Zoe Bell and Braden Hamelin | Staff Writers
Jennifer Loew Mendelson was 8 when she asked her father why she had never met his siblings. That was when Mendelson learned that her father had survived the Holocaust.
“‘I don’t get it; I’ve met Mom’s sisters, but where are yours?’ It was the first time I asked that question, and he literally turned around and cried,” Mendelson said. “He didn’t tell me the answer; I didn’t know. But I knew something [had] happened.”
Decades later, Mendelson said she still thinks and cries about this moment: “It is impactful in a really meaningful way.”
Her father’s death in 2022 prompted Mendelson to act.
In July 2023, she co-founded Living Links, the first national organization for grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. In May, Living Links announced a partnership with the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing Holocaust stories.
“We have to do this,” Mendelson said. “There wasn’t any institution, Jewish or otherwise, that understood what it meant to be a descendant [of a Holocaust survivor].”
Almost a dozen independent third-generation — 3G — groups, formed within the past decade joined to create Living Links. Its goals include cultivating and building 3G communication across the United States, educating through a speaker training program and advocating using the “unique voices” of descendants of Holocaust survivors.
Mendelson said having these 3G groups and sharing the memory of Holocaust survivors is especially important with the global surge in antisemitism and horror felt by Jews and survivor families after the Oct. 7 attacks: “We were shaken to the core.”
The speaker training program, created by 3GNY in 2010, mentors 3Gs in learning and sharing their families’ stories with schools, organizations and community groups, according to the Association of Holocaust Organizations’ website.
“It’s a pretty intense program,” said Amy Wexler, content strategist at the USC Shoah Foundation. “They’re really learning and honing their grandparents’ stories to share, and they’re being critiqued by their peers and the facilitator. So it’s a pretty big time commitment and a personal commitment.”
The partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation is attempting to build the infrastructure of Living Links as a national organization, getting it the knowledge and employees to be successful, according to Catherine Clark, senior director of programs at the Shoah Foundation.
The two organizations came together and began planning for a partnership shortly after Living Links was founded, as the two organizations share near-identical missions.
“We have experience in Holocaust education, we have experience in content delivery, we have experience in incorporating ideas around contemporary antisemitism into how you teach the Holocaust. And we have experience with fundraising and simply infrastructure like staffing personnel, these nuts and bolts of running an organization and we can help them,” Clark said. “This important project didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
By this year’s end, about 150 3Gs will be trained in the speaker training program, and more than 500 3Gs have been trained since then.
The educational portion doesn’t teach European history or chronology but rather what happens when people make decisions based in bigotry and prejudice — such as the choices that led up to the Nazi regime.
Mendelson said by having 3G speakers go into classrooms and speak at events, the story of the Holocaust becomes personalized. It turns the Jews killed from a statistic into human beings for audiences.
Living Links aims to teach about bigotry and hatred, Mendelson said.
“Nothing sticks like a story … We’re there to help students understand how they can make better choices and make the world a better place by telling our family stories,” she said.
Mendelson said the 3G demographic is important in keeping the memory of survivors alive as the number of living survivors dwindles, and 3Gs were the first generation to hear their grandparents’ stories, starting notably around the 1990s.
Rachel Lipman, Mendelson’s niece and a member of 3GDC, one of the 14 affiliates of Living Links, is a trained speaker who shares her grandfather’s story. She is one of an estimated 1 million grandchildren of Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. and found the 3G community through Mendelson.
Lipman shared her grandfather, William Loew’s, story in a classroom of about 100 high school students in March 2023. Afterward, one student asked what a “death march” was, referring to forced evacuations of concentration camps.
“It was kind of shocking to me because I felt like I grew up learning about death marches my whole life, or at least since I was like 6,” Lipman said. “I realized at that point that there is a lack of understanding of what my grandfather went through and what all these survivors have gone through.”
Before that, Mendelson and Lipman hosted an event at their family winery, Loew Vineyards, in Mt. Airy, Maryland in 2021. This event marked the first time in years that Lipman shared her grandfather’s story publicly.
She said most people who come through the winery’s tasting room know its legacy as a family business dating to Loew’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s in Poland, where the Loews owned five prominent meaderies. Loew brought his affinity for wine-making to the U.S. when he immigrated in 1949 and later founded Loew Vineyards with his wife, Lois Loew, in 1982.
“I had a very close relationship with my grandfather,” Lipman said. “I worked with him every day for almost over a decade. And he was a Holocaust survivor.”
Lipman now manages operations for the vineyard, winery and tasting room at Loew Vineyards, carrying on the family tradition. She also leads 3GDC’s education committee in addition to serving as a board member of 3GDC, where members host potlucks, happy hours, informative panels and events with local embassies. It was through the Polish embassy that Lipman was able to travel to Poland in June 2023 and learn more about Loew’s story.
“That was actually really, really special because we were able to develop these relationships with the embassies from the places that we were born or grandparents were born,” Lipman said.
During what she described as a “really life-changing” trip to southeastern Poland, Lipman visited Auschwitz, where Loew had been imprisoned.
“The networking aspect, the community aspect and the educational aspect is really an important piece of the puzzle because 3Gs are the last proven link to that history,” Lipman said. “And if we’re able to connect and provide conviction for that history, then it does justice I think more so. When we share [these stories], it provides us a close sense of connection and thus the name of the organization Living Links.”
She added that she wants to form connections with others who share the same history because of her lack of physical reminders of the past — Loew’s family’s belongings were lost during the Holocaust.
“[Mine] was a very large and vast family, and we don’t have any heirlooms,” Lipman said. “There are families that don’t have heirlooms, but I think that in this sense, it was taken away and destroyed. I think that there’s this unique aspect of this resilience and wanting to connect with other 3Gs because your family does not necessarily have any family heirlooms.”
Lipman has stayed connected to her history by dedicating her career to the family business: “My whole life is about wine in the Holocaust.” She studied plant science and communications at the University of Maryland and interned at an organic vineyard in France, according to the Loew Vineyards website.
“[I’m] continuing a legacy that my family has had making mead — honey wine — for over 150 years,” Lipman said. “We have one of the longest tenures of mead production in the world, and it started in Lviv, Poland with my grandfather’s family.”
Still, Lipman feels a sense of responsibility as a 3G, something she discovered during her trip to Poland.
“There were so many parts of my grandfather I got to learn through that trip: how he was Polish, in terms of his roots, but the one thing that I noticed with all these museums and Auschwitz and the preservation is that there is a massive responsibility that we have as grandchildren of Holocaust survivors,” Lipman said. “But as 3Gs, we have this unique responsibility beyond speaking — it costs money and time and effort to preserve [this history]. And if we don’t have these relationships with our history and where we come from, then we lack conviction of ‘why is this important?’”
