Everlasting Life

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2026, and in observance of my father’s twentieth yahrzeit (anniversary of his passing), I offer these words and images – Everlasting Life.

My father is a Holocaust survivor. He was liberated from KZ (concentration camp) Mauthausen by US 11th Armor troops – Thunderbolt Division – on May 5, 1945. Despite the unimaginably black abyss from which he emerged, he chose a path of light to  create a new family and new life in a new country. 

He was my hero. I think about him every day.

“May his precious soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting life.”

Those words are etched at the base of the monument recently dedicated in my father Joseph’s memory. I’ve been thinking a lot about everlasting life since he died. I’ve now come to a better understanding of its meaning. In the beginning, I fully expected to feel lost and aching. Expressing similar pained emotions, two Jewish sages, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, composed these lyrics for their soulful song “America”:

I’m lost and aching and I don’t know why, 
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

When my journey of mourning began, it was also in New Jersey, and it was also on a highway. But it wasn’t the Turnpike, and I wasn’t counting cars. I was, however, numbly staring out the window of a small SUV as it cruised down Jersey’s Garden State Parkway on the way back from the cemetery where my father had just been laid to rest. Although traffic was flowing freely, our driver suddenly exited onto a side road. I turned to ask why the switch. He told me he grew up in New Jersey and loved driving the rural routes whenever he could. At that moment, I pictured my dad leaning over to give him the directions to turn off, just as he often did to me when I was driving, and just as he would have done if he was behind the wheel and the option of a more scenic route presented. I realized in that instant that I would never again take the quiet “road less traveled” without feeling my dad’s presence. So, despite the tears of the morning and the turbulence of the previous few months, and unlike the lost and aching souls in the song “America”, I smiled and turned to continue gazing out the window. Somehow I was happy and at peace.  

One day when sitting in synagogue for the daily morning service, I sensed my father’s presence once again, as I have on numerous other occasions. My eyes had momentarily drifted from the siddur (prayer book) and fixed on the beautiful aron kodesh (ark containing the Torah scrolls) in front of me. A smile spontaneously spread across my face. What happened to elicit such a pleasurable diversion? Among his many talents, my dad was a master craftsman. One of his last creations, at age 87, was building a commissioned aron kodesh for his own congregation. In the exuberance to complete the project, he made an errant cut with a power saw and it needed to be disguised with just a slight, undetectable modification of design. This scenario of an “excitement faux-pas and correction” did occur occasionally in his creations. When he told me what happened, I invoked the traditional carpenter’s mantra, “Remember, you measure twice and cut once, not the other way around.” This interchange had long ago become a standing joke between us. For added emphasis, I added that in my surgical work, I typically measure three or four times before an incision is made, never the other way around. With all of our kidding aside, I always learned a lot standing alongside my dad watching him work. As a teen I often begrudged having to spend my time being his assistant, steadying the wood as he sawed those knotty-pine boards for renovations around our home and other such jobs. But that is how I developed an appreciation for the beauty of wood and finer points of woodwork.

And later it was for photography, of which he was also a master. So now, whenever I take in the aroma of fresh sawdust, or whenever I hear the soft metallic whisper click of my camera’s shutter, I know he is there. His presence will always be with me. It is everlasting.

My father lived to an old age, but he never became an old man. He was vibrant, independent, fiercely loving of family, incredibly creative & artistic, and wise with the fundamental precepts of Judaism to the end. I will always be grateful for and inspired by that full life. 

As I said, he was my hero.

“May his precious soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting life.”