Grief & Loss Support Group

Grief & Loss Support Group

Grief & Loss Support Group

Loss can be difficult, especially during the COVID era. At JFS, we know that talking about it can help. Get support from this online, 4-session Grief & Loss Support Group.

 

Pinwheel Garden Planting – CANCELLED

Pinwheel Garden Planting – CANCELLED

Pinwheel Garden Planting – CANCELLED

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month.  Please join us as we gather the community to stand together against child abuse. 

Covid 19

Covid 19

Covid 19

Dear Jewish Family Services Stakeholder,

Shalom Park is committed to the safety, health and well-being of our Members, Program participants, guests, and Staff. We are always vigilant with our protocols and the measures that we take to ensure the safety and well-being of the community. 

We want to assure you that the Shalom Park Senior Leadership is keeping up to date on the Corona-virus (COVID-19), is listening to recommendations coming f rom appropriate authorities, and taking proactive steps to minimize any potential spread.

In an effort to ensure the health and well-being of our clients, staff and volunteers, JFS is asking that you follow the reconunended protocols identified in this letter. We would re-quest that if you are sick and scheduled for an appointment, please call to cancel your ap-pointment and we are happy to reschedule your appointment when you are feeling better.

The following are the specific steps that the Shalom Park leadership is taking in an ongoing effort to prevent the spread of illness within the community:

  • Our cleaning personnel will continue the use of high-level antiviral cleaning agents to properly disinfect the entire facility on a daily basis.
  • We have reviewed our daily cleaning and sanitation protocol for all program ar-eas and have modified and enhanced daily procedures where necessary and ap-propriate, and we have taken steps to ensure that we will have the necessary sup-plies to do this.
  • Our staff are being reminded and retrained on procedures for sanitizing toys, equipment, as well as high use surfaces throughout our facilities.
  • We will be making sure that all of our youth program participants will engage in frequent and proper hand-washing and that we remind them about proper usage of tissues and their disposal for runny noses.

As the Shalom Park staff works hard in the above-mentioned ways, there are steps that we would like to ask you, our valued members and guest to take to aid in our efforts to promote and maintain a healthy environment:  

  • If you are not feeling well and exhibit any symptoms of illness, please refrain from using the facilities until all symptoms have subsided. If you have a fever please make sure that you are fever free for 24 hours without the use of fever reducing medication before returning to the LJCC to use the facilities or partici-pate in any programs.
  • If you are planning to do any personal travel in the coming months and during the upcoming spring break season, please take a moment to familiarize your-selves with information about the areas where infection rates are high and the chance for disease transmission is heightened. You can find in formation on the CDC’s Coronavirus Disease Travel Page HERE.
  • Please wash your hands f requently, consider carrying hand sanitizer to use if soap and water is not readily available, cover your mouth and nose when sneez-ing (if a tissue is not readily available use the upper part of your arm/sleeve), and properly dispose of tissues and paper towels in appropriate trash receptacles.

For any of you who would like more information about the Corona virus, frequently asked questions, or how to mitigate the transmission of the disease, please use the following links for your review: CDC Coronavirus Fact Sheet I and CDC Coronavirus Fact Sheet 2.

‘I was there, I saw it happen’: Charlotte Holocaust survivors hope others never forget

‘I was there, I saw it happen’: Charlotte Holocaust survivors hope others never forget

‘I was there, I saw it happen’: Charlotte Holocaust survivors hope others never forget

Monday marks 75 years since the Soviet Union liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland at the end of World War II, and is now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

By: Mark Becker

Updated: January 27, 2020 – 5:19 PM

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Eyewitness News reporter Mark Becker spoke with five survivors who now call Charlotte home. They said they will always remember the Holocaust and how they left it behind.

“You know, these memories that come back, it’s torture — torture,” Felix Pierson told Channel 9 at a retirement community in south Charlotte. “Somehow, when we get older, all these happenings from the past keep coming back more than ever before.”

The survivors want to make sure no one forgets about the Holocaust.

“I remember being scared,” Suly Chenkin said. “I remember how my parents sent me away to people they had never met — tossed me over barbed wire.”

She was tossed over the fence in a sack, so she had a chance to live. Chenkin was 3 years old when the Nazis raided a ghetto in Lithuania, where she was living with her parents. The oppressors began rounding up children younger than 12.

“I was hidden in a bunker and survived that raid, but my parents knew that they had run out of time and that’s why they made that horrible decision and sent me away,” Chenkin said. “I was lucky, a woman who was Jewish herself, passing for Christian, saved my life.”

 

“I am the luckiest of survivors that I have ever met in my life,” Daisy Shapiro-Rieke told Channel 9. She was born in Austria and a year later in 1937, her family moved to Hungary, which was also under Nazi control.

They survived because Daisy’s mother was able to buy falsified papers and somehow found the courage to stand up to the soldiers.

“The Nazis would come to our door and say, ‘There are Jewish people here, a truck is waiting,’” Shapiro-Rieke said. “My mother pulled out the falsified documents and said, ‘Yes, my husband is a Jew. He’s in prison, but I am Catholic and so are both of my children.’ And she showed them the falsified documents.”

 

Irving Bienstock was 12 years old living in Dortmund, Germany when Kristallnacht happened, which was when Nazis targeted the Jewish community in Germany.

Kristallnacht, also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” took place on Nov. 9, 1938.

“Around the middle of the night I was sleeping, and I heard a loud noise in the street,” Bienstock said.

Mobs of Nazis gathered and went from one Jewish home to the next.

“And I got up and looked out from behind the curtain, and I could see the synagogue down the block was burning and there were mobs of people on the street yelling, which meant, ‘Out with the Jews, exterminate them.’ I was scared to death,” he said.

Hanna Adler said, “We looked out, and I saw one of my high school teachers, and they screamed for my father to come out.”

 

Adler was in a small town 25 miles away, where the mob rounded up her father and the other Jewish men.

“And they did terrible things to them,” Adler said. “We could hear the screaming. What they were doing to them? They threw one man from his roof and then they kept saying, ‘Throw the women, too!’ They didn’t do that.”

Her father was beaten badly but somehow survived. Bienstock’s family lived through the terror, too, before leaving Germany.

Pierson wasn’t so lucky.

“Life in Poland was living under anti-Semitism from the day I was born,” Pierson said.

He was 13 years old living in a small town in Poland when the Germans invaded. The horror of war and hate became clear when the Nazis arrested two teenagers he knew for stealing potatoes.

“There was an announcement: ‘The entire town has to come out to the Jewish cemetery to see these two boys hung,’” Pierson said. “And at the age of 13, seeing my friends’ brothers hung, it takes the soul out of you. It takes everything you got in you. It takes everything out.”

In 1944, he was rounded up with the town’s other 3,000 Jews and sent to a concentration camp near Dachau, Germany. He said he was half-dead when U.S. troops finally arrived in 1945.

“In Dachau, there were hundreds of corpses lying on the ground,” Pierson said. He is convinced he survived because of the love and courage of his father.

Chenkin said, “And here, we all have told stories about what our parents did to save us.”

“We survived because someone was very brave and did something that worked, but unfortunately, the whole world stood by and let it happen,” Beinstock said.

The survivors told Channel 9 they will continue to share their stories as long as they can.

“There will come a time when someone will come and say, ‘This never happened,’” Peirson said. “I was there. I saw it happen.”

Charlotte Holocaust survivor remembers childhood, has growing fears

Charlotte Holocaust survivor remembers childhood, has growing fears

Charlotte Holocaust survivor remembers childhood, has growing fears

HARLOTTE, N.C. — Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. A Charlotte survivor, Irving Bienstock, is getting ready for a trip to Israel to meet soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces.

It’s something he says he never thought he’d live to see growing up as a young boy during Hitler’s rise to power. But Bienstock is worried about what he’s seeing happening now, scared history could repeat itself. Talking about his life is crucial to Irving Bienstock, especially the most difficult parts. “As many people as I can get to talk to about what happened,” he said. Bienstock grew up in Nazi Germany and survived the Holocaust. As a 6-year-old boy, he watched everything change, his father and uncles were afraid to leave the house, the friends he always played with beat him up and spat on him. “I couldn’t go out to any place,” Bienstock remembered. “If they saw me, they’d chase me.” He said he was fortunate to avoid being put in a death camp, but he lived in fear, separated from his family for long periods of time while six million other Jewish people were killed. Decades later, Bienstock said that fear is back. “As a survivor, I’m scared to death of what’s happening,” he said, pointing out the recent shootings in synagogues. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States, 11 people killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. Bienstock growing concerned the worst part of history will repeat itself. “I hope people don’t believe that it can’t happen here,” he said. “I think it can.” So he talks about it — to anyone who will listen. He speaks at schools and works with the Jewish Family Services of Greater Charlotte to tell his story at different events. Bienstock will take a trip to Israel next month to visit with soldiers on an active base, something he’s always wanted to do. The friends of the IDF gave him a medal of honor for his activism while he was speaking to WCNC Charlotte, telling him he is a hero and inspiration to the soldiers he will meet. “You have to understand what we went through in Germany, to go to the homeland and see police and soldiers, it’s wonderful,” Bienstock says, getting emotional. It’s a day he never thought he’d see 75 years ago.