by Marden Paru (Sarasota, FL)
Uncle Leon (Label) came to Phoenix in 1947 and lived with us.
He was the youngest and now the only survivor of the Parubansky family, barely a teen when he was sent to a concentration camp, and one of the very few out of several thousand prisoners to survive a Nazi death march to the Czechoslovakian border.
HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) took care of Uncle Leon in a displaced person’s camp after the defeat of the Nazis until he was able to connect with American relatives.
At the time that Uncle Leon arrived, we were a growing family of seven living together under a single roof. My parents built an addition to the house since, with only one bathroom and a shortage of bedrooms, we were bursting at the seams. So, a large dorm-like room with clothes closets and a bathroom was added, along with an evaporative cooler, which was installed on the new roof. Suddenly, our Culver Street house seemed huge and spacious to a child of seven.
With no knowledge of English, Uncle Leon was aided by my father in finding a job and subsequently learned a new marketable skill. At the poultry market where Dad worked as a shokhet (a butcher trained in kosher slaughtering), Leon learned to candle eggs. The skill was in how to locate blood spots in the yoke within the shells of the eggs, then discard those eggs and pack the remainder by the dozen. This led to learning Spanish, the primary language among the Mexican employees of the poultry establishment, and driving a truck to deliver eggs by the gross to local supermarkets and bodega grocery stores.
In the mid-50s Uncle Leon went east to find a Jewish wife and married Aunt Sally in 1959. The chuppah (literally canopy/the wedding ceremony) ironically took place in the Vilna Shul in Boston, a landsmanshaft synagogue founded by recent Lithuanian post-war immigrants who’d settled in Massachusetts.
Uncle Leon became an expert candler and did this for the remainder of his working career, which lasted sixty years, most of which were spent later in the Boston area, where he was reunited with family cousins and was also in the company of Uncle Joe and Aunt Esther, though they lived several towns apart.
Marden Paru is currently the Dean, Rosh Yeshiva and co-founder of the Sarasota Liberal Yeshiva, an adult Jewish studies institute, and a former instructor at the Sarasota-Manatee Jewish Federation’s Melton Adult Mini-School. He attended Yeshiva University, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Chicago, and was a doctoral fellow and faculty member at Brandeis University. Marden and his wife Joan are members of Temple Beth Sholom and Congregation Kol HaNeshama. To read more about Marden and Joan, visit: https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/news/newsletter/Hornstein-alumni-articles/My-1966-Computer-Arranged-Jewish-Marriage-by-Marden-Paru.html
The Jewish Writing Project 