Remembrance Ambassadors in Jerusalem tell stories of surviving the Holocaust

There are not many people still with us who experienced the Holocaust first-hand. My own Vienna-born mother died recently at the age of 92, and she was one of the younger ones, escaping to England on a Kindertransport at the tender age of seven. That makes the January 23 (7 p.m.) date at the refashioned Beit Ha’am Cultural Hall – formerly Gerard Behar Center – on Bezalel Street all the more significant.

The event is the initiative of the Remembrance Ambassadors in First Person nonprofit established by Yehuda “Dudi” Ronen and takes place just four days before International Holocaust Day. The choice of venue was also premeditated. Sixty-three years ago, the original Beit Ha’am hosted the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

During the course of the evening, the audience will hear half a dozen ambassadors relate the Holocaust experiences of six survivors, interspersed by musical interludes. Ronen has a highly personal vested interest in the enlightenment program. 

“My father, Pinchas, was born – as Paul - in Antwerp, Belgium. He recently celebrated his 90th birthday,” he tells me. “He was near the end of first grade when the Nazis invaded.”

Ronen, a polished storyteller and playback improvisational theater actor, seasons the tale with intriguing tangential asides. 

The goal: document as many stories as possible before they're too late

“My father’s sister Chaya is 94, and my younger daughter Ravid, who is an actress, tells Chaya’s story in the first person.” No doubt that makes for an emotive listening experience, as will surely be the case next Tuesday evening.

Remembrance Ambassadors in First Person started around five years ago. 

The idea was to document as many Holocaust survivor stories as possible, before it is too late, and to disseminate them as far and wide as possible. The latter, Ronen figured, could be achieved by providing people of all ages with the technical skills to produce the evocative goods to audiences up and down the country and, hopefully, around the world too.

True to his entrepreneurial spirit, and extemporizational ability, he devised the suitable preparatory setup. 

“We established a special course with 10 sessions. Anyone who wants to tell a tale [of a Holocaust survivor] we teach them how to do that, how to organize the story, how to present it.”

By all accounts, Ronen et al. have done a pretty good job of that thus far and getting some of the purse string trustees on board in the process. 

“So far, we have trained 700 people as ambassadors,” he says. “Most of our [trainee] ambassadors get to us through the local or regional authority. At the moment, we have a course starting in Kfar Saba.” That must be particularly gratifying for local resident Ronen. “At long last, my mayor and I shook hands on this. It took me two and a half years to achieve that.”

It’s time for liftoff at Ronen’s home patch. “That means that 22 residents of Kfar Saba, who each paid NIS 600, and we are underway. The trainees will become ambassadors; we will continue to support them. We will connect them to the local community and the municipal education department, and schools, and the ambassadors will tell the stories, as volunteers, for the rest of their lives.” 

He has accrued plenty of experience in the field himself over the years, including at schools. On one such occasion, Ronen was faced with a particularly challenging situation, trying to spread the Holocaust survivors’ word while the teachers struggled to get their charges to pipe down and listen to him.

Ronen managed to tough it out, and duly did the business, thanks to a moment of improvisational inspiration. That not only restored decorum to the school session it also, eventually, spawned the Remembrance Ambassadors in First Person venture. 

“I have been telling my father’s story, first hand, for 15 years,” he notes. 

Children don't always cooperate, even when it's important

It didn’t always run according to plan. “I went to a school in Kfar Saba on Holocaust Day 15 years ago to talk to 120 kids about the Holocaust.” However, Ronen had to come up with a Plan B, in double-quick time, when matters got out of hand. 

“The teachers couldn’t get the children to keep quiet, and I couldn’t speak at all,” Ronen recalls. Drastic action was required. “I got up and started my talk with pantomime, and the children started quietening down. Suddenly I ‘saw’ my father standing in the doorway.” 

Pinchas Ronen, of course, hadn’t actually made the trip over from his home at Kibbutz Yavne but Ronen’s flash of thespian creativity was compelling enough to convince the rowdy youngsters that the Holocaust survivor had arrived to tell his tale. The then 45-year-old speaker was taking a leap of faith which, thankfully, not only worked on the day at the Kfar Saba school it generated the whole surrogate first hand storytelling venture. 

“When the kids were quiet I motioned [as if] to my dad to wait a bit and then I told the students my name and that my father had come to tell them about his Holocaust experiences. Then I turned a full circle and said: ‘Good morning children. My name is Pinchas and I am Dudi’s father. I came here to tell you my story.’” 

And so the ambassador’s die was cast. “I took them back to 1936-37, to ‘my’ earliest childhood memory, from Belgium to France then across the Pyrenees, to Haifa and Atlit,” says Ronen sketching his nonagenarian father’s long and winding road to salvation. 

“I knew the trick had worked when one of the 6th-grade kids raised his hand to ask a question and addressed me as Pinchas, not Dudi.”

The vast majority of the ambassadors are the children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, although Ronen says the program also chronicles the life-saving deeds of Righteous of the Nations. 

Ronen’s own sister, Racheli Merhav, tells people up and down the country about how a French woman by the name of Germaine Chesneau was recognized by Yad Vashem for saving not only Merhav and Ronen’s dad but also another 137 Jewish children. That gripping tale is in Tuesday’s Beit Ha’am lineup 

For Ronen, the evening, which features a recorded message from President Isaac Herzog, is not just about keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. The program credo has broadened in the wake of recent global political developments. 

Since October 7, and the wave of global antisemitism and the continued Holocaust denials, it has now become even more important to tell these stories,” he says. “We were aiming for 2,000 ambassadors. Now we want to get to 10,000 ambassadors who will spread across the world.”

Ronen cites a giant of the field as a powerful motivating force. 

“Two years before Elie Wiesel died, in 2014, he was asked what would happen when there were no more Holocaust survivors left. They said no one would believe it happened. Wiesel said that the younger generations have to start telling those stories, right now, and they would be best told first-hand.” 

Ronen and his cohorts have certainly got that one right.

For tickets and more information: tickchak.co.il/56397?ref=13BW