Life after unspeakable death

Peretz Joseph Weizman, his Polish family's sole survivor of the Holocaust, found meaning, purpose as rabbi at Winnipeg synagogue

By: Kevin Rollason 

Returning to Poland from having endured forced labour at a Nazi munitions factory during the Second World War, Peretz Joseph Weizman waited for his mother, siblings and their children to join him.

His wait was in vain.

Weizman, who was 99 when he died April 21, lost his entire family in the Holocaust: his mother, his five siblings and his nieces and nephews. Even before Weizman was taken from the Lodz ghetto to a factory to make bullets, his father had already been taken away, shot with a group of others, and put in a mass grave.

In all, the longtime rabbi at the former B’nay Abraham Synagogue in West Kildonan lost 80 immediate and extended family members.

"After the war, he went back home," his son Sam recalled recently.

"He didn’t know who in his family survived and who didn’t. He waited until he realized no one was coming. He was the last of the family."

"He was a tormented man," daughter Tzila Schneid said. "He lost everything."

Weizman was born to Shmuel and Esther in Lodz in November of 1920, the youngest in a family of three brothers (Isaac, Mordechai and Baruch), and two sisters (Yita and Chava). His dad ran a successful pharmaceutical wholesale company and by 1939, at 18 years of age, he was about to join the family business.

But the German forces invaded Poland in September of that year and later forced Jewish people into ghettos in the cities, including in Lodz.

In a Free Press story in 2009, Weizman said his faith remained intact, even after what he and his family went through during the war and the Holocaust because "it doesn’t work to give up on God and to rely on people.

"The culprit was people. If I gave up on God, what was left? I am not alone if I have God."

Weizman and his family were followers of Ger before the war and knew its rabbi at the time, Avraham Mordechai Alter. Ger, named after a small Polish town, is a Hasidic dynasty which today is based in Israel. Alter was rabbi from 1905 to 1948.

Because of Weizman’s strong faith, not long after returning to Lodz, he was serving as the rabbi at a funeral when two sisters from Lithuania walking by stopped to listen.

"It is how he met my mother," Sam said. "She heard him reading a eulogy.

"He was with a friend and when they walked to their place, the two followed them and asked if they could get room and board there. That’s where the love began."

First, they had to sort out who would go out with which woman. Weizman’s friend, at first, went out with the woman who would become Weizman’s wife, but when they realized each was more compatible with the other woman, they switched.

He married Ryvka, or Riva, in 1946, and they were together for 67 years until she died in 2013. Sam came along in 1947, and, after they moved to Israel, their daughter, Tzila, was born in 1952.

The following year, the family moved to Winnipeg, sponsored by his wife’s cousin.

For the first few years, Weizman had different jobs. He worked first in a meat-packing plant helping to produce kosher meat for local butchers and grocery stores. He became a cantor because he had a good singing voice. He worked as a teacher at a Jewish day school.

But in 1960, Weizman began his life’s work, becoming rabbi at B’nay Abraham, about a year after it opened a new building on Enniskillen Avenue. He would be there for decades, delivering sermons, officiating at weddings and funerals and preparing boys for bar mitzvahs. He helped it become one of Western Canada’s largest congregations and was there when it installed a memorial to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The synagogue merged with two others in north Winnipeg — Beth Israel and Rosh Pina — to create Congregation Etz Chayim in 2002, and he was named rabbi emeritus of the merged synagogue.

Rabbi Neil Rose, who met Weizman in 1967, said B’nay Abraham was "very unique."

"Most of the parishioners were Holocaust survivors," Rose said. "Their first language was Yiddish. Weizman spoke only Yiddish for many years. For them, he was their link to the past and their connection to the present and future... he made a real contribution to the community."

Rose said it was hard for Weizman to begin life anew after the war.

"Weizman was a displaced person," he said. "He came from a culture he knew well, but in many ways he wanted to be a modern man, and he was. But he often reminded me of the professors I had at rabbinical seminary. They had one foot in two different worlds — and neither were they totally at home in."

Sam said he and his father travelled together to Lodz. There, in a dusty book kept by the city, Weizman found his own father’s signature.

"For the first time in my life, I saw some physical evidence my grandfather had been alive, that he lived," Sam said. "When my dad saw this, he broke down and started to cry."

There was one final move left for Weizman. In 2009, to be closer to his son and daughter, he and his wife moved to Toronto. For a brief period, he served as the rabbi at Beth Emeth Yehuda Synagogue.

It also rekindled memories because many worshippers at the traditional conservative synagogue would ask him about being a Ger follower and someone who had known Alter.

"He didn’t want to go there at first," Tzila said. "He said he didn’t have a beard, the locks. He thought they wouldn’t let him in.

"But one day I drove there and dropped him off and I waited in the car. He came out an hour later and he was beaming. He said they asked him about (Alter) and he told them he knew him and was friends with him.

"They just adored him. The children would ask did (Alter) like chocolate and he told them of course he did."

As Rose added, "he achieved a place of honour thanks to his childhood connection to a very old man. He was well-respected there."

But there were other memories and they haunted him constantly.

"He never left the Holocaust," Tzila said. "Almost every conversation I’d have with him he would be in pain.... "During the seven years he lived in my home, there wasn’t a night he wouldn’t scream with nightmares."

Tzila said her father was a humble man with a sense of humour.

"He really felt he was protected in life, even though he went through the horror," she said. "He made a life."

For a person who had lost his entire family during the Holocaust, Weizman was part of a growing family by the time he died.

Besides his son and daughter, he is survived by six grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca