Tuesday, May 22, 2012

May 6, 2012  JGSCV

From Venturing Into Our Past, June 2012 Issue 
(The newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County)




"...Sara Applebaum talked of her four-day visit to Poland.  Her father was born in Warsaw and the family lived in nearby towns.  She started her part of the program by reminding the audience of how her family escaped from Poland and went to Siberia and then Kyrgyztan, where she was born, and lived briefly in Poland after World War II-then Belgium and finally immigrated to the U.S.





On her trip to Warsaw, they found the house where her family lived before the war in 1939.  It is now an apartment house . 

In visiting where her mother's family came from, Lodz, they found the house her great grandfather lived in until 1892.  ...The current occupant refused them entry.


80 Pomorska Street  and its rose garden


Piotrkow Cemetery
Auschwitz


She noted the importance of going to Auschwitz to ...bear witness...that we did not all perish.

Sara Talked to JGSCV previously about her life story when she talked about her book Lost and Found, A Family Memoir, and her second book, a novel ... Pomorska Street.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

A You tube must see: MADEMOISELLE-KEREN HADAR-English

 


For those of you who have read and enjoyed POMORSKA STREET, you know there is an important theme in it of honoring the Virtuous Among the Nations and an important character named Lisette.  This You Tube video is a touching tribute to one such true case.  It brought tears to my eyes.

Take a look at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR6PC74--Is&feature=youtu.be
Then let me know what you think.

Friday, April 20, 2012



April 17, 2012

For those of you who attended the event at the Camarillo Library on Tuesday night, thank you.  I thought that Kate Sexton did a terrific job as moderator....and isn't that library beautiful!




I think I've figured out why some folks have been having difficulty logging on to the blog...the link is saraapplebaum.blogspot.com.  (there is no @)  If you're reading this, you've obviously found it.

Yeah

Friday, March 9, 2012

LDS church response-Jewish Journal

I was pleased to see a Letter to the Editor from the Jewish Relations Committee Southern California Public Affairs Council, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the March 9-15 Jewish Journal from which I quote as follows:
"...the LDS Church agrees that names of Jewish Holocaust victims should not be submitted for temple ordinances except by their direct descendants who have joined the church(a small group, to be sure).  Just last Sunday, a letter signed by the top three leaders of the church was read to every Mormon congregation in the world.  It reminded members of the policy on Holocaust name submissions, and listed possible sanctions that could be imposed on violators of the policy.  There has never been more than a minyan of Mormons worldwide who choose to violate this rule: 99,999999 percent of the 14 million Mormons living in 167 countries across the world honor the memory of Jewish Holocaust victims in the way that our Jewish friends have asked of us..."

Thursday, February 23, 2012

POSTHUMOUS CONVERSIONS OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS ATTEMPTED BY LDS CHURCH

Those of you interested in Genealogy may have seen some articles in the news lately, about the attempted posthumous conversion of well known Holocaust victims such as Anne Frank and parents of well known survivors such as Elie Wiesel. 

This is a Mormon practice that troubles many.  The LDS church officially promised to end the practice in 1995.  In spite of that, there are still a few isolated cases of it happening against the church's stated policy. 

As a genealogist who has benefited from the generous help of Mormon volunteers and from the work done by the LDS in rescuing and photocopying and digitizing many many records of Jews in Eastern Europe I find myself very conflicted.

There are millions of Mormons.  I suppose the actions of a few extremists, in such a large group, can be understood as hard to prevent totally.  According to what I've read, the Church approves it only if done by the descendants of the people being posthumously converted.   These descendants then stand in as proxies in the conversion ceremony.

Anne Frank died as a teenager and never had descendants, so there can be no pretense of even following their own rules.

As a Holocaust survivor, and the family member of a number of Holocaust victims, I find the whole idea of "converting" people who were killed because of their religion repugnant.  The concept of conversion by someone else's will also makes no sense to me at all.

I wish the LDS leadership would reconsider this practice, as some other past practices have been reconsidered in the past and then changed. I can't view it as anything less than disrespectful and offensive.



 

Sunday, February 5, 2012

SOME UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Wednesday, March 28, 2012 @ 11:30 a.m.
WOMEN'S INFORMATION NETWORKING OF SIMI VALLEY
Topic: Genealogy 
 Place: SUTTER'S MILL Restaurant
3885 Cochran St. suite A, Simi Valley Ca 93063
805-520-4797
Take Tapo Canyon off ramp from 118 FWY, go south to
Cochran St. then right (West)


Tuesday, April 17, 2012  @ 7:00 p.m.
THE CAMARILLO LIBRARY "Inside the Author's Story"
4101 Las Posas Rd. Camarillo CA 93010
(805) 388-5222, CAMARILLOLIBRARY.ORG

Sunday, May 6, 2012  @ 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
JEWISH GENEALOGY SOCIETY OF CONEJO VALLEY
meeting at Temple Adat Elohim,  2420 E. Hillcrest Dr.,Thousand Oaks, Ca
There will be several presenters...including me... speaking about
"Visiting your ancestral shtetl"
Check out the JGSCV website for more information

Sunday, May 20, 2012  @ 1:00-4:00 p.m.
THOUSAND OAKS LIBRARY "Authors' Panel"
in the Community Room.  More information to come





Thursday, February 2, 2012

WELCOME TO MY BLOG!








 Sara Borczuk Applebaum



SURVIVOR

GENEALOGIST

BEARER OF MEMORIES

TELLER OF TALES




Welcome to my blog.  You're here because...

A.     I invited you and you're a friend or a fellow writer or reader.

B.     You've read one or more of my books and want to comment or ask a question or see what I'm up to.
 
C.     You share my interest in genealogy or history or writing or travel.

D.     You may be or know a Holocaust survivor and don't want to see the stories lost.        

E.     You like reading good stories.

F.     You heard me speak somewhere and want to know where I'll be next or what my next project is.

G.    You want to contribute information or share some news about what's going on in the   world related to any of the subjects listed above.

Mechanics:  I'm new at this but it seems that the last post appears first.  When you get to the end, look for the icon that says "More" or "Older Posts". 


Hope you like it.  If you know more about blogging than I do (which wouldn't be hard) feel free to make suggestions.


Sara








PRESS RELEASE


RETIRED... TO RESEARCHER... TO WRITER
With time to think and perspective to reflect, local retired educator delves into her family’s dramatic past...from Warsaw to Siberia...from a lumbering camp in the Archangel Forest to Kyrgyzstan.

The generation of survivors of World War II is fast coming to an end and telling its stories is becoming a compelling need.  “Baby Boomers, in general, are expressing their need to understand who they are and where they came from.” (Ancestry Magazine Nov. 1999)

“Who Do You Think You Are?”  a show on NBC  has an audience of between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 viewers.  The Internet and sources like Ancestry.com provide easily available resources to a hungry audience with possibilities they never had before to seek answers to their questions.

One local retiree went from delving into her family’s past to writing its story, published as LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir in December 2010.  It tells of escaping Warsaw under attack...deportation ... a three month trek in cattle cars to Siberia...her birth in Kyrgyzstan.  Not every Holocaust story happened in Concentration Camps.  This one included a father fighting with partisans and a mother so desperate to have her children survive that she threatened suicide to have them accepted at an orphanage, where they were less likely to starve.


























That book was followed by a work of fiction called POMORSKA STREET just published.  Both available in print and E-book on Fastpencil.com and Amazon.com

A World War 2 survivor, anticipating death, passes a debt of honor on to her granddaughter, a duty to remember and honor one who did not stand by in silence the blood of the innocent.
In trying to repay that debt, Clara goes to Poland and there she learns of her grandmother’s gut wrenching experiences as a young teen in the resistance.
People with long memories and longer resentments ensnare her in a dangerous struggle to determine what is true and what is not...who is friend or lover and who is treacherous. ...and how she herself can survive it all.


 

           

# # #

CONTACT INFORMATION

Email LAUSDAP@AOL.COM



Sara,

Congratulations on your achievement. You’ve told a haunting story that weaves together the Holocaust, survival, memory, guilt, expiation, legacy, and, in the end, a qualified triumph.
I admire how you’ve taken your own story and imagined it into a fictional one that combines the past and present in a way that will touch many people - people who may know something about the Holocaust, but who see it only as something that happened in the past…a more and more distant past.
And by keeping it so personal, so much a story of a few sharply drawn characters, you have followed in the tradition of The Diary Anne Frank and Schindler’s List. The scale of the Holocaust, like that of so many catastrophes, is literally unimaginable, and people turn away from it. But by focusing on one small story in that terrible time, you have created a reality that everyone can understand and feel, as they read of the near-unbelievable things that happened to people not so different, really, from themselves.

Suzanne Zaharoni
Author of See You Next Time!



FASTPENCIL.COM  or  AMAZON.COM 
Available in Print and E-book

SARA BORCZUK APPLEBAUM



POMORSKA STREET

A World War 2 survivor, anticipating death, passes a debt of honor on to her granddaughter, a duty to remember and honor one who did not stand by in silence the blood of the innocent.

In trying to repay that debt, Clara goes to Poland and there she learns of her grandmother’s gut wrenching experiences as a young teen in the resistance.

People with long memories and longer resentments ensnare her in a dangerous struggle to determine what is true and what is not...who is friend or lover and who is treacherous. ...and how she herself can survive it all.