‘To Respond With Your Person’

Myriam Abramowicz For giving voice to people who don’t have one.

Myriam Abramowicz For giving voice to people who don’t have one.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week

While many New Yorkers watched in horror as television reports showed the deadly destruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Myriam Abramowicz was making airplane reservations. She flew down to Houston days after the hurricane hit, and showed up at the Astrodome to volunteer.
Her first assignment was to hand out supplies from a central location, but she was frustrated that people had to leave their families in order to line up, and then receive only sparse items. So she instead filled bags from the supply closet with blankets, socks and T-shirts, and walked up and down the makeshift rows of beds, handing out whatever was needed.
“These people had lost everything,” she says. “I would stop and talk to them, and I’d find a way to let them know that I am Jewish and from New York, that I believe in God too. I don’t particularly look Jewish and I felt it was important that they know there was a Jewish presence.”
Abramowicz also went to Israel in 1991 to volunteer during the Scud attacks and worked in a psychiatric hospital, filling in for staff members mobilized for military service. In 1999, during the war in Kosovo, she traveled to help out in the refugee camps in neighboring Albania. After 9/11, she volunteered downtown at Trinity Church.
“I just felt it was a Jewish thing to do, to respond with your person,” she says, about her personal missions of aid.
Abramowicz, 62, is a Manhattan filmmaker, teacher, social activist and global humanitarian. She has developed innovative programs at her synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, and around the city, and through her work often gives a voice to people who don’t have one. Her own voice is deep and compelling, and she hosted two radio shows — one in French and the other in English — while a student at Columbia University.
She has a strong handshake, an easy laugh and penetrating eyes — she looks directly into the eyes of the person she’s addressing, and gazes for an extra second or two. Friends say that she sees deeply; she takes in everything that’s in front of her, and she sees possibilities where few others do. Abramowicz moves at her own pace: She always has time for conversation and can talk with ease and interest with individuals of all backgrounds, all ages.
Born in Belgium soon after World War II, she and her family moved to New York City in 1955 and settled in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Rego Park, Queens, and then the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That she’s the child of Holocaust survivors has been an influence throughout her life. Unlike other survivors, her parents spoke openly about their experience in hiding as well as the deportation of other relatives to Auschwitz.
In the spring of 1977, she was planning a trip to Belgium, and her mother suggested that she visit the woman who, along with her late husband, had hid Myriam’s parents and brother in their home. From this woman, she heard the other side of the story she had heard many times before, and she realized that she had her to thank for her very life. Upon returning to New York City, she decided to take a leave of absence from her job in book publishing to return to Europe and interview other non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. With the encouragement of the late oral historian Studs Terkel, whose books she had worked on, she set off with a tape recorder and camera. But she soon realized that she wanted to work with film, in order to fully capture her subjects, their facial gestures and their silences, too.
When she’d ask her subjects if they remembered the day that a Jewish person came seeking a hiding place, several nodded and said, “As if it were yesterday,” which became the title of her 1980 documentary. The film, about Jews and non-Jews in Belgium who placed, hid and saved more than 4000 Jewish children, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and won several awards around the world.
The film was not only a critical success but launched an international movement, and Abramowicz credits her mother for that success. At screenings, people who were themselves hidden children would often approach her and express gratitude. When she mentioned to her mother that she had collected the names of more than 200 people who were hidden as children, her mother suggested a get-together in her home, so that they could meet one another. Sparked by the idea, Abramowicz went on to organize, with the support of several in the survivor community, the First International Conference of Hidden Children in 1991, in New York City. About 2000 people attended, and that led to the creation of The Hidden Child Foundation (now under the aegis of the Anti-Defamation League). Further conferences were held, and groups were set up in Europe, Israel and the U.S. Abramowicz stepped aside, so that the former hidden children themselves could lead the organization, as she had hoped would happen.
Her latest film, “Illyria: A Journey of Resistance,” due to be released next year, was inspired by her volunteer work in Kosovo. From her Manhattan apartment, when she first saw media images of Kosovar-Albanians being expelled from their homeland, she thought immediately of what her own family had been through during pogroms in 1917 Russia. She heard that the Red Cross was looking for volunteers to work in refugee camps, and she knew that she had to go. She contacted local activists, who helped her get a flight, and also suggested that she bring her camera.
Then, from 1999 to 2005, she made five trips to the region — “Illyria” is the ancient name of Albania. While her initial time was spent in refugee camps, she found herself drawn to document Balkan history, the war and its aftermath, and events leading to the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic and his eventual trial at The Hague.
“After only a few days in Albania, I realized that there were many stories to tell because the Albanian people hadn’t had a chance to speak for so long,” she says. She explains that she was profoundly moved as she got to know Albanians and learned of Besa, their ancient code of honor, which, in part, explains why this predominantly Muslim nation saved all its Jews during World War II, and why so many poor Albanians sheltered a million Kosovar-Albanians who had been “ethnically cleansed.”
“In the face of so much hatred, I found humanity, endurance and justice,” she says, noting that she was always welcomed by her Albanian hosts as though she were family, even as she revealed that she was Jewish. She appears briefly on camera in the film, and her abilities to connect deeply with people — whether a teenager, a widow, or a family patriarch — are evident.
Closer to home, Abramowicz — a great grandniece of S. Y. Abramovich, also known as Mendele Mocher Seforim, considered the grandfather of Yiddish literature — serves as a gabbai on the holidays at B’nai Jeshurun, and has pioneered programs in Jewish learning, remembrance and ritual. In 1995, she initiated the annual “Reading of the Names” ceremony for Yom HaShoah, in which the names of Jews murdered in the Holocaust are read aloud, one by one, all through the night, by a series of volunteers. The program, begun at B’nai Jeshurun, is now a joint project of Upper West Side synagogues and the JCC of Manhattan.
Moved to action when a member of the community passed away just after services in 1991, she was involved in establishing a chevra kadisha, or burial society, at B’nai Jeshurun. She has helped groups in other synagogues around the metropolitan area to do the same, and, specifically, to learn to do the ritual cleansing. She speaks of this work as a privilege.
“Myriam is a very creative, imaginative person who is deeply rooted as a Jew. She’s intensely Jewish and yet is always able to see things from a perspective that most people don’t see,” says Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon of B’nai Jeshurun.
“She grew up with parents and a brother deeply affected by their terrible experience during the Shoah, and she understands reality from that perspective. She can empathize with people who were displaced, understand that experience from the inside. And she puts herself in situations of addressing needs — helping, filming. She wants to witness, to give testimony, and she makes us look at things we don’t always pay attention to.”
Periodically, she meets with the rabbis of the shul and brings a collection of scraps of paper — they call them her “kvitlach,” Yiddish for small notes — and she goes over her ideas for new programs, cultural events they may want to know about, and suggestions for improvement.
“These meetings are completely unlike any other. She opens our minds, always with tremendous love,” says Rabbi Matalon. “Sometimes we have to say no, and sometimes we later realize that she was ahead of her time.”
In the 1970s, Abramowicz became interested in Jewish mysticism, and when she went to Brussels to work on the film, she began studying traditional Kabbalah with a Benedictine monk. Later, they taught a class together on art and spirituality. When she returned to New York, she taught a course at B’nai Jeshurun called “Aesthetics and Spirituality: A Roadmap for Meaning.” A student, Judy Geller-Marlowe, describes her as a soulful teacher, who “shares her Torah in a gentle yet powerful way, drawing you in, questing for more.”
Abramowicz is now undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She’s still worrying about the rest of the world, ever passionate to keep teaching, telling stories and helping out wherever she’s needed.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization