Woodside woman’s family heirloom tells story of Holocaust survival

Professor Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz with her father’s shofar, which was blown in Auschwitz during the Jewish High Holidays 75 years ago. Photo by John Halpern/Courtesy of the Museum of Jewish Heritage

By Victoria Merlino

A Woodside-born woman spent her childhood unaware that her father’s shofar, a wind instrument used during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services, was blown in Auschwitz. Now, she is sharing her family heirloom  — and her father’s story — with the world.

Starting on Tuesday, Professor Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz will be loaning her family’s shofar to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park for its exhibition “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” Her father, Chaskel Tydor, was an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor.

"My modest five-foot-two father was a giant of a man who, because of his position as work dispatcher, managed to save hundreds of lives, and possibly more, in Auschwitz III-Monowitz during his years in Nazi camps,” said Baumel-Schwartz in a statement. 

Possession of shofars and other Jewish religious objects in Nazi concentration camps was punishable by death, but a group of observant Jewish people in Auschwitz kept one anyway. Tydor, in his position as the camp’s work dispatcher, was able to transfer their work detail to a distant part of the camp, so that they may be able to blow the shofar without drawing attention to themselves. 

“The shofar was a symbol of his powerful belief which he never lost throughout his years in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and his spiritual resistance. He always looked forward, never backward. He helped, encouraged and supported everyone he could, giving them hope for the future,” Baumel-Schwartz continued.

At first, Tydor did not see the shofar, as the prisoner who was said to have it denied it. However, during a “death march” from Auschwitz in January 1945, where as many as 15,000 prisoners died, a prisoner approached him and gave him the shofar wrapped in a cloth.

“Take it… I'm too sick to survive. Maybe you will make it. Take the shofar. Show them that we had a shofar in Auschwitz,” the prisoner told him, as Baumel-Schwartz recalls her father saying.

Tydor was able to hide the shofar until his camp was liberated in April 1945.

Tydor died in 1993, but his story and his shofar live on in Baumel-Schwartz, who is director of The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and a professor in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. 

“For more than two decades, the Museum of Jewish Heritage has sought to educate, inform, and illuminate, motivating all of us to reflect on the atrocities of the past and the world around us today,” said Bruce Ratner, chairperson of the museum’s board of trustees, in a statement. “Every artifact in this exhibition tells a story — of pain, of potential cut short, or of spiritual resistance — and presenting this shofar on the cusp of our High Holy Days illustrates that signs of hope can exist during even the darkest of times.”