TAMAD - FREUNDE DES TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART, DEUTSCHLAND
HALLE IS EVERYWHERE. VOICES OF JEWISH WOMEN.
EDITION NECHA ZUPNIK - KIDDUSH CUP - JUDAICA

Date: May 4, 2022, 7 pm
Location: OMZB - One Million Zentrale Berlin, Brandenburgische Str. 43, 10707 Berlin
www.tamad.org

My father Jacobi Weissberg of blessed memory was bound in great reverence and love to his mother Necha Zupnik of blessed memory who, according to his descriptions, was a warm-hearted, calm, strong woman and who had protected him all his life.

In 1941, shortly before the Lemberg pogrom, she begged him to flee. He hid in the nearby woods with his brother Leiwe of blessed memory. When both brothers returned to Lemberg two weeks later, after the pogrom, to look for their mother, they learned that German Wehrmacht soldiers and SS forces from Einsatzgruppe C, with the help of Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, shot Jewish people and buried them in ditches.

As my father stood by such a ditch, "the earth breathed as a man breathes," he told me, breaking decades of silence at the age of ninety. Because those who were shot are also buried under the layer of earth thrown over it, who are still moving, gasping for air and trying to dig out at night.

The idea that his beloved mother was among them tormented him throughout his life. My father always suffered because he fled without his mother. The only surviving photograph he owned was of my grandmother Necha. In his final hours, his mother's likeness, his handwritten note addressed to G‑d, and his red Kabbalah bracelet gave him comfort. “Askenazi Jews traditionally give their children the names of their deceased relatives. The Israeli psychotherapist Dina Wardi describes children who are named after their parents or siblings who were murdered in the Shoah as “living memorial candles”.

My father called me Nea in memory of his mother Necha Zupnik.

- Nea Weissberg, 2022

EDITION NECHA ZUPNIK - KIDDUSCH CUP - JUDAICA

Reading from the book "Halle is everywhere. Voices of Jewish women" with Nea Weissberg and Maya Zehden.

Nea Weissberg, publicist, educator and cand. Director of Pychodrama, founded Lichtig Verlag in 1993, in which she publishes literature on Jewish history and the present. Her particular concern as a publisher and editor is to promote dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.

The attack on Yom Kippur 2019, the highest Jewish holiday, on the synagogue of the Jewish community in Halle (Saale) K.d.ö.R. had a very special dimension for Jews in Germany. The people praying in the synagogue wanted to commemorate the sanctity of the Day of Atonement - but the assassination attempt with its destructive violence evoked some associations reminiscent of November 9, 1938 or the Shoah.

20 women are taking part in the anthology "Halle is everywhere" and expressing their concern, fear and outrage on that day, October 9, 2019, and about their families and their lives, which in some way came into contact with anti-Semitism. The variety is great: the authors have different professions and political attitudes, and their religious attitudes towards Judaism are also different.

Maya Zehden, journalist, is one of the twenty authors. She was born in Berlin as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She has two children and one grandchild. She was always connected to the subject of Israel and Judaism. She has been a member of the German-Israeli Society since 1999, a member of the board since 2000 and a member of the executive committee since 2014.

We would like to thank Uli Aigner for repeatedly hosting TAMAD events and the publisher Nea Weissberg for her constant support. - TAMAD