Survivors Gather in 'Cafe Europa' to Recall a World Before the Shoah

Holocaust survivor Noah Yucht displays a collection of family photos that date from before World War II.

Photo by Michele Frentrop

While at a recent gathering of area Holocaust survivors, the Polish-born Yucht then held up a photograph of his parents taken in the 1930s. Neither survived the war.

Yucht -- who for years ran a bridal shop on Castor Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia -- also had a picture that was taken on a grade-school trip, and another of a brother-in-law who perished.

Yucht himself managed to escape the Warsaw Ghetto with no possessions and fled to the Soviet Union, where he spent the war as a soldier. After the war ended, he reunited with three older siblings in Paris. They'd managed to hang onto the family photographs, explained Yucht.

Despite the fact that the images serve as tangible reminders of all that has been lost, Yucht said that he's been eager to share them with survivors he's encountered over the years. In a way, it serves to keep alive the memory of those who did not live through the hell.

Yucht, along with roughly 175 other Holocaust survivors from the Philadelphia area, attended the second Cafe Europa lunch event, organized by the Jewish Family and Children's Service of Greater Philadelphia. The May 8 lunch program -- marking the 62nd anniversary of the war's end in Europe -- took place at Fisher's Tudor House, a banquet hall in Bensalem.

The lunch was funded with a grant from the Humanitarian Aid Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping victims of atrocities during World War II. The Cafe Europa program is meant to offer aging Holocaust survivors a chance to socialize, reminisce and enjoy an afternoon out in the company of individuals with similar life experiences, according to Susan Goldfinger Bilker, director of senior services for JFCS.

The May 8 event was the second of two programs paid for by the grant, but JFCS plans to apply for more funding, said Bilker.

She added that the name Cafe Europa is meant to echo the trendy, pre-World War II establishments that were popular in such European cities as Vienna and Budapest. To evoke the era in other ways, a trio that included a keyboard player, a clarinetist and a vocalist played Yiddish, Russian, and Romanian tunes. More than once, participants got a hora going.

"We enjoy it. We get together and everybody knows each other. It's like family," said Yucht, a member of Philadelphia's Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

Yucht said that he also loves hearing snippets from the numerous conversations in Yiddish that inevitably break out at such gathers. And on this day he was far from the only one showing pictures to whomever would take the time to look.

Michael Zal, who also lives in the Northeast, carried a photo of a wooden spindle that his father had made for his mother years before the Shoah.

Born in what is now the Ukraine, the 79-year-old said he survived several concentration camps before immigrating to what was then Palestine in 1946. He served in the Israeli Defense Force during the War of Independence and eventually made his way to the United States a decade later.

Survivor Michael Zal, with wife Libby Forman, holds a photo of a family memento that also survived.

Photos by Michele Frentrop

Zal's brother, Solomon Zelmanvitz, had reached the Soviet Union during the war. (Zal Hebraized his last name.) The two brother's did not see each other again until 1977, when Zelmanvitz emigrated and brought with him that very same spindle, which he'd somehow managed to find after the war.

Not only does it symbolize the reunion with his brother, but the spindle is also an object his father made; Zal and his wife both consider it a small miracle that it remained intact and was found.

"I'm just so very proud of him," Zal's American-born wife Libby Forman said of her husband. "He went on to rebuild his life and live in the present."