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'It means alive...'
Every few weekends, Naomi goes to Portland to attend Congregation Shaarie Torah, an Orthodox congregation, with her father. The synagogue, across town in a newer neighborhood, is embellished with Weiss family history. Amber lights on a bronze plaque in the sanctuary glow on the anniversary of the deaths of members. There are lights for Eric's parents -- Ferdinand, who died in 1974, and Pauline, in 1971 -- and for Gerda, dead of multiple sclerosis in 1977 when she was only 54. On another wall of the sanctuary is a memorial Eric designed: "To the sacred memory of the men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust, 1939-1945, and in honor of those striving to rebuild the destroyed communities; and to the glory of those who worked, fought and died for the rebirth of the Jewish State." Behind a curtain painted with a tree of life, where the synagogue's Torah scrolls are stored, is an old Torah once confiscated by the Nazis from a Czechoslovakian town not very far from Novy Bohumin, Gerda's home town. Eric arranged to have it brought to Congregation Shaarie Torah in 1983. "It was all that was left of the Jews there after the war," he said, "except for one old woman. The rest were dead in the ovens." Another piece of the past has come down to Naomi Weiss and will be used to strengthen the family's connections with Israel. Years ago, when Gerda was still alive, an aunt, Bertl Engel, came to visit the Weisses in Portland. "We were very touched by her visit," Naomi said. "No one else ever came. I think it was very emotional for her because she saw my mother leave Israel as a young, vibrant woman, and here she was, in a nursing home with multiple sclerosis. She kept a happy face when she saw my mother, but it was hard on her." When Engel died a few years ago, she left Naomi an inheritance, not huge but enough to give some away. Naomi has been meeting with American fund-raisers from the Technion to arrange to put some of her money into research seeking a miracle drug for the disease that killed her mother. The past caught up with Eric Weiss recently, too. Within the past few months, his written testimony was used in the military trial in Rome of a former Nazi SS captain captured four years ago in Argentina, Erich Priebke. Priebke was charged with the massacre of 335 civilians in Rome in 1944. As an agent for the British during World War II, Weiss had interrogated Priebke's superior, Col. Herbert Kappler, about the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. Kappler escaped from the British, and Weiss heard later he died. Priebke, 84, was sentenced last month to life in prison for the massacre. He is one of the last Germans who will be prosecuted for Nazi war crimes. Weiss is proud of his past. Much of it, like an Italian newspaper clipping of the Priebke trial, has found its way in frames to the crowded walls of his house, the "Eric Weiss Memorial Museum." Some he keeps with him at all times. He wears two pieces of jewelry. One is a metal signet ring that he wore throughout his marriage even though it was a gift from a wartime girlfriend, someone he met before that day on the beach in Tel Aviv when he first saw Gerda Feldmann. Naomi fusses at him for continuing to wear "that old ring." It was always a point of contention between him and Gerda, he admits, but, he says stubbornly, "I like it so I wear it." The other piece of jewelry is a silver charm that dangles from a chain at his throat. The charm is the Hebrew symbol chai. It's worn by many Jews and many will tell you it means life. "It doesn't," Weiss says. "It means alive. I wear it because I am alive when so many are dead." |
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