The Shem Olam Holocaust Institute in Kfar Haroeh received this week an amulet that survived the inferno of the Holocaust and was dedicated by a son to his mother in the Lodz ghetto.
On the pin, the son engraved a drawing of the ghetto, emphasizing the fence that surrounded the ghetto and the watchtower. The son also engraved the foreign letters LW on the pin, which apparently symbolize the mother's first and last name.
It is estimated that the amulet was made in the ghetto in March 1943 from a coin, and was given as a gift from a son to his mother so that she would have a memento of him - in case he was sent to a death camp. It is also estimated that the rest of the family, including the father and other brothers who were of working age - were sent to the death camps in 1942 - before the brooch was made.
Both the son and his mother were sent to extermination camps in 1944, about a year after the pin was made.
This amulet provides another perspective on the spiritual strength of Jews, who lived their lives under the Nazi inferno and yet managed, from the depths of evil, to maintain warmth and humanity.
The Lodz ghetto was one of the largest ghettos in Poland, and over 165,000 Jews lived within it, over an area of about 2.5 square kilometers, in terrible density.
This week we marked the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto, of which, out of the 204,000 Jews who were in it throughout its entire period of operation, only about 10,000 survived.
Rabbi Avraham Krieger, who heads the Shem Olam Institute for Holocaust Research, Education and Commemoration, said in response to the discovery: "The moving discovery tells a love story between a son and his mother who wanted more than anything, through oppression and extermination, to remember each other in one of the most crowded and cruel ghettos in Poland. Although they did not survive - the memory of their love survived the inferno.".
"It seems as if this amulet comes to remind us, especially in the days when the bereavement from the dead of Operation Protective Edge is still fresh, that we must at all costs preserve the spark of our unity.".
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