6 | JANUARY 27 • 2022

1942 - 2022

Covering and Connecting
Jewish Detroit Every Week

To make a donation to the
DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
FOUNDATION
go to the website
www.djnfoundation.org

The Detroit Jewish News (USPS 275-520)

is published every Thursday at

32255 Northwestern Highway, #205,

Farmington Hills, Michigan. Periodical

postage paid at Southfield, Michigan, and

additional mailing offices.

Postmaster: send changes to:

Detroit Jewish News,

32255 Northwestern Highway, #205,

Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334

MISSION STATEMENT The Detroit Jewish News will be of service to the Jewish community. The Detroit Jewish
News will inform and educate the Jewish and general community to preserve, protect and sustain the Jewish
people of greater Detroit and beyond, and the State of Israel.

VISION STATEMENT The Detroit Jewish News will operate to appeal to the broadest segments of the greater
Detroit Jewish community, reflecting the diverse views and interests of the Jewish community while advancing the
morale and spirit of the community and advocating Jewish unity, identity and continuity.

DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
32255 Northwestern Hwy. Suite 205,
Farmington Hills, MI 48334
248-354-6060
thejewishnews.com



Publisher
The Detroit Jewish
News Foundation

| Board of Directors:
Chair: Gary Torgow
Vice President: David Kramer
Secretary: Robin Axelrod
Treasurer: Max Berlin
Board members: Larry Jackier,
Jeffrey Schlussel, Mark Zausmer


Senior Advisor to the Board:
Mark Davidoff
Alene and Graham Landau Archivist Chair:
Mike Smith
Founding President & Publisher Emeritus:
Arthur Horwitz
Founding Publisher
Philip Slomovitz, of blessed memory





| Editorial
DIrector of Editorial:
Jackie Headapohl
jheadapohl@thejewishnews.com
Associate Editor:
David Sachs
dsachs@thejewishnews.com
Social Media and Digital Producer:
Nathan Vicar
nvicar@thejewishnews.com
Staff Reporter: Danny Schwartz
dschwartz@thejewishnews.com
Editorial Assistant: Sy Manello
smanello@thejewishnews.com

Contributing Writers:
Nate Bloom, Rochel Burstyn, Suzanne
Chessler, Annabel Cohen, Keri Guten
Cohen, Shari S. Cohen, Shelli Liebman
Dorfman, Louis Finkelman, Stacy
Gittleman, Esther Allweiss Ingber,
Barbara Lewis, Jennifer Lovy, Rabbi
Jason Miller, Alan Muskovitz, Robin
Schwartz, Mike Smith, Steve Stein,
Julie Smith Yolles, Ashley Zlatopolsky

| Advertising Sales
Director of Advertising: Keith Farber
kfarber@thejewishnews.com
Senior Account Executive:
Kathy Harvey-Mitton
kmitton@thejewishnews.com

| Business Office
Director of Operations: Amy Gill
agill@thejewishnews.com
Operations Manager: Andrea Gusho
agusho@thejewishnews.com
Operations Assistant: Ashlee Szabo
Circulation: Danielle Smith
Billing Coordinator: Pamela Turner

| Production By
Farago & Associates
Manager: Scott Drzewiecki
Designers: Kelly Kosek, Kaitlyn Schoen,
Deborah Schultz, Michelle Sheridan


PURELY COMMENTARY

essay

Caught in Ice, Light, Silence
J

anuary is the month
that tries our souls,
often bringing the year’s
worst weather to Michigan.
It turns post-holiday defla-
tion into a sense of lingering
dread, a looming despair
fueled by bitter
winds, intermi-
nable lake effect
snow and some
of the calendar’s
shortest days.
Each January,
the physical
cold I feel is
accompanied by the harsher
and icier winds of history.
Sometimes they buffet me as
I walk across a frozen park-
ing lot on the Grand Valley
State campus or crunch my
way through drifting snow
between buildings. More
often they penetrate a warm
classroom or the harbor of my

office when I pause to remem-
ber the many thousands who
once marched through the
snows of Poland in 1945.
For a host of reasons, Yom
HaShoah, which usually falls
in April, has become the day
when most Jews mark the
Holocaust, but I sometimes
think that in our northern
clime, Jan. 27, designated
by the United Nations as
International Holocaust
Remembrance Day, may be
the more appropriate com-
memorative choice, marking
the moment in 1945 when
troops of the Red Army liber-
ated Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Liberation, though, is a
misnomer. Ten days before
the Soviets arrived, the Nazis
had evacuated nearly all the
camp’s prisoners, some 56,000
men and women, marching
them west into the Polish
winter.

Elie Wiesel’s Night forever
etched this infamous death
march in our collective mem-
ories, though his account
seldom lingers over the cold
felt by the malnourished
and rag-clad victims. Still,
when teaching Night during a
Michigan winter, I always try
to make this section visceral
to my students by asking them
to imagine setting out, right
then, without their North
Face coats and Ugg boots, for
a march through the snow
to Big Rapids, some 73 miles
away. With no food or water,
with Germans shepherds
tearing at their heels and with
pistol shots for those who
faltered.

THE TORMENTS
OF WINTER
For me, such a mental exer-
cise always evokes Dante’s
Inferno, where the deepest

center of Hell is a vast frozen
lake, Cocytus, in which trai-
tors are embedded in the ice.
Six hundred years later, what
the poet could only imagine
had been created by Hitler’s
legions on the windswept
Silesian plains.
Among the many survivor
accounts of Auschwitz there
are some common observa-
tions regarding the seasons:
spring was a time of viscous
mud that grabbed the pris-
oners’ wooden-soled clogs;
summer was when the camp’s
pestilential stench hung over
them; but it was the Polish
winter that most tormented
them, its very approach strik-
ing fear in even the most vet-
eran of haftlinge or prisoners.
Primo Levi, writing of the
onset of winter in the chapter
“October 1944” of Survival
in Auschwitz, recalls thinking
that it would kill seven out

Robert
Franciosi

continued on page 8