Articles
Celebrations | Found family Torah takes on new life for next generations
by Renee Ghert-Zand, J. Correspondent | J Weekly | When Charlotte Smith reads from the Torah at her bat mitzvah next month, she will be “holding history,” she says. The sefer Torah that Charlotte will hold and read from June 29 in front of her friends and family at the Smith-Madrone Winery in Napa Valley is a very special one for her family. The sacred scroll survived…
Lib at Large: The story of a lost Holocaust Torah
By Paul Liberatore | Marin Independent Journal | UNTIL RECENTLY, members of the Jewish community at Alma Via, an assisted living home in San Rafael, were without a Torah, the five books that make up the Jewish Bible. Last month, a Torah was given to them, a very special Torah, a Holocaust Torah with a long and, at times, harrowing history, beginning when it was…
Rescued from Kristallnacht, a family Torah reaches a new generation
By Edmon J. Rodman | The Times of Israel | Hidden during the Holocaust but lost after the war, the scrolls would eventually be read at the bat mitzva of their savior’s granddaughter LOS ANGELES (JTA) — It was the “Night of Broken Glass” in Germany, Kristallnacht — a national pogrom of death and destruction of Jewish property and the rounding up of Jews — and…
Going Home Again ~ Postcards from Luedinghausen
by Edie Strauss Kodmur, ‘56 | Stanford Magazine | I was 3 years old when I left my hometown in Germany, but the fairy-tale town never really left me. As a child, I studied photographs of my family and a postcard showing my grandparents’ home. I reveled in stories of my grandmother’s “bewitching the pots” and of my father’s and his two brothers’ boyish pranks. My…
“We Were Ghosts” ~ Postcards from Luedinghausen
by Julie Ann Kodmur, ‘78 | Stanford Alumni Magazine | November 2008 Last June I spent five days in Luedinghausen, the tiny German town where my mother, Edie Strauss Kodmur, ’56, was born. In the picturesque Westphalian countryside an hour’s train ride from Dusseldorf, Luedinghausen isn’t on most maps. But for three families invited from around the globe, it was the most important town in the…