I'm so glad I got that out." And this way his kids can listen to it without his being there. Or he could listen to his grandchildren. Yeah I mean they were all so grateful that their parents

00:54:47.660 - 00:55:03.480

had, or grandparents or whatever relatives, had it done. And those, those interviews, many of them have been woven into the exhibit at the museum, right? Right, well especially in the first, you know, we have a new building now, but I was co-chair of the committee that built

00:55:03.480 - 00:55:20.800

the first one. So we used those um I mean I read over all, maybe Deutch and I, she was the one who worked with me the hardest on it. She was a survivor from Hungary and I was amazed that she could read through all these, going

00:55:20.800 - 00:55:32.750

through what she had been. She had been in Peterswald. She had been in Auschwitz for a little while, and I just couldn't believe she could read through all these oral histories. Because we hadn't divided them up. Once we finally got a designer you know, they gave

00:55:32.750 - 00:55:50.500

us categories of what they wanted quotes about. Like they wanted quotes about the food in the camps or about children in the camps or about different things. So we'd read through all of the transcripts again to find quotes. So plus we were working with Jodi Small

00:55:50.510 - 00:56:07.040

in New York to create a video, Voices. So we were giving her, she had she had all the oral histories to read. So she picked out some of the quotes but we were also suggesting certain quotes from certain people to use. And then after Voices which

00:56:07.040 - 00:56:22.620

is our first tape of survivor tape, we were given money to do Voices Two. And then we did a third one, Where is My Family. So I worked on both of those where we were going through all the oral histories, finding the right quotes and there's a

00:56:22.620 - 00:56:42.920

cute story about Mr. Cooper. Um, he he was, you know, Ashcroft Pecan Factory, Houston Pecan Company on Ashcroft. So he, Leon Cooper, he and Rabbi Heim were very upset about the museum being opened on a Saturday afternoon even though Rabbi Radinsky had given us the okay. Rabbi Radinsky

00:56:42.920 - 00:56:55.340

had served as a consultant when we were coming up with all the rules for the museum. And he had been a great friend of the museum. And so they wouldn't give their testimonies. I finally talked him into giving their testimonies and then we wanted to use

00:56:55.340 - 00:57:09.760

some of his testimony for Voices Two. And so he said, "Well show me what you want to use." I sent out like four or five choices, the sections we wanted. He said, "You can, anyone you want." So then the next time we wanted to use

00:57:09.760 - 00:57:27.470

them for Where is My Family, and I said, "You know what can we use these?" He said, "Do whatever you you want. It's okay." But he was very effective. He talked about going back to Germany after the war. And he was saying, "You couldn't find a Nazi with a flashlight. You know,

00:57:27.470 - 00:57:47.080

he was, they all disappeared. You couldn't find one." So the survivors have enriched my life so much. I mean I just have gotten close to so many. I've lost most of the ones I've been close to. And they just, remarkable people, and they're all different. Every individual

00:57:47.080 - 00:58:03.660

story is unique. Yeah, and how they handle it is unique. But one thing we didn't expect that the museum would do for the survivors is it gave them a home. It gave them some place to come to and be with other people and we have a beautiful memorial room and

00:58:03.670 - 00:58:19.460

you know that's like their cemetery because most of them don't know where their relatives were buried. But the, the memorial room is their sacred spot. And when we built the new building it was the first thing we decided, we're not touching the memorial room. It's going to

00:58:19.460 - 00:58:36.420

stay the same as it was in the original and and the survivors came to the museum a lot. Some of them volunteered you know behind the desk or in the library or wherever. And it made a big difference. Yeah, absolutely. What's your, do you have, do you

00:58:36.420 - 00:58:55.890

have a role with the museum today? I'm on the Board of Advisors and I do, you know, ad hoc kind of things. I was on the committee to pick the 25 best um art exhibits that we had for our 25th anniversary. So I worked on that

00:58:55.900 - 00:59:12.390

and then now I've been giving lately, tours to chaplains. Hope Lipnick is the chaplain for the Jewish community and she was teaching a class of people training to be chaplains at M.D. Anderson and she called me, she said, "Do you know some of these people don't know

00:59:12.390 - 00:59:27.060

what the Holocaust was." So I said, "Really?" I mean they're either clergy or social workers or something. So I said, "Well, I'll arrange a tour at the museum. Can you, will you bring them to the museum?" So I arranged a tour and I got her a non-Jewish docent who I thought

00:59:27.070 - 00:59:43.870

they would want to hear from. So they actually said they had another group they wanted to bring but they wanted a Jewish docent. So Hope said, "Will you do it?" So I did that group and then now, on the 30th, I'm doing another group from M.D. Anderson

00:59:43.880 - 01:00:00.370

and then Hope has two groups from Methodist Hospital coming in July. So she's done a fantastic job of trying to get all of the chaplains. And then Linda Burger at JFS would have me talk every year to the PhD nursing students, that they would have a day

01:00:00.370 - 01:00:15.360

to learn about the Jewish community. And she'd have me go talk to them about the survivors. You know, what they like and how to treat them and what they've been through. And that was really, I love doing that. It was very interesting and I was so

01:00:15.530 - 01:00:42.160

pleased that Linda, I just love Linda anyway, but that she would think to do that, to have a special session on how the nurses should treat survivors. So yeah, you know, it's interesting we're unfortunately at an inevitable moment in history when there are almost no survivors still

01:00:42.160 - 01:00:59.080

living and the day is not far off when there will be no survivors living. Is that, is that something that you have been thinking about recently? Yeah, and actually the museum has acted on that. They have a program that Sandy Lessig started where they're training the second

01:00:59.080 - 01:01:15.540

gen and third gen to tell their parents', their grandparents' stories to keep them alive. So they have that program, I forgot the name of it. And the educational programs at the museum has just expanded. There's one that my granddaughter actually is in, that she got in on her

01:01:15.540 - 01:01:33.530

own called Engines of Change, where they have kids from, juniors and seniors from high school, come once a month and they get together and learn about the Holocaust. And they have another educational program where they take, the museum takes the text to the schools. The education department

01:01:33.530 - 01:01:58.030

at the museum has expanded. It's just amazing. And yeah, I mean it's something we think about. That's why these oral histories are so vital and we have them online so people can view them. Yeah, I know that that many Holocaust museums, and I think HMH also is, are experimenting with

01:01:58.030 - 01:02:18.800

some, some sort of, I don't know what word to use. Holograph, holograms of survivors. We have one. Can you tell us about it? Yeah, hologram is where you interview a survivor and you have like 1000 questions, whatever, to ask them. And then you have his image through this hologram

01:02:18.810 - 01:02:37.610

and visitors can come and they'll ask him, "Where were you born?" And that's one of the 1000 questions you have answers recorded. So it's like he's talking to the person. They're very, very expensive to create. We have one with Bill Morgan, and it hasn't been

01:02:37.610 - 01:02:53.690

working the last few times I'm there. But several other museums have done this. I think Shoah Foundation was the first one to do it. So it seems real, like you have the real person answering the questions. And it's interactive as opposed to watching a screen or listening to a tape.

01:02:53.690 - 01:03:10.740

Yeah, it's in a little private alcove. And you know the visitors can come in and ask a question and then he'll answer if it's one of the, or he'll say, "I don't know the answer to that." Because they tape for days for him to answer all these questions. Were you involved

01:03:10.740 - 01:03:31.770

with that? No. Yeah, it's one response to this challenge that we're that we're up against in terms of Holocaust education. And it's not lost on me either, as I'm sure it's not on you, that you know, we live in a moment of increasing antisemitism and

01:03:31.770 - 01:03:52.800

instability and war in you know, in the Ukraine. And what you told me a few moments ago about, you know, very, you know, well educated people not having a sense of the history of the Holocaust is quite frankly, it's frightening. It's scary. Something I forgot to

01:03:52.800 - 01:04:09.920

mention, when I went on the trip to Kharkiv with the Federation, and we'd go to these Chesed houses which were like little mini JCCs, that the Federation funded. It's places where the Jewish community could go for a hot meal, for medical attention, for

01:04:09.920 - 01:04:28.430

programming. And this non-Jewish bus driver said, "I wish I could go, it looks like such a happy place." But we went for the dedication of Drobitsky Yar which was a memorial to, it's another Babi Yar and that's why we were originally there. I remember walking down,

01:04:28.440 - 01:04:43.510

we were all, it was a national um mission. I don't remember how many of us were there, but we were walking down towards the memorial and they had a loudspeaker saying the names of some of the victims. And I hear, "Trachtenberg, Trachtenberg, Trachtenberg." And then I

01:04:43.510 - 01:05:03.460

heard, "Fishman, Fishman, Fishman." And it was like, oh my God, I mean that's me. It was just a startling figure how lucky our family was to get away. It was really striking and now I see images of Kharkiv now. It's just terrible. Do you want to

01:05:03.550 - 01:05:21.340

use this opportunity to talk a little bit about your book, "Tattered Letters, Shattered Dreams?" Okay, my mother-in-law came from Poland in 1938. They had one, then you need some, an affidavit to get out, to show somebody, a relative that supports you. And she had a

01:05:21.350 - 01:05:35.610

relative in Oklahoma. They had one affidavit. She was the oldest of three daughters. So you know, she was the first one to come, thinking they were all going to come. So they didn't. But when my father-in-law died, we were cleaning out the house in

01:05:35.610 - 01:05:49.970

Oklahoma and I found this little nondescript cardboard box and I happened to open it and I see all these letters and pieces of letters and envelopes and stuff in there. And I took them to my mother-in-law and said, "What's this?" She said, "Oh these are all the

01:05:49.970 - 01:06:06.960

letters I saved from my family. Well these are from 1938 to 1941." And I had to find a translator which, and then her mother was brilliant. I mean she wrote in mostly Polish, some in Yiddish, a couple in Hebrew, a couple in German, a couple in English. So I had to

01:06:06.960 - 01:06:20.910

find translators for all of this. And then once I got them translated, then I could put them, try to get them by date as to where they belonged. And it was a huge, huge job. But what happened was through the letters, there were a lot of letters

01:06:20.910 - 01:06:39.400

in '38 and '39. Then mostly postcards in '40, '41. But through the letters, Dan got to meet his grandmother and his aunts because their personalities just shown through the letters and got to connect with his family. And then the most amazing thing about it, um you

01:06:39.400 - 01:06:51.630

know I had the book out. This is the second edition I gave you, but I had a first edition and when I first got it, I sent it to people in the museum world I knew. And I had been on this trip for the museum um

01:06:51.640 - 01:07:09.200

the year after we opened, on the Holocaust trip with people from the U.S. Holocaust Museum and from international, from Romania and Finland. And you know we're all, it was, it was organized by The Topography of Terror Foundation. So I went representing Holocaust Museum Houston. So I

01:07:09.200 - 01:07:27.710

got to meet all these incredible people. And so I sent one book to David Marwell, who was then the director the Holocaust Museum in Battery Park in New York. He happened to have it on his desk. Lena Bergman, who was head of the Jewish

01:07:27.710 - 01:07:41.760

Institute in Warsaw was in his office, happened to see it on his desk. And saw it was about Warsaw and Poland and asked me, contacted me and asked if I would give her the letters and I said, "Well I'm gonna give them to the museum but I can make

01:07:41.770 - 01:07:56.770

copies of the Polish letters and send them to you." She said, "Well I'll have my genealogist look at your family tree and see if he can find anything more about your family." I said, "Great." I forgot about it. Then a few months later I got a letter from Dan's cousin in Warsaw saying she

01:07:56.770 - 01:08:13.420

found a new family member in Koszalin and she went to visit him in Koszalin, Poland and she gave him her copy of my book and said, "Could I send her another copy." I didn't think anything of it. So then, as it turned out, that Lena was coming to Houston

01:08:13.430 - 01:08:29.350

because we had borrowed artifacts from the Warsaw Institute, the Ringelblum milk cans. Oh sure. She was, from the Oyneg Shabbos project. So we had them on exhibit. And this is all around the same time she happened to come to Houston. So I took her to dinner and she said, "You

01:08:29.350 - 01:08:43.330

know it's because of your book that these two relatives reconnected." They were two cousins, a cousin from Israel and a cousin from Koszalin. They had lived together in Warsaw when the war broke out. They got separated. They didn't know each other had survived. It'd been 60

01:08:43.330 - 01:08:58.770

years. And what happened, they were looking for relatives and they were looking for Victor Hochberg, who is the uncle, and in my genealogy, I had Victor Hochberg Gora because he had changed his name to Gora to pass as a non-Jew during the war. So the same

01:08:58.770 - 01:09:15.000

genealogist put two and two together. And I have a picture in my book of Tadeusz and Yossi from Israel meeting for the first time at the train station in Warsaw. So I mean, and she said, "It's because of my book." That's incredible. I mean that was

01:09:15.000 - 01:09:33.530

like you know something I never expected to be part of anything. Yeah, no, it's part of the you know what I call, "The magic of the archives," and all the connections that you know lay buried until these kinds of things are, you're able to make that,

01:09:33.530 - 01:09:47.560

make that happen. Well, it's funny because when I was in accession in the archives for the first ten years in the museum, and we had a collection from a POW, Jewish POW, from New Orleans. And his family brought in all of his information and all of a sudden I see a picture

01:09:47.560 - 01:10:02.990

of my aunt. She was in his confirmation class at Gates of Prayer. So her picture is now in the archives. And then we had a picture in the archives of a woman, a survivor screaming at one of the liberation of the camp, of a camp,

01:10:02.990 - 01:10:18.430

screaming at the, we didn't know what she screaming, but it was a picture of her animated. And it turns out Helen Colin, one of our survivors was in London with her daughter, Muriel Meicler and they were at the war museum. And Muriel heard her mother's voice and she goes

01:10:18.430 - 01:10:34.310

to this television screen, and there's the same picture. It was her mother who was screaming at the soldiers, the British soldiers to go get the Germans, and I go back and look in the archives, we had that picture. But we didn't know who it was and

01:10:34.310 - 01:10:53.720

it's just amazing. So let me ask you now, as we're coming towards the end, um some people might say that, you know, for a Holocaust Museum in terms of thinking about its mission and thinking about its intended audience, that there's at least two directions you could go

01:10:53.720 - 01:11:20.130

in. So a Holocaust Museum could be primarily built for a Jewish community, for a Jewish audience, and designed to tell exclusively the story of what happened to European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Or you could try to design a Holocaust Museum that, you know, it

01:11:20.130 - 01:11:35.540

tells the story of what happened to the Jews during World War II, but also situates it within the context of other genocides in history, as a way of, I don't know, universalizing some of the human rights lessons of what, of what happened. So how do

01:11:35.540 - 01:11:52.780

you how do you feel about that, about that dilemma? And how do you think that, you know, Holocaust Museum Houston tries to straddle that issue? Well first of all, we didn't build the museum for the Jewish community because a lot of the Jews didn't come until they had relatives

01:11:52.790 - 01:12:03.280

in town and they wanted something to do. So they'd come to museum because a lot of the Jews in Houston think, "Well I know about it, why do I need to go see it?" And in truth, in the beginning they thought we were going to be a

01:12:03.280 - 01:12:20.400

cut and paste museum. They didn't realize that we were going to be a professional museum from the beginning. Um, it was a dilemma because you had survivors saying, there's some survivors, "If you weren't in a camp, you're not a real survivor. Or if you came, you

01:12:20.400 - 01:12:34.820

know, you should be called a refugee, if you came after '33. And you bought a ticket on the boat and you can bring your things." It's like Raul Hilberg says, "You're a refugee. You're not a survivor." So you have those inner dynamics going. Um you know,

01:12:34.830 - 01:12:55.560

I always say that every genocide is unique. A lot of people use the word Holocaust because it's evocative and they want the emotion to come. But it's not, every genocide is not a Holocaust. I mean they're comparing now Ukraine to a Holocaust. The museum has gradually moved.

01:12:55.570 - 01:13:11.380

I remember we had an exhibit and this one we had a lot of survivors and they were more vocal. We wanted to do an exhibit about Rwandan Children. They were lost and and a lot of the survivors were adamant, you know, "It's only about the Holocaust." Well, we paired

01:13:11.380 - 01:13:31.960

it with the story of French Jewish children. So there was a connection but we brought in the Holocaust. When we built the new building, we have a big human rights gallery now, and we have another very unique gallery about young children's diaries, and the diaries, not

01:13:31.960 - 01:13:53.070

just from the Holocaust, but also from Cambodia or Kosovo, places like that. Um but I remember even earlier when Susan Meyers was director, we brought an exhibit about the Armenian Genocide and she got a call from the President of Turkey, complaining that we were showing, that it

01:13:53.070 - 01:14:13.320

wasn't genocide. Turkey did not perpetrate a genocide on the Armenians. So that was kind of difficult to deal with that. As the group was preparing to build a new museum they started visiting other new museums around the country, and some have even changed their names from Holocaust

01:14:13.320 - 01:14:36.110

Museum to Human Rights Museum with a focus on the Holocaust. We were adamant that we're always a Holocaust museum first. But in today's world, people felt you have to talk about human rights. You know, in truth, a lot of the lessons from the Holocaust, it's not,

01:14:36.120 - 01:14:54.400

it's about bullying and how you treat people. I remember when the gentleman from Mississippi was murdered. They dragged him behind the truck. Oh, James Byrd? Yeah, here in Texas. Yeah, so Mayor Brown wanted, and he was with Clyde Drexler, they wanted to speak to students about it. So

01:14:54.400 - 01:15:08.390

they chose the museum as the site that we would get the students because we had the school groups come in, that they wanted to talk about that at our museum. So that was like a beginning of civil rights, you know, because the lessons from the Holocaust,

01:15:08.400 - 01:15:27.640

they're about how you treat people, bullying and all of that. So you know, there are some people who are not happy that we have a human rights gallery and then they want it to be only about the Holocaust. But I'm not that against it as long as we keep

01:15:27.650 - 01:15:44.430

the main focus on the Holocaust because other groups can do human rights, but we're the only ones who really would do the Holocaust. But I think it's necessary because they're connected. I mean, you can't separate human rights. No, I don't think you can and you know

01:15:44.430 - 01:16:02.210

this is Houston. It's the fourth largest city. It's incredibly diverse and you have to be able to make the Holocaust relatable to people who aren't Jewish. Otherwise I think it diminishes the, the power of the story. I mean that was our focus. I mean that was

01:16:02.210 - 01:16:16.900

the reason we took it away from building it in Meyerland. We wanted it to be for the whole city, for everybody to feel welcome. And I used to advocate for every board member just to come to the museum for a day and to stay there and watch

01:16:16.900 - 01:16:33.130

all the groups come in and all the people who come. You'd be shocked to see the diversity of people coming to the museum. And you know, but I still, I still think the focus should be on the Holocaust because we're trying to talk about it

01:16:33.130 - 01:16:51.360

and to teach it and nobody else is gonna do it for us. But I think we do need to talk about other genocides and human rights. Yeah, I agree. It's a tough call. You know, and it's a programming call. But you know, the other thing is too is you bring

01:16:51.360 - 01:17:04.520

in different groups of people. You have people coming in to see the human rights gallery who might never have come to see the Holocaust gallery. So, the purpose is just to get people in, to be able to tell them the story. That's what we've tried to

01:17:04.530 - 01:17:19.660

do with all the exhibits. When we first opened, we had like four changing exhibits every four months, and it was to bring in different groups of people. We knew we had a small museum and we couldn't tell the whole story with limited space so we would

01:17:19.670 - 01:17:36.200

augment the story with these exhibits. Like we talked about, I mean we had one huge exhibit about the Nuremberg trials, because we couldn't talk about enough in the core. So that was the reason for all our different exhibits is to bring in different groups. Yeah, definitely,

01:17:36.210 - 01:17:54.780

definitely. Alright, this has been such a treat for me and a privilege. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and it's just so inspiring to hear about all that you've accomplished over these past several decades and you have a lot to be proud

01:17:54.780 - 01:18:08.190

of. You've made such a difference in our community and it's great to hear about it. Well, you're very sweet. It's nice to be appreciated and I really, I'm flattered that you know, you took the time, not just today, but twice to listen to me. I've been

01:18:08.190 - 01:18:25.830

very, very lucky. I've been in the right place at the right time so many times and I've been afforded these opportunities. You know, it's just by luck that I was able to do this. I'm so grateful because they've just enhanced my life so much. But thank

01:18:25.830 - 01:18:26.910

you for your interest.