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Never a Child
One could say that Alex Buckman never had a childhood, moving from the
age of two from home to home while living in fear of imminent death.
Recipes As Resistance
April 12, 2010
This post was originally published as Yom Hashoah: Recovered Recipes From A Vanished
World on the Kosher.com blog on April 12, 2010.
For victims of the Holocaust, recipes, a treasured cultural inheritance normally passed from generation
to generation, also became a vital source of resistance.
Love it or hate it, we all carry a culinary legacy. During the Holocaust, where food represented life and
death, recipes represented a precious link to the culture that the Nazis and their allies tried to destroy.
As Holocaust educator, Myrna Goldberg notes, talking about food and exchanging recipes, even, or
especially, in such terrible circumstances boosted womens sense of community. As women
recollected recipes, they taught one another the art of cooking and baking, and, in the process of
teaching, they reclaimed their importance and dignity. Teaching offered hope that there would be a
next generation hope for survival.
For most in the Shoah, recipes could only be recalled as a link to better times. In rare cases, though,
Jewish women were able to record their own recipes, or collect and write down those of others
imprisoned with them. One of the very few such recipe books to survive the Shoah belonged to
Rebecca Teitelbaum, who, as a forced laborer in Ravensbruck, managed to steal paper, pencil, needle
and thread to write and sew together a tiny, 110-page book of the recipes she recalled from home.
The women around her found comfort in reading the recipes aloud to one another. Teitelbaum lost the
book during her forced evacuation from the camp, but a stranger found it and succeeded in returning
it to her in Belgium, where he located her two years later. The book is now housed in the Vancouver
Holocaust Education Center