Yiskor Appeal 2025 / Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? By Felicia Schneberg

YISKOR APPEAL

by Felicia Schneberg

October 2, 2025

Almost exactly 20 years ago, I stood up here and made the Yiskor appeal whose theme was:

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

We’ve all heard that question asked numerous times in the course of a service. Well, next month would have been my dad’s 100th birthday and I’d like to honor him by re-telling his story. And as I speak, I ask you to reflect on this question: Who in your life has been confronted with life or death situations? Who has succumbed and who has survived?

The date is November 9, the year is 1938, the place is the Great Synagogue in Danzig, Poland. My father, Manek Feldman, was conducting his Bar Mitzvah when a brick was thrown through the window – glass raining down upon him. Hitler wanted this port area of

the Gdansk region of Poland to be ceded to Germany. This date became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

September 1, 1939, the war breaks out when the Nazi’s invade Danzig. My father, his father, mother and sister, are forced from a life of what we would call upper class living into a life on the run. Moving from one town to another eventually moving from a larger Warsaw ghetto to ever smaller ghetto quarters… yet they persevered. Somewhere between July and September of 1942, my grandfather was seized in a raid. My father pleaded with the soldiers not to take him and that he would do whatever they wanted. They hit him on the head with a stick and sent my grandfather on a cattle car to Treblinka, an extermination camp, never to be heard from again.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

Around April of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto is being systematically set on fire, building by building, until the inhabitants of the buildings, who were all in hiding, had to flee from their protective nests into the sewers to avoid being overcome by smoke from the fires. After an indeterminant amount of time, when they needed to get some fresh water, my grandmother ventured out to find some and she was captured. When my father learned of this, he and his sister gave themselves up at the railroad station. Why that day they were not shot on sight was anybody’s guess but they reunited with their mom, got herded onto a cattle car and got sent to the concentration camp called Majdanek.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

Now my father, as I said came from a rich family and as such had the usual accoutrements of this type of lifestyle such as watches, gold jewelry, etc. which they were able to smuggle onto the train. Once in camp, my father hid a small bag of the jewels behind some coal and later, when he had an opportunity, he disclosed its whereabouts to the guard in charge of this section of the camp. Could he have been killed for daring to speak? Most assuredly. Yet this Nazi not only helped my father with additional rations of bread for him and his mother and sister, but also gave my dad THE most coveted of work assignments, as a “kettle vasher”, in the inner sanctum, the kitchen, which allowed

him to eat and be able to feed his mom and sister as well.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

This arrangement didn’t last very long, 2-3 months at most, when his mom and sister “disappeared” and he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he worked hard labor on the road leading to the gas chambers and ovens which he said were working all the time. The majority of Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their death immediately after their arrival there. Somehow my father did not, he survived.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

My father began to hang out near the kitchen for any scraps of food they would toss him. The workers there were all non-Jews who didn’t speak any German. One day they rounded up all these men and inadvertently picked up my father as well and took them to another concentration camp. Here these Polish prisoners were allowed to write home for supplies but only in German and my father, being the only one that could write in German, became the official letter writer for all of them. Of course, he would get rewarded with a share of the goods that arrived and so my father became a pretty “wealthy” man. He

actually had a body guard, if you will, the biggest, baddest Pole in the camp who watched over him. He also began to barter for other things they couldn’t get with what they had.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

He remained in this coal mining camp for a number of years, until one cold Polish winter day the Nazis learned that the Russian army was approaching. Taking only those prisoners who could walk and killing the rest, they forced them to pull or push their carts towards Germany. This was called the Death March where most of the prisoners perished.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

At some point along the way, my father knew he was too weak to make it any further. As it happens, that night they stopped near an abandoned concentration camp. This was his chance. He escaped into the ruins and hid in a storage area under a brick building. Miraculously, when the Germans set the camp on fire the next day, it did not burn. Once the Nazis left, he found another escapee hiding in a vat of excrement, and the two of them traveled towards the Russian front until they came to an old farmhouse.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

This is in January of the year 1945. My dad is 19 years old. They were in the attic of this house, exhausted and famished, when they heard footsteps coming up the stairs but were too tired & frightened to move. Who, by the grace of God, opened the door? A Russian Jewish soldier with a hospital unit! Who would have known that a Russian Jewish doctor would come to his rescue! They fed him, gave him a uniform and a gun and he was made to fight with the Russian army against the Germans until the end of the war in September of that year.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

Eventually my dad made his way to the United States, became a US citizen, and actually served in our army as a Sergeant first class. He married my mom, a Brooklyn gal, in 1953 and had me in 1955. My brother, Steven, came along in 1958.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

In July of 1988, three weeks before my son Michael was to be born, my father passed away from non hodgekins lymphoma at age 62. Mom just passed in December of 2022 at age 92. I miss them both terribly.

In December of 2000, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Ductal and Lobular breast cancer, with 33 out of 45 lymph nodes involved. I had a very slim chance of survival. I underwent a 7 hour operation to have both breasts removed and had immediate reconstructive surgery. I began months of chemotherapy and radiation, even lying on the table as the

planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. We were under attack right here on our own soil.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

There’s a woman in this town who asked her husband to go into work late that day because she wanted to attend a PTA meeting that morning. He worked at the World Trade Center. He wasn’t there when the planes hit. That day, he lived.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

I don’t know the answer. None of us do. But I know this: despite all the efforts of all those who try to exterminate us, we are still here. Alive and well. Some of us a bit scarred but we…are…here. I know I could not have survived my ordeal without my loving family, my husband Ellis, my mother, and my children Michael and Marisa and the many of you out there in this audience. I don’t know what I would have done without my extended Manetto Hill Jewish Center family that took me to my chemo and doctors visits, and took my children to Hebrew school, and made dinners for me and my family. You are my family. We are all family in a religious sense in that we are all here because our ancestors, may they rest in peace, survived and bore children who bore children who bore children and so on and so on until we arrive at our lives today.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

Our children are now grown. Michael is married to a wonderful girl who just gave birth to our first beautiful grandson, Asher, 3 months ago. And our daughter, Marisa, at 32 years old, was a happily single physical therapist living on the upper East side in NYC when out of nowhere last year at this time, she was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer and had to endure months of surgery and chemotherapy. She got an emotional support dog, Ollie, to get her through that, as well as her friends, and I, of course, was by her side throughout the ordeal.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

I prayed that she would survive… and she did, only to find out a few months ago that her follow-up scan accidentally picked up 2 spots on her breast. Yup, breast cancer. It was in the early stages but because of her age they wanted to be very aggressive. So after major surgery & some recuperation, she just started what will be 5 months of heavy duty chemotherapy and radiation until next February. I’ll be leaving after break fast today to be with her for her 2nd chemo tomorrow.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

This last paragraph was written by Rabbi Marc Gellman of the God Squad after 9/11 and reprinted last month. I have paraphrased some of it to fit this speech. He said, “The Talmud and the African Masal tribe both teach the same wisdom – Sticks in the bundle are unbreakable. Sticks alone can be broken by a child.” The fears and sorrows of our

world today are so heavy they can break us if we try to bear them alone. But if we are bundled together we are unbreakable. We do more than merely survive, we shall overcome. We shall overcome the forces of hatred without allowing hatred to unbundle us. We shall overcome the forces of terror without allowing fear to unbundle us.

So, let us remember that the person next to you, in front of you, behind you is not merely a fellow congregant. They are a part of this bundle called Manetto Hill Jewish Center and that each and every one of you is the twine that binds us and saves us from becoming extinct. We are all survivors, individually, but together we are stronger!

Most of us are familiar with the TV show Star Trek and it’s Jewish, by the way, star, Leonard Nimoy. But how many of you are aware that the Vulcan V-shaped symbolic hand gesture that Spock invoked as his motto, Live long and prosper, comes from a Jewish blessing.

And so it is my wish for you to live long and prosper and use your prosperity to ensure that our house of worship is maintained by making a pledge in honor of all those who came before us and all those yet to come. God Bless each and every one of you. L’Shanah Tovah. May this new year bring to each of you good health, happiness and love always.

Amen.