Happy Chanukah - The Jewish Georgian

November-December 2011 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 31
printed in Philadelphia in 1906. On each
page of the siddur, columns of Hebrew
prayers are side-by-side with columns of
English translation. In the opening section
of the siddur are three pictures of a young
man putting on tefillin in the U.S.A. in the
early twentieth century.
A young man learns how to put on
tefillin (from the Joseph Magil
Siddur, Philadelphia, 1906, collection
of David Geffen)
Via his determination in the years before
World War I, he put together a school that not
only trained young men for bar mitzvah, but
twelve of his students went on to become rabbis
in the United States. One question was
always raised: What about the girls?
The rabbi did teach his own daughters,
and those basic patterns of Judaism he imparted
to them have replicated themselves in the
family, in successive generations in the United
States and Israel. However, his wife, Sarah
Hene, is to be thanked for not letting her husband
skip over the girls. Initially, she had sessions
for congregational women via the sisterhood
she created.
Rabbi Tobias and Sarah Hene Geffen
celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary,
1948
My cousin, Jane Wilensky Ravid, has
written about her grandmother: “In 1916, the
Rebbetzin Geffen invited her friends and
neighbors to her home on Hunter Street for the
first meeting of the Ladies Society of
Congregation Shearith Israel. Dues of $1.20
were collected, and from these proceeds, the
Ladies Society maintained an independent
mikveh for the entire Jewish community and
saw to it that needy Jewish families received
help in a quite genteel fashion. She was the
first president and then worked with subsequent
leaders from the Zimmerman, Auerbach,
and Goncher families.”
Mrs. Geffen believed deeply in education
of all types, as those who remember her will
recall. Ultimately, in the ‘20s, Shearith Israel,
with the encouragement of both the rabbi and
Sarah Hene, developed a wide-ranging
Hebrew school led by the rabbi’s son, Samuel
Geffen, in which boys and girls received a
solid Jewish education. In fact, Sarah’s grandmother
Esther Sloan Lewyn was a student at
that school.
Sarah’s bat mitzvah, especially during the
holiday of Sukkot, was an important statement
for her, but through the requests listed in her
invitation, she inspired many people to add a
new dimension to their Judaism.
When the guests attended Sarah’s bat
mitzvah, Saturday night, Chol HaMoed
Sukkot, October 15, in her family’s Sukkah,
each received a booklet prepared by Sarah.
“You are about to enter the world of Sukkot—
Sarah style,” she wrote. Along with a printout
of the responses to her request for Jewish commitment,
Sarah shared words of Torah based
on her studies of sources in the Torah, Mishna,
Halacha, and Jewish philosophy, along with
Sukkot stories that she had written for her simcha.
Booklets created by Sarah Bena Lewyn
(photo: Barry J Taratoot Photography)
The excitement and charm of Sarah’s
tales took us to the desert to experience the
first Sukkot. Then, the kindness of a loving
family to an orphan provided us a literary
vehicle to learn about another aspect of the
holiday. In the third tale, Sarah focused on a
boy who finds that Sukkot has a “split identity
similar to a double agent.” The final story provides
a symbolic “holiday lift,” as we learn
why it is permissible to build one sukkah on
top of another, “two-tiered” as Sarah wrote.
The final question we might ask, as have
all of us who are survivors in one way or
another of the terrible Holocaust of the ‘30s
and ‘40s: Why are we here? In Sarah’s case,
the answer has become somewhat clearer
since her Jerusalem cousin, Professor Dov
Levin, discovered a letter from his grandfather,
Sarah’s great-grandfather David Levin, to
Rabbi Tobias Geffen in Atlanta, in 1914. Levin
was concerned about two sons, one living in
Lodz, Poland, the other in Berlin. The Berlin
son, Leopold, was Sarah’s great-grandfather.
The two men, one in Atlanta and the other in
Kovno, knew that the only person who could
help was Gitel Rabinowitz, their mother-in-
law. We are not privy as to what she did, but
she saved both of her grandsons during World
War I.
The other two participants in Sarah’s historical
being were Sarah Hene and Rabbi
Geffen. From 1936, they tried to get Leopold,
his wife, Johanna Wolf, and their son, Bert, out
of Berlin. Sadly, they did not succeed in saving
the parents. However, in 1949, when his
great uncle and aunt here in Atlanta located
Bert in a displaced persons camp in Germany,
they acted as his sponsor so he could become
a resident of Atlanta. Bert married Esther
Sloan, and they have created a family, of
which Sarah is a vibrant part.
As she became bat mitzvah, Sarah carried
with her the blessing of her ancestors. “Sarah,
your caring heart is like the etrog, you stand
straight and tall like the lulav, you see deeply
with eyes symbolized by the hadasim, and
your words found in the aravot are a pleasure
to our ears. May God bless you in all the years
to come.”
The Lewyn family: Marc, Bev,
Alexandra, Sarah, Rachel, and
Rebecca, front (photo: Barry J
Taratoot Photography)
Atlanta grandparents, Bert and Esther
Lewyn with Sarah Lewyn, center
(photo: Barry J Taratoot Photography)
Houston grandparents, Resanne and
Earl Saltzman with Sarah Lewyn, center
(photo: Barry J Taratoot
Photography)