Ellen and Randy Pfann greeted me inside the Reform Jewish temple located near Foxfire Village. Christina Speiser described the garden to be dedicated that evening by her congregation, which is led by Rabbi Floyd Herman.
Speiser, a New Century Middle School teacher, guided Beth Shalom's religious school children in reading, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," a book of poems by Jewish children held at Terezin Concentration Camp during World War II. The students then helped create a memorial butterfly garden called "Remembering the Children Who Wanted to Fly."
Lowell Simon of Seven Lakes, president of the Beth Shalom congregation, opened the meeting and gathered the crowd outside at the small garden.
Vivian Jacobson of Pinehurst, speaker Ralph Jacobson's wife, lit a "yarzheit" (memorial) candle, and seven readers led a Call to Worship titled "Our God on the Gallows: Voices from the Holocaust." Readers quoted Holocaust victims and survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank and Victor Frankl.
The congregation recited a "kaddish" (prayer) in Hebrew, and Mindy Fineman of West End sang "The Butterfly," a poem by Pavel Friedman who was born in Prague in 1921, deported to Terezin in 1942 and killed at Aushchwitz in 1944.
Bernie Clorman knelt on arthritic knees to plant a flower. Jennie Sessler, 18, and others planted flowers in memory of six million Jews who died in the Holocaust -- a word meaning "great destruction, especially by fire"--and five million non-Jews killed by Nazis from 1933-45.
The crowd returned to the temple to hear Ralph Jacobson of Pinehurst.
Jacobson, a retired lawyer born in 1928, lived in Osnabrueck, Germany, when Nazis ravaged his neighborhood synagogue on "The Night of Crystal," or "Kristallnacht," Nov. 9, 1938.
After Hitler was elected in 1933, Jacobson's father, a "notar" (high-ranking lawyer) lost his rank and his partnership with the Christian notar father of Wolfgang Kreft, Jacobson's best friend. Barred from public school, Jacobson and his older sister attended a one-room Jewish classroom.
His parents were away one night when he and his sister observed singing-and-torch-bearing, uniformed SS troops headed toward their home.
"We thought they'd burn our house," he said. But the soldiers gathered at a nearby soccer stadium to hear a speech.
At age 14 in 1937, his sister went to live with his mother's brother's family in New York City.
In 1938, Osnabrueck's mayor wanted the synagogue -- to destroy it and construct an SS building. Jacobson's father opposed the mayor, and on Oct. 8, 1938, Jacobson's mother was called to the hospital. Her husband had died of a heart attack, she said. Years later, Jacobson learned his father had been murdered.
On Nov. 9, 1938, "Kristallnacht" generated destruction in all synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses in Germany. That night around 2 a.m., five Nazis searched the Jacobson home, looking for Jewish men. Finding none, one man pointed at Jacobson.
"How old is he," the man asked.
"He's 10 years old," Jacobson's mother said.
"That's too young," another man said.
The men left.
Christian friends dropped supplies in Jacobson's backyard, and he and his mother left Germany on his eleventh birthday, Jan. 15, 1939. They lived with her brother in New York City. Many of their relatives died in the Holocaust.
In 1996, Jacobson visited Germany and his childhood friend Wolfgang Kreft, who had passed Jacobson on the street just before the Jacobsons left Germany.
"I knew you were leaving," Kreft said. "I wanted to wave to you…but I knew it was too dangerous."
"Wolfgang told me that the war didn't end for him until 1996, when he and I stood at that spot (where we passed) and shook hands," Jacobson says.
Jacobson tells his story to many students and various groups. He should continue -- so we'll "remember…not to forget."
Steve Crain may be reached at crain207@nc.rr.com.
