adamrdavis

Like Most Jews, I lost family in the Shoah, mine at Babi Yar and in Pinsk.  I had the moving experience helping transcribe the Pinsk Ghetto Census taken by the German Ensatzgruppen before its 17,000 inhabitants, mostly women, children and elderly (the nearly 11,000 Jewish men 11-60 were taken and killed before the ghetto was established) were murdered in 1942.  I normally try to read the names of my relative at the annual Lakeview community commemoration but I couldn’t make it this year. 

I instead caught a PBS special on Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara.  Sugihara was the Japanese Schindler, a Righteous Gentile who as “Japanese Consul to the Independent State of Lithuania” until 1940, issued thousands of transit visas to Polish and Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas, thus helping them to get to Japan and Shanghai, supposedly on their way to Curacao, which required no entry visa and was thus a logical “destination” for Jewish refugees. 

There’ve been a few books and movies made on this subject, including Shanghai Ghetto, and there’s a park in Israel named for Sugihara.  The entire Mir Yeshiva was by Sugihara and nearly 50,000 Jews living today owe their lives to him, yet he is relatively unknown.  The entire Mir Yeshiva was by Sugihara.  He attended a Hanukah celebration with 11 year old Solly Ganor in Kauna, where he heard about the atrocities in Poland from a refugee staying with the Ganor family.  Sugihara eventually defied his government and issued a few thousand transit visas.  He likely would have written more, but as the sole member of the consulate, he was the only person who could write the difficult Japanese characters.

It’s a story that tells an interesting and relatively unknown chapter in the Shoah, a story of hope for mankind, and one which also highlights the relatively unknown wartime Jewish communities of Harbin China, Kobe Japan and Shanghai.

The last few weeks have been interesting to say the least.  My KFAR presentations, though well received, have been eclipsed financially by booking activities through j-arts.  I’m quickly seeing that presenting Jewish music in Chicago, while gratifying, is never going to by sole means of paransah without substantial sustained financial support for the established community or certain prominent members thereof.  Crumb found, paradigm shift.

The failure of my computer around Purim made a much needed clutter (crumb) removal of my hard drive, well, irrelevant.  It also forced me to rebuild a number of files and fined a better project tracking mechanism.  More crumbs removed.  I found two that seemed to work well.  Charlie Cheney’s Indie Band Manager and Act, though both work for different reasons.  I think I discarded a whole loaf of bread.  

I’ve gone through three boxes and four monstrous “stacks” of papers to file and somehow managed to put together a system that is sort of working to keep my halfway organized.  I’m shoveling flour out the window.  On another front, I’ve emptied five big storage boxes from my folks place and some old t-shirts from my closet.  Silos of wheat have disappeared.  Passover cleaning for me seems to be as much about mental clutter and “stuff” as it does literal chametz. 

Nothing could be more telling, however, than when I opened my desk drawer today to get a paper clip and came up with cookie crumbs.  I proceeded to empty the draw of its contents, wiped down the box, and replaced its contents sans chamtez.  There is something to this.