Holocaust Remembrance Day

“Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

All day long, I was torn between wanting to finish our weekly topic of age gaps (highlight coming soon) and talking about the Holocaust. But I couldn’t figure out how to make a natural transition, so I left it alone.

The very idea of having large families is not unique to the Jewish culture of religion, and frankly, the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” comes directly from the Old Testament, well before 6 million of us were annihilated around 80 years ago. But, throughout history, we have been the target of discrimination, resettlements and massacres. This is testimony that we live with, tell over around our shabbos (Shabbat) tables and recite during key points of the calendar year.

We can NEVER forget who we are, and we people have done to us because it is something that we live and breathe, every single day.

And this notion of wanting to have larger families to replace those lost is something that very much resonates with me, as a second generation survivor. My maternal grandparents (distant cousins) both endured unspeakable tragedies during the war, finally meeting each other afterwards, marrying and starting a new life in America. My grandmother came from a large religious family (her mother was one of 11 or 12 we think), and most of them were all killed in the Holocaust. I grew up with the story that she was sent away from her family at the age of 14, shortly after the Nazis came to her town in Poland, because she had blond hair and blue eyes - she looked Aryan and could survive without the baggage of a Semitic looking family. And she was the only one of her immediate family to do so.

When I became decided to become more religious toward the end of high school, her story reverberated through me. I knew that we had a deep familial connection to Judaism and I wanted to bring that beauty into my own life as well.

And I always dreamed about having six children, not the 12 of my ancestors, but enough so that I could “replace” some of them.

And so the years of secondary infertility and pregnancy loss hit me hard, in all the obvious ways, but subconsciously in the place that was deeply painful to the dreams I had of a large family. And while I do have five children, I am tearing up as I write this, knowing that I have not been able to replace as many as I hoped.

Age gaps. Family size. The Holocaust. It all intertwines.”