In Spite of Everything —YES!
Intentional living is the goal for new NST resident
STORY BY
STEPHEN VRATTOS
Photos courtesy of Nurit Israeli
He who has a “why” to live
can bear almost any “how.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
October 12, 1942. Amid
the throes of a world at
war, Nurit Nora Israeli
was born. She was the only child
of Polish-born Jewish parents, Yehuda
and Rachel Bar-Or, raised in
the British Mandate of Palestine in
the shadow of the Holocaust, which
had already claimed many members
of her family before her arrival.
Turning away from tradition, she
was not named after her paternal
grandmother, Pesla. Yehuda’s mother
had died just before the German
invasion of Poland, a victim of
breast cancer, and it was Yehuda’s
suspicious belief that naming his
daughter after Pesla would all but
ensure her contracting the dread
illness in her lifetime.
Yehuda’s father, Chaim, was a
community leader in Jędrzejów,
Poland, and wished for a life in medicine
for his son, going so far as to
register Nurit’s father in a university
in Paris upon his graduation from
high school. However, when the
principal of Yehuda’s school objected
to sitting next to Jews during the
ceremony, the incident confirmed
Yehuda’s life-altering decision
to leave Poland, make his way to
Palestine, and prepare a safe shelter
for the rest of his family (they never
made it…). In Palestine, he joined
the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary
organization in the British Mandate
of Palestine, which later became the
core of the Israel Defense Forces.
It turned out to be a life-saving
decision for Yehuda, and subsequently
Nurit, as soon thereafter,
Hitler invaded Poland, sparking
the second world war and the
beginning of the end for most of
Poland’s Jewish population during
the Holocaust. All Nurit’s relatives
who stayed in Poland perished. “I
learned early on I had to live very
intensely for all the family members
who didn’t survive.”
For most of her life, Nurit
believed her grandfather to have
Our two children, their spouses and our five grandchildren. Whenever I look at this photo I think of my
father, who lost his family during the Holocaust.
been shot by the Nazis during the
Polish invasion. It was only in 2015
Nurit’s daughter, Millet, discovered
via a listing in the Auschwitz-
Birkenau online database that
Chaim was deported to Auschwitz,
where he perished exactly a week
prior to Nurit’s birth. (Nurit’s family
trip to Poland several years before
was cover-featured on the April
2018 edition of the North Shore
Towers Courier.)
Yehuda continued fighting as the
state of Israel was formed, battling
in the First Arab-Israeli War. Until
she was 10 years old, Nurit and
her parents lived in a single room,
sharing a two-room apartment with
another family and with family
members and friends who came to
stay. There was hardly any room,
but it was a welcoming and pleasant
home. Still, though she had little by
way of material goods, she excelled
in spiritual ones. “He knew how to
love, my father. Strong in spirit, he
was principled and honest, loyal
and dependable, compassionate
and generous, hardworking yet
lighthearted, short-tempered yet
patient,” Nurit wrote in a 2015
piece, entitled “Reflections on
Father’s Day.”
Nurit’s mother came to Palestine
from Sanok, Poland, to study literature
at Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, where Nurit subsequently
completed her undergraduate
studies. Nurit’s entire wardrobe
growing up was hand-sewn by her
mother from hand-me-downs. A
teacher who loved literature, she
read to Nurit everything from passionate
Polish ballads to children’s
stories to poetry recited in various
languages. She taught and encouraged
Nurit to dance and loved to
sing her daughter lullabies, their
gentle melodies still echo in Nurit
today. From the moment Nurit
could walk, her mom took her on
walks, instilling in her an appreciation
of nature and simple pleasures,
as well as respect and affection for
diverse cultures. “My mother was
a wise, devoted, decent, dignified,
hard-working, kind woman of
various interests and impeccable
integrity, who loved to feed us all
(and did it so well),” Nurit once
wrote in an essay written to commemorate
her mother’s birthday.
(Nurit lovingly spoke of her mother’s
borscht and her lullabies in the
February and May editions of NST
Courier.)
Like her mother, Nurit excelled
in school and had the grades to
go straight to university, if she so
chose, allowing her deferment
from mandatory military service
(and since she married at 19, and
married women were exempted, she
would have never served). But like
her father, her sense of community
Baby Nurit in her father's arms.
16 NORTH SHORE TOWERS COURIER ¢ August 2018