Yasha/Yaakov/Jacob Gelman.
My dedushka (grandpa).
I’ve never written about him here before. He passed away in 2012. I love him.
He was a complicated man. He was a Holocaust survivor. He was generous, caring, hardworking, but also would flip to anger in a moment's notice.
Let’s just say he was Russian.
I remember sitting at family dinners with my grandparents.
Fried potatoes and onions, borscht, kasha.
The conversation would switch to Russian and slowly escalate to screaming. My brothers, father, and I would sit, silently, oblivious to the subject. We don’t speak Russian. We would usually start laughing. “Here we go again.”
The mood would cool as if nothing had happened. I would run around with my brothers after dinner, climbing on the stairs banister.
“Be careful!” He would yell.
Those were his favorite words.
“Be careful!”
He loved us. Those words were how we knew.
He was a man with an extremely dangerous past. I guess he tried to make up for it in his grandchildrens’ lives.
Every playground, look-out, rock…
“Be careful!”
Always in his thick Russian accent.
I remember every time I would leave my grandparents’ house. He would bend over to kiss the top of my head.
“Oy me G-d.” He would say as he bent over.
He would then kiss my hair, always making the same elephant-like trumpet with his lips.
That sound. Always that sound. I can still hear it to this day.
I miss him. He embodied the American Dream. He left Communist Russia, started a business in his basement, and eventually built that business into a company. He never stopped working. His hobbies were work.
But where did he come from?
I never talked to him about the Holocaust. Not like I did with my babushka. He was older during the war- already 8 when the Germans occupied his town.
It was much harder for him to speak about it. He understood the atrocities as they happened.
I didn’t learn about his story until after he died.
I made a video of my babushka’s story in my senior year of high school (2016), 4 years after my dedushka’s death. She transmitted his pain to me.
“Babushka, what did Dedushka do during the war?”
“You know my story. For him, it was worse, much worse.”
My dedushka was born on January 15, 1933, the year Hitler rose to power. His Russian name was Yasha, his Jewish name was Yaakov. He usually went by Yasha.
Yasha Gelman lived in Chornyi Ostrov in what is now Ukraine. It is a small village. You could call it a shtetl.
His father, Shika Gelman, had many siblings. They all left for America during the Communist Revolution. Shika stayed to take care of his ailing parents.
He used to own a candy store. It was seized by the Bolsheviks.
Intense hunger ensued. Together, it was my dedushka (Yasha), his father (Shika), his mother (Sura), and his 3 siblings (Simeon, Fanya, and Genya).
The Nazis invaded Ukraine in the summer of 1941. My dedushka, his parents, and 2 of his siblings left for Khorazzem, Uzbekistan sometime around then. They were Jews. They had to run. His brother, Simeon, was already in university and stayed behind. He didn’t make it.
Much is unknown about their journey. All I know is that it was, like my babushka said, much worse.
They were starving to death in Uzbekistan. They all came down with disease, probably typhus. They went to the hospital. Hospital is a generous term.
Shika, my dedushka’s father, died of illness and starvation in 1944.
Fanya, my dedushka’s older sister, had already recovered by then. Everyone else remained in a near-death state.
Penniless, Fanya dug a hole in the ground and buried her own father, Shika, my great grandfather. No Jewish burial, no ceremony. Just death. Alone.
He is buried somewhere in Khorazzem, Uzbekistan.
I will do everything in my power to find his remains and bring him to Eretz Yisrael.
My dedushka and his siblings began to recover. They heard about their father’s death. They were too afraid to tell their mother, Sura, about her husband’s passing. She was still very sick. They didn’t know if the news would be too much for her to bear.
She began to worry about her husband’s health. To her knowledge, he was still alive. She asked my dedushka (now 11) to bring him some of her leftover food. She didn’t want him to starve.
My dedushka didn’t know what to tell her. He took the food, walked away, sat, ate the food, and cried. Alone.
In time, my great grandmother found out. They moved forward. There was no other option.
Eventually, my dedushka, his now single mother, and his living siblings returned to Ukraine after its liberation from the Nazis.
Life was still full of endless torment. Fanya, my dedushka’s older sister, died of starvation at the age of 18 after returning to Ukraine.
A once full, beautiful family, owners of a sweet little candy store, had been reduced to my great grandmother, my dedushka, and one of his siblings, Genya.
These are the Jews of Europe.
I am drawn to a story regarding former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin:
Begin, in his first meeting with President Carter, used the word tertiated to describe how, during the Holocaust one in three Jews, of the worldwide Jewish population, were murdered. When Carter asked ‘What was that word, Mr. Prime Minister?’ Begin compared it to Decimation (Roman army) and then added ‘one in three- tertiated!’ Begin mentioned that he had used the word in a book he wrote.
Begin elaborated later on: ‘When I use the word “Tertiated” I mean to say that we do not accept the known term of “Decimation.” During the Holocaust our people were not decimated, but “tertiated”- it was not one in ten, but one in three that were murdered.’
My dedushka’s family, my family, was halved.
One in two.
I guess these memories were too much for my dedushka to tell me. Maybe he wanted to protect me.
He did tell me about his life in Russia after the war. He hated Communism with all his being. He wanted to work for himself and his family. He didn’t believe the lies of his government.
Every aspect of life was controlled and manipulated. The news was designed to make the people submissive. He didn’t believe a single word of it. My dedushka retrofitted a radio so that he could access Western radio frequencies. He would fall asleep every night with that radio, listening to Voice of America or BBC.
He dreamed his whole life of coming to America, the land of opportunity.
When he was around the age of 18, he moved to Odessa, Ukraine on the Black Sea. He had enough. He made a plan to join a fishing crew. They would sail to the edge of the Iron Curtain. He was then going to defect, go to Western Europe, and somehow make his way to America.
His mother, Sura, found out. She was scared. She had only one living son. Sura forbade him. She had him enrolled in a trade school far away from any body of water.
It was in that trade school that my dedushka learned his craft, how to repair precision measuring tools. That knowledge would later enable him to start his business out of his basement in America.
In the 70s the Soviets began to allow some Jews to leave for Israel. It was rare for Soviet citizens to be able to emigrate. Nevertheless, they didn’t really care for Jews, especially not the problematic ones. I guess my dedushka was problematic.
In 1973 my dedushka, my babushka (his wife), my aunt, and my mother made Aliyah from Ukraine to Israel.
First they travelled to Austria. From Austria they flew to Israel.
My babushka told me the story of when they finally got a glimpse of the Israeli coast
And they said on the speakers, ‘Here, there are the lights of Israeli land. It’s the Israeli airport. And I had to wake up your mother (5-years-old) and she started crying. She was asleep. Poor kid. And Dad, Dedushka, was crying also. He’s coming to Israel. And they started playing that ‘Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.’ And he said ‘That music brought me to Israel.’
This was their Exodus. They were free.
The Gelman’s lived in Israel for 2 years but my dedushka never stopped dreaming about coming to America. All his cousins were there. It was the opposite of the land he despised. It was the land of opportunity.
The Gelmans moved to America in 1975. My dedushka was able to meet his cousins for the first time. They are the offspring of his aunts and uncles who left during the Revolution.
What comes next is a classic example of the American Dream.
His business moved out of his basement and into a shared building with a flower shop. Eventually, he bought the whole building. My parents met and began working for him. The one-man-show was now a father, daughter, and son-in-law. They continued to grow.
I remember “helping” my dedushka work as a child. I would sit at his desk as he tinkered with an indicator. His hands were always stained with that black grease. The smell of metal filled the room.
It only makes sense in the end.
I enjoyed those moments as a child but only now do I understand how much he enjoyed them- only after I learned his story.
When he was 11, his sister buried their father. My dedushka sat, crying, eating that little piece of food.
When I was 11, I sat at my dedushka’s side, in his business that he built from nothing, my father, mother, and brothers there as well. A full, prosperous, healthy family.
My hand would get too close to a sharp tool.
“Be careful!”
Only now do I know the true meaning of his words.
I love you too, Dedushka.
Here I am today, 23-years-old. I am a combat soldier in the Israeli army.
I recently received my placement in the army. I am in the Nahal Infantry Brigade. It was my first choice.
So far I have had about 2 weeks of basic training. We are just getting started. Most time isn’t spent doing crazy marches or shooting. That will come in due time.
We clean, learn about the structure of the unit, and work on discipline. Nevertheless, my heart is not big enough to contain the pride that I feel.
I am a combat soldier in the Jewish Army. My base is located in the Judaean Desert. Yes, that Judaean Desert. The one from the Bible. The one that our kings and people ruled thousands of years ago.
There was a sandstorm the other week. Our eyes and throats burned from the dust.
That day was also Israeli Election Day.
It was beautiful and perfect.
I get to live out the dream. The dream of my ancestors- to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion, Jerusalem.
I was born on January 15, 1998, my dedushka’s 65th birthday.
We share the same blood but our lives are worlds apart.
In 1944, my family was dying because they were Jews. In 2021, I am living because I am a Jew.
The miracles happening in our lifetime are near biblical proportion.
These miracles take work and I am prepared to put in that work.
As I write this I sit, on base, in uniform.
I have just begun the most dangerous yet fulfilling journey of my life.
Dedushka, I can hear you from beyond the grave:
“Be careful!”
I promise I will.
I love you too.
