My father spent his teenage years in the Chestochowa ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps of Dora, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. During those years, he lost his parents, four of his five siblings and, undoubtedly, all of his dreams. One of the clearest memories of my bar mitzvah was my father’s tears as he sat alongside my mother with my brother and sister in our synagogue. At the time I did not know why he was crying. It was not until years later that I learned he had never had the privilege of becoming a bar mitzvah.
Thirteen years ago, at the bris of my eldest child, Joshua, my father told me of a dream he was having. He dreamt of witnessing Joshua becoming a bar mitzvah.
Last December, my parents were called to the Torah for an aliyah as their grandson, Joshua, became a bar mitzvah. It was a moment that my father could not have imagined during the darkest moments of his life. Nearly sixty-three years after he was liberated, holding the bima for support, he watched and listened to his grandson chant from the Torah.
This time, it was I who cried.
Rabbi Harold Kushner teaches that a key to dreaming is to recognize that when dreams do not come true, you should dream new dreams.
To this day, my father has not stopped dreaming new dreams. In fact, as we walked out of the synagogue the morning of Joshua’s bar mitzvah, my eighty-one-year-old father was dreaming again. This time…of Joshua’s wedding.
David Woznica is a Rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple in L.A. www.wisela.org
