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On a BPC Street, Hope To Preserve a Memory
By Ronald Drenger
JUNE 2, 2006
A 65-year-old historical trail has led Yakov Goodman from a city in Belarus to a street in Battery Park City, where he is on a mission to preserve a powerful wartime memory.
For Goodman, 61, now a writer for a Russian language newspaper, the uphill journey began with a dramatic tale, told to his family by neighbors when he was a child growing up in the city of Mozyr.
In late August 1941, after the Nazis had occupied Mozyr, the townspeople said, 21 Jews gathered in a house and set it on fire, choosing to burn to death rather than fall victim to the Nazis. In the group was Goodman’s 80-year-old grandfather, and at least one child. |
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Goodman’s parents had fled Mozyr before the Nazis invaded, not to return until 1945, when he was a few months old. His grandfather had refused to leave.
Almost half a century later, Goodman began looking into the story. His research took him to Communist Party records in Minsk, K.G.B. files in the Belarusan city of Gomel, German archives, and Holocaust museums in Israel and Washington.
“When I grew up, I heard about this story,” he said in an interview last month. “But it was just like a myth. Now it’s a historical fact.”
Goodman wanted the defiant act of the Mozyr Jews to be recognized by others. In November 2003 he and several other Jews erected a plaque at the site of the house where it occurred, but government authorities removed it. Last year he convinced the Israeli city of Ashdod to name a park after the “Heroes of Mozyr.”
And last month Goodman, who lives in Brooklyn, appeared before Community Board 1’s Battery Park City Committee with a proposal to co-name the block of Battery Place in front of the Museum of Jewish Heritage as “The Avenue of the Heroes of Mozyr.”
Goodman called the self-immolation by the Mozyr Jews “the Masada of World War II,” referring to the famous mountaintop fortress in Israel where 967 Jews killed themselves in the year 73 when they faced capture by the Romans.
“It is important to give our respect for people who chose this kind of death,” Goodman said.
The committee acknowledged the event’s importance but said the proposal required more study, and consultation with the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Goodman said he had not approached the institution, but said it plans to include the story of the Mozyr Jews in an exhibition next spring on Jewish defiance in the Holocaust.
Responding to a query from the community board late last month, the museum said that it could not support the co-naming.
“We would not be comfortable choosing one act of resistance to represent history,” Abby Spilka, the museum’s director of communications, wrote in a letter to the board. She said that the inclusion of the story of the Mozyr Jews within a historical framework in the museum’s exhibition would be the most fitting way to honor their memory.
In an interview, Goodman responded. “There is an expression,” he said. “‘If you know the taste of the ocean, you do not need to drink the whole ocean.’ The story of the Mozyr Jews is that taste of the Holocaust.”
Goodman, president of a New York-based association of Belarusan Jews that he founded in 1993, said he would return with Holocaust survivors and Jewish war veterans to plead his case when the Battery Park City Committee discusses the issue at its June 8 meeting. He also planned to seek the support of Councilman Alan Gerson.
Goodman said he feels it is his mission to preserve the memory of the Jews who perished in Mozyr. “Maybe God created me that I will do this job,” he said.
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