A Miracle
Holocaust survivor passes away, leaving 2,500 descendants
January 5, 2010
Many Israelis (and American Jews) are accustomed to meeting people of a certain age with five or six names: Ashkenazi Jews name children after the dead (so you'll never meet an Ashkenazi Jew called "Shloimie, Jr."), but in the Holocaust generation, there were far more murdered relatives than there were kids to name after them. So some families would give kids–especially the one they expected would be the last kid–several names to carry on (like "Yitzhak Pinchas Aaron Ephraim-Fischel," the last son of the Gerer Rebbe, a hassidic rabbinic leader who survived the war).
This was definitely not the case with Yitta Schwartz, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who passed away over the weekend in Kiryas Joel, an enclave of Satmar hassidim in New York state. Unlike most, Schwartz, her husband, Yosef, and their then-eight children all survived the war. The family made its way from Europe (like many Satmar hassidim, they were from Hungary) to the United States, where they ultimately raised 17 children.
It's not all that unusual for hassidic families to be that large (and they marry young), so that by the time Mrs. Schwartz passed away, her 17 children had each had a bunch of kids, who probably had a bunch of kids, who'd probably started having kids… and Mrs. Schwartz was left with 2,500 children, grand-children, great-grandkids, and probably more than a few great-greats…
Now that is one spectacular way to triumph over the Nazis!
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