Emanuel “Manny” Kandel was a beloved member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Potomac who was devoted to Israel and the Jewish community. He was a grandfather of nine and father of three.
“He was a special man,” Zehavit Kandel, Emanuel’s wife, said. “He was very kind, very smart, very happy most of the time [and] a very friendly person.”
Emanuel was born in 1938 in a small town in Ukraine, where he lived in a shtetl with his parents and grandparents. His childhood was marked by hunger, cold and fear — of the Germans and of his non-Jewish neighbors.
“I’m a Jew and everyone is out to kill me,” Emanuel recalled thinking as a child, according to a 1991 oral history interview donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
His parents worked in merchandising, dealing with local grocers. Emanuel had fragmented memories from when the Nazis invaded Ukraine starting in June 1941. He remembered seeing his grandfather being beaten in the streets by Germans and recalled his non-Jewish neighbors sneaking him out of the ghetto in a wagon filled with straw: “In my mind, it’s almost like a cowboy movie.”
“During the so-called war, I don’t recall any good times,” Emanuel said in the oral history interview. “I don’t remember any pleasant incidents.”
“Everybody perished” in Emanuel’s family except for Emanuel, his mother, his aunt, his aunt’s husband and one cousin.
Eventually, the Germans were driven eastwards towards France and Germany, so Emanuel and his family began to come out of the woods. There were still German bombardments and air raids every night, he recalled.
Over a five-year period, Emanuel and his family moved to Poland, then Czechoslovakia, then Hungary, Romania and Germany before ending up in southern Italy.
“I loved school there,” Emanuel said in the oral history interview. “Things were relatively pleasant.”
He added that after his father’s death, his mother remarried to Morris Kandel in Italy. Emanuel’s younger sister was born in an Italian hospital.
“The Italians were very gracious people,” Emanuel said. “They were supposedly the enemies, but they were probably the most warm-hearted people. I have such warm memories of them.”
Emanuel emigrated to the U.S. in 1950 at the age of 12 or 13, where he joined “mainstream Jewish life.” He attended present-day Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville, then continued on to a yeshiva in Baltimore.
It was Christmas Eve of 1967 when Emanuel first met his wife, Zehavit Kandel, at an Israeli musical show in Shady Grove. The two talked and he asked her when she was next going to Israel.
“Can I come with you?” Emanuel had asked.
“‘You can only come if you’ll be my husband,’” Zehavit recalled. “And he looked at me like I was a crazy woman.”
When Zehavit returned from Israel, she and Emanuel got married in July 1968 in Washington, D.C.
The couple made an annual trip to Israel together. Over the past decade, they increased the frequency of these trips, staying for three months at a time twice a year.
“He didn’t think we could live without Israel,” Zehavit said of her late husband. “Whatever he could do for Israel, he did.”
Emanuel donated to an Israeli synagogue, a northern Israeli village, a hospital that treats wounded soldiers and “any organizations that asked for money,” according to Zehavit.
Emanuel was also actively involved in the United Jewish Appeal and served as president of Beth Sholom.
“The people really loved him,” Zehavit said. “He brought life and happiness [and was] really caring.”
Once very secretive about his dark past — Emanuel kept his Holocaust story from his wife — he shared his experiences at Beth Sholom’s Yom HaShoah commemoration in 2024. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
“He was one of the people who moved everybody and let them feel what happened,” Zehavit said.
Emanuel was a longtime member of the Bender Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville, where he regularly exercised. He also took classes at Montgomery College to learn the art of sculpture — his wood- and stone-carved pieces remain on display in Zehavit’s living room.
Zehavit said her late husband cared deeply about his grandchildren, giving them Israeli bonds for their birthdays to pay for college down the road.
“He was a very, very caring grandfather,” Zehavit said.
Emanuel died of leukemia in Tel Aviv on April 16. He is survived by his wife, Zehavit Kandel; children Rami and Melanie Kandel, Ari and Claudia Kandel and Shira and Alan Leeds; and grandchildren Max, Noah, Alex and Sarah Kandel, Jacobi and Mischa Kandel and Joshua, Shoshana and Danielle Leeds.
Amy Hollander contributed to the reporting of this story.
