Ellen Kandell finished Maggid, a program designed to train second-generation Holocaust survivors in telling their parent’s stories, in March. Three days later, the Silver Spring resident was on a plane to Munich, Germany, to honor her great-aunt who perished in a concentration camp in 1943.
The trip to Germany, coupled with the Maggid program, gave Kandell a deeper desire to focus on Holocaust education, she said.
Kandell had flown out to Munich with her cousin to join a gathering of descendants who had received Nazi-plundered silver from the Bavarian National Museum there. Among the collection of artifacts was a 300-year-old silver cup belonging to Kandell’s great-aunt, Hermine Bernheimer.
Bernheimer had followed a 1939 Nazi order demanding that Jews relinquish silverware and precious metal objects to their local pawn shops, Kandell said. The German Jewish woman was then taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered.
In July 2022, Matthias Weniger, a curator of the Bavarian National Museum, returned the cup to Bernheimer’s descendants, including cousins in Australia and California whom Kandell had not known about.
“The silver cup is symbolic of justice,” Kandell said.
Kandell and her newfound cousins met over Zoom and decided that the “logical thing to do” was to donate the silver cup to the Jewish Museum Göppingen, located in the town where Bernheimer was raised.
Weniger facilitated the trace and return of about 90 silver objects that had been plundered by the Nazis during the Silver Levy. In fall 2023, a year after those objects were returned, Kandell and two cousins went to Germany to dedicate a Stolpersteine stone — a “stumbling stone” memorializing Holocaust victims — to Kandell’s mother and aunt.
At that time, the silver cup had been installed in a case at the museum.
Weniger organized the March gathering of the nearly 90 descendants, realizing the bond shared by the families he’d worked with, Kandell said. The group heard from elected officials and diplomats, toured historic German Jewish neighborhoods, visited the Jewish cemetery and a new synagogue and learned about silver and archival research from experts, Kandell said.
The group of nine family members, newfound cousins and other families dedicated several memorial plaques, including one to Bernheimer and her sister, Rosa Frei.
“It was meaningful to have other people with a shared history witness these dedications together,” Kandell wrote in a reflection piece after the trip.
Bernheimer, who had never married, lived with Frei and Frei’s husband in an apartment in Munich.
“My mother knew these women. My mother spent time with them,” Kandell said. “They were older ladies and my mother loved them. They and my aunt Margo, Naomi’s mother, have letters they wrote as their world was getting smaller and things were getting more restricted, and then they had to be forced to move to a ghetto and all of that.”
Kandell said she takes pride in commemorating her family story.
“I’m very proud of this rich history, as difficult as it was and as much as we lost people, I’m very proud of it,” she said.
Kandell learned how to refine the telling of her family’s Holocaust story through the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington’s Maggid program to eventually share these narratives with young audiences, including local middle and high school students.
“It was very structured because all 11 of us [in the cohort] had plenty of stories to tell,” Kandell said.
Participating second-generation Holocaust survivors were asked to pinpoint a “nugget” of information from one parent’s Holocaust narrative and create a 20-minute presentation around that one event.
“The way we were instructed and coached was to figure out ‘what’s the impact?’ ‘What’s the trauma in my mother’s story?’” Kandell said. “The trauma in my mother’s story was leaving home at age 17 with her middle sister by themselves, going on two trains across a seven-day boat ride and living with people she didn’t know for an unknown period of time.
“What prompted me to sign up [for JCRC’s Maggid] was furthering my mother’s legacy. The history that formed her, that has formed me,” Kandell said. “I think all this work with the silver cup and the dedication and being in Germany made me feel like it was important that this story, the story of the Holocaust, stay alive. … It makes sense for me to do it.”
Mandy Book, JCRC’s assistant director of education programs and services, said when she joined the organization two and a half years ago, she noticed a “huge need for age-appropriate Holocaust education” in the Washington, D.C., area.
Guila Franklin Siegel, JCRC’s chief operating officer, said the purpose of the Maggid program is to shift into a new phase of Holocaust education given the dwindling number of survivors today: “It just seemed obvious that the torch was going to be passed to this next generation.”
Franklin Siegel and Sara Winkelman, JCRC’s director of education programs and services, worked closely with Holocaust education advocate Peter Nelson to develop the Maggid curriculum. JCRC launched the Maggid program in 2022.
Tobi Bassin and Sharon Freundel, both second-generation Holocaust survivors themselves, have trained dozens of fellow 2Gs, volunteering their time as educators and bringing Maggid participants into their homes to prepare them to present. The two also spent hours refining the curriculum.
Since Maggid’s inception, the program has trained nearly 60 speakers who can go out into the community and preserve their parents’ narratives. Kandell is now one of them.
