In Memoriam

Yehoshua-Shiyye Hochman, 1906-2005

Mania Kalmanovich-Hochman, 1917-2007

My paternal grandfather, Yehoshua-Shiyye (Joshua) Hochman, was born in September 1906 in Piaski – a Jewish shtetl east of Lublin in Russian-occupied Poland. He was the second of five children born to Peretz and Rosa Hochman. In 1914 World War I broke, Peretz was called up to the Tsarist military reserve, and eight-year-old Shiyye had to leave school and start working as a shoemaker’s apprentice. The war years passed in desperate poverty. In 1919 Peretz returned from the war. Shiyye, already a teenager, continued to work and to support the family.

Shiyye became a master shoemaker, specializing – among other things - in shoes for unusual feet and in cavalry boots. He employed several helpers in his workshop, and received orders from neighboring villages and towns. In 1934 Shiyye married Esther Berger, daughter of a well-educated, highly respected town council member.   They had two sons: Menachem (1936) and Moshe (1937).

In fall 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Piaski being far from the German front, the uncertainty was great and most locals stayed put. After a few weeks, a Soviet convoy passed through town. The Nazis and Soviets divided Poland, and in the Lublin area the Soviets have overstepped the agreed boundary. One officer from the retreating convoy approached the local Jews and urged them to join the convoy, rather than stay behind and suffer a terrible fate. After consulting with his mother and his sister, Shiyye decided to heed this advice. Together with Esther, her two younger sisters and the two toddler boys, they boarded a cart provided by the Soviet officer and headed east. They never again saw anyone from their families who stayed behind (most of Piaski’s residents were sent to the Belzec death-camp in March 1942).

During the trip east Moshe’s leg was crushed, but he fortunately recovered. Upon reaching the USSR, Shiyye decided that unlike most other Polish refugees, he prefers to become naturalized as a Soviet citizen. His wish was granted, and the family was sent to northern Russia, some 200 km east of Leningrad (now St. Peterburg). During the week, Shiyye worked in a shoemaking collective in a small town, and on weekends he would walk 20 km through the forest to his family in the village. They were the only Jewish family in the district, but the locals showed no hostility. However, the economic situation was dire and the isolation great. In summer 1941, the Nazis invaded the USSR; shortly afterwards Shiyye was drafted to the Red Army as a civilian professional, and the young family lost its provider. Fortunately, after a while Shiyye managed to procure a release and returned to his family until the end of the war.

After the war they returned to Poland, not to Piaski but to a town in western Poland where Jewish institutions still existed. In 1950 they boarded a ship and reached the newly-formed state of Israel. They were settled in an immigrant camp in Kfar Saba, a small town 20 km northeast of Tel Aviv. Shiyye (from now on called in his Hebrew name, Yehoshua) immediately resumed work as a shoemaker. Their children’s schooling having suffered from repeated migrations, Yehoshua and Esther were frustrated to see them sent to a special immigrant school with low-quality teachers. After intense lobbying, Menachem and Moshe were allowed into the town’s regular school, and their success there opened the way to the rest of the camp’s children to join the following year.

In 1955 Menachem graduated from high school and was drafted to the Israel Defense Forces. In March 1956 he died in a training accident. Later that same year, Moshe was drafted, joining the academic-military program. In 1959, Moshe married Rachel Oppenheim. They have four children – Ahikam-Menachem (1964), Assaf (1966), Hagit (1969) and Udi (1976).

In 1958, the city of Kfar Saba leased Yehuoshua a small hut in the yard of the Central Synagogue, as a shoemaking workshop. The lease was long-term and symbolically priced, in appreciation of the family’s sacrifice. Yehoshua’s workshop soon became a popular meeting point, where people converged to have shoes made or mended and exchange some gossip.

During the late 1970’s, Esther became ill. Yehoshua tended to her until her death in summer 1980.

Mania Kalmanovich was born in November 1917, the eldest child of Haim and Haya-Rocha Kalmanovich. She was born in a shtetl near Polotsk (now in Belarus). The country was going through the Bolshevik Revolution, which – in some areas far from the capital – lasted several years. A counterrevolutionary White Russian militia passed through Haim and Haya-Rocha’s town, murdering Haim and two dozens other Jews. Mania was not yet four years old.

A few years later, Haya-Rocha married again. The new husband would not have Mania and her sister Sima at home, and they were sent to a Jewish orphanage in Polotsk, being eight and six years old at the time. Fortunately, the orphanage was run by kind-hearted people and Mania had fond memories of the place. After the orphanage, Mania and Sima moved to a vocational school in Minsk, and then worked in Minsk as seamstresses. In 1937, Mania’s step-father disappeared; later the family learned that he was taken to one of Stalin’s gulags.

In 1941 the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Exactly then, Mania was on vacation at her mother’s in Polotsk; she recalled unsuccessfully urging Sima to join her. (Minsk was closer to the front, and Mania never saw Sima again.) Anticipating what was to come, Mania and her mother set out on foot, eastward away from the front. They walked hundreds of kilometers before managing to use other forms of transportation. Like many refugees from the front, they spent the war in Soviet Central Asia. They suffered hunger, and Mania’s mother died there.

After the war, Mania moved north to Vilnius and married a wounded Jewish war veteran named Glazeris. They had one son, Yefim-Haim. Mania worked as a team leader in a factory. When Yefim was 14 years old, Glazeris died. After retiring, Mania obtained a Soviet permit to emigrate to Israel. She arrived in Kfar Saba in 1980.

Despite not being a devout Orthodox Jew, Yehoshua heeded Kfar Saba’s Orthodox Rabbi’s advice to marry again.  He was introduced to Mania and married her in April 1981. They had many good years together, going on vacations inside Israel and to Eastern Europe every year. When the Soviet Bloc collapsed, they visited Vilnius together and met Mania’s son there. Yehoshua was the healthier of the two. He continued working full-time at his shoemaking hut, tending to Mania when she was ill. Mania became a loving step-grandmother and step-great-grandmother to us and to our children. In 1996, at the age of 90, Yehoshua underwent coronary bypass surgery, being one of the oldest people in Israel to have gone through the procedure at the time. Thereafter, he reduced his workload to part-time. However, he continued to be the energetic and resourceful head of family he had always been.

In early 2001, Yehoshua rushed out of home on a rainy Friday to do some last-minute errands. He ran down an alley, not realizing that recent renovations have replaced the sloping pavement with stairs. He fell, broke his shoulder and lost his eye. From that moment on, he had never regained his full health.

Yehoshua and Mania continued living in their home, but now received daily assistance. Occasionally, one of them was hospitalized. In summer 2005 Yehoshua became seriously ill. He died in November 2005. Our youngest son, born January 2006, is called Ben Joshua in his memory.

Years before that, as old-world professions became steadily less common, teachers started bringing their classes to see the shoemaker at work. This inspired Yehoshua to try and turn his workshop into a small museum after he ceases to work there. In 1998 he obtained an agreement in principle from City Hall. A few years later, an open-hearted and energetic city curator began work on a “Heritage Trail” through downtown. She immediately became fascinated with Yehoshua’s personality and with his workshop. Starting 2001, in joint efforts by the curator, local students and our family, the workshop has been gradually renovated. The renovation is not yet complete, but the shoemaker’s workshop is already a regular stop on “Heritage Trail” tours.

After Yehoshua’s death, Mania continued to live with the couple’s personal assistant. In September 2007, on the eve of Jewish New Year, she became seriously ill, was hospitalized and died a few days later.

I was fortunate to have loving relationships with all my grandparents – Esther, Yehoshua and my maternal grandparents Lotte (1908-1989) and Julius (1904-1993), who were no less wonderful - and with my step-grandmother. My relationship with Yehoshua and Mania was unique, both in that they had grown in such a different world from the privileged and prosperous one in which I grew up, and in that my two older children got to know them, at least a little bit.

Yehoshua never had any formal schooling beyond a couple of years in a traditional early-childhood heder. He taught himself to read, spoke three languages fluently, and had managed to speak the fourth one – modern Hebrew, which he encountered later in his life – well enough to do business with Middle Eastern Jewish customers and suppliers. He saw it as his life’s mission to have highly educated descendants; a point he had never failed to remind us, of course. Mania never learned to read and write properly, and never got the hang of Hebrew. However, she tolerated my broken Yiddish and opened her heart to me and to my family.

Yehoshua and Mania have taught me humbleness; what it means when life truly humbles you, and how to bounce back. But also pride - in who you really are, in your ability to face adversity and provide for your loved ones - and dedication and devotion to family.

May their memory be blessed.