On March 28, 1944, six-year-old Tatiana and her four-year-old sister Andra were roused from their sleep and arrested by German and Italian soldiers. With their grandmother, mother, aunt, and cousin, they were deported to Auschwitz, where Joseph Mengele performed deadly experiments on children. More than 230,000 children were deported to the camp, of whom only a few dozen survived.

Determined to keep track of her girls, their mother Mira, whose barrack was on the other side of Birkenau, managed, somehow, to visit them several times in the camp, each time repeating their names and telling them to “always remember your name.” By keeping this promise to their mother, the sisters were eventually reunited with their parents after the war.

When Aryeh Gross was born, a few years before the founding of the State of Israel, his birth certificate stated that he was born in Palestine. Years later, when he was in the USA and applied for his first passport, he put Palestine as his place of birth. The agent told him that he had never seen a Palestinian with a Jewish kippa, and then added in amazement, “There is no state called Palestine.” Aryeh replied, “That is what I wanted to hear from the State Department.”

There is an old Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times.” This is not necessarily a blessing, because interesting can be positive or negative. But no matter, our life experiences can teach lessons, and we can all learn to appreciate what another has experienced and thereby gain wisdom.

Menashe Shabtai is a well known and popular figure in our Baltimore community. Since I often daven at Beth Abraham-Herzberg’s, where he is the all-around “go-to guy,” the gabbai, chef, whatever-is-needed person, I decided to ask him about growing up in Israel. With the approach of the 56^th anniversary of the Six Day War, I was especially interested in his memories of that seminal event.

I want to thank the many people who expressed how much they appreciated my recent article about the history of our Baltimore community. In this generation, the number of strictly observant families is growing by leaps and bounds, bli ayin harah, and the younger generation, especially those who have moved here from out of town, are not aware of the history of Jewish Baltimore. History is comprised of events and dates, but history is not written in broad strokes alone; it is made by individuals. We are the beneficiaries of those who planted the seeds and whose harvest we now reap.

We frum Jews of Baltimore take pride in living in one of the strongest Orthodox Jewish communities in America. It’s also one of the oldest; Jews have lived in Maryland since 1729. This article is not a summary of that long and very interesting history, recounted in the new book, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore, by Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner. Rather, I propose to tell a number of short stories – episodes that stand out – that I found enlightening.

The recent passing of Rabbi Pinchos Stolper, z”l, the first full-time national director of NCSY, the youth arm of the Orthodox Union, brought back memories of a bygone era in my life. I remember lying awake in bed many years ago, while I was a student at the Israeli yeshiva Kerem B’Yavne, wondering, “How in the world did I get here?” This article will answer that question and discuss how and why NCSY awakened opportunities for me that I never imagined existed.

The clever title of this article is not original to me. It is the name of a book written in 1973 by humorist Sam Levenson about his own youth in the 1920s and ’30s. Just as he marveled at the changes in society, I too, though born in a different place and time, have, baruch Hashem, lived to see a very changed Jewish world than the one I grew up in.