The Jewish Writing Project

By Elaine Freilich Culbertson (Philadelphia, PA)

My mother was extremely superstitious, and her superstitions guided much of what went on in our home. We were held to certain behaviors, what we should and should not do and most importantly how to overcome bad luck. Spitting three times (pooh, pooh, pooh) was a regular practice whenever compliments were given or received. We couldn’t whistle in the house or sit on a made bed. We couldn’t open an umbrella inside or step over someone’s feet. If my mother was fixing a hem on a dress I was wearing, I had to chew on a thread to keep my wisdom from being sewn away. Babies could not be held up to mirrors and if you sneezed while someone was talking about a dead person, you had to pull your left ear up to avoid the angel of death. Never hand a knife to someone with the edge out and most importantly don’t take a direct path home from the cemetery lest the angel of death follow you.

My mother used to say that when a baby falls, an angel swiftly glides underneath to cushion the impact. She believed there were angels and was particularly well-versed in how to recognize and avoid the angel of death. I liked the idea of angels being on guard for babies, angels whose wings provided safety, but I was never sure what to think about the angel of death, in Yiddish the “malachomovitz.” Death was inevitable, this I understood. Outwitting the “malachomovitz?” How could a mere mortal do that? To say someone looked like or acted like the angel of death was the greatest insult. To get the better of the angel of death was the greatest heroic feat.

One day my mother and I were assured of the presence of angels when I told her about an eerie incident that had occurred on the off ramp at 22^nd St. and I-676 in Center City Philadelphia.

It was on the way home from work in the western suburbs during rush hour that I was exiting I-676 to my home in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. I had the reverse commute – everyone coming out of the city while I was coming back in from the suburbs. The myth was that there was less traffic going in that direction, but it wasn’t the truth. Each evening the crawl from I-95 onto 676 seemed to last longer than the evening before. On this night, I was aware as I crept up the highway of how the seasons were changing. The sun had started to set earlier each day as it does when fall fades into winter. It was that time of day when shadows and objects can play tricks on one’s perception, when the sun can blind you with its brilliance as you are driving and then suddenly disappear from the horizon, leaving only the first wan glow of illuminated streetlights as guides. Things look different at that time of day and the eye can be fooled by the descending darkness. I’ve heard it called “the gloaming,” that romantic time of day when the light has mostly faded but it’s not quite dark yet, a time when on this night I was fumbling for my headlights, realizing that I thought I saw a person standing on the 22^nd St. ramp.

As I approached, what had been an almost amorphous figure resolved into the shape of a woman clad only in a short-sleeved shirt and a long skirt that almost touched the ground. Her hair was blowing in the wind. It was a chilly day, but she had no coat or outer garment to protect her from the oncoming night air. The expression on her face was one of distress. She was attempting to stop cars as they drove up the ramp, indicating with her hands that drivers should roll down their windows to listen to her pleas. No one was complying. This was years before the stop light had been installed at the top of the ramp, and it was always a bit of a free-for-all as cars tried to merge onto 22^nd St. The drivers that evening had no intention of stopping for her and as she grew more frantic, she stepped further and further into the lane of traffic. 

By the time I reached the top of the ramp she was in front of my car, determined to stop me. I rolled my window down and asked her to step aside. She shook her head and began retelling her story of why she was on the ramp. Her car was on the road below, just past the off ramp, broken down. She needed money to get home. Any amount would help. She insisted that she was not a beggar, but a commuter who had a sudden mishap.

Something about her touched my heart. I hated seeing women in desperate straits. A homeless woman on the street was a more pathetic sight to me than a man. Her vulnerability seemed double that of a man in the same dilemma. I imagined myself in her situation. I wondered if anyone would stop for me. Certainly, I was better dressed, but in that helpless moment might I have left my coat in the car and started walking, hoping someone would help? 

I told her I would give her $10 if she would step away from my car. The tears were running down her face as she mouthed a thank you. I found $10 in my wallet and handed it to her. If that was all it took to save her in this moment, then I didn’t feel I had been duped in any way. 

The cars behind me were beeping furiously. How dare I stop to help this street person! How rude of me to extend their commute time by even 10 seconds, for that was all the time it took.

“Please get off the ramp!” I was sure she could hear the insistence in my voice.

“I will,” she replied, and as I started to drive away, I lost sight of her. 

I made the turn onto 22^nd St. and just as I was ready to pull through the first intersection on the Ben Franklin Parkway, a car traveling at ridiculously high speed ran through the red light, completely heedless of anyone, vehicle or pedestrian that might have the right of way.

I gasped. 

If I had been one second sooner onto the ramp and into the intersection, that car would have broadsided me, surely injuring or perhaps killing me.

Because I had stopped to help the woman on the ramp, I had been late to what might have been a dreadful fate.

That evening I called my mother, as I did each evening, to recount the day’s events. At this point in her life, she lived in a retirement home, and anything I might tell her was of great interest, as the days stretched out uneventfully for her.  When I told her about the woman on the ramp and the speeding car, she said very determinedly, “She was an angel.”

“Mom. I thought angels only helped little babies or led people to their deaths.”

“You are my baby. She didn’t let you get hurt. She was an angel. I am sure of it.”

Who knows, maybe she was. That angel of life had helped me outwit the “malachomovitz.”

Elaine Culbertson is the chair of the Pennsylvania Holocaust Education Council, a statewide organization of teachers, survivors, and liberators who volunteer to keep the lessons of the Holocaust alive in the schools of the state. She is a member of the Pennsylvania Act 70 Committee and a convener of the Consortium of Holocaust Educators in the Philadelphia region. Elaine represented the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Museum Fellow and a Regional Educational Consultant in the Mid-Atlantic. She presently provides professional development for teachers using Echoes and Reflections, a curriculum resource developed by the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and the Anti-Defamation League.

Elaine retired as the director of Curriculum and Instruction in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, ending a 36-year career in public education. She is the executive director of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. For the past 18 years she has served as program director of the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program, a seminar based in Poland and Germany, that has provided professional development to more than 1100 teachers in its 36-year existence. She works with teachers and students to connect the events of the past with the genocides of the present day. Elaine has written chapters in five different books on Holocaust teaching methods and lectured across the United States, using the story of her own parents’ survival as the basis for her presentations on developmentally appropriate and morally responsible pedagogy. She is working on a memoir that incorporates her mother’s writing with her own reflections on being the daughter of survivors.