Remembering My Mom, Lenore Gelb Lichtman

I want to tell you about the happiest little girl in the world. She had a young mother, whom she adored. A widely respected father, whom she idolized. An older brother who looked out for her, and two younger sisters who looked up to her. Her town was colored in the pastel shades of a Chagall painting. The air tasted like fresh-baked challah. Her household was in perpetual motion from one Shabbat to the next, from one Yom Tov to the next, filled with aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. And filled with chessed.  The happiest little girl in the world was Libu Gelb, my mother of blessed memory.

Although my mother was forthrightly outspoken about the horrors of her darkest time during the Shoah, this town, this childhood, this family was the overriding memory that she carried, and that she conveyed to us to carry with her, and after her. A childhood of joy, of trust, of love.

So successfully did she embody this memory as a core of who she was, that on the Pesach of COVID, after Natalie and I shared a model seder with her over the phone in the afternoon, when we sat down to our seder in West Orange, she sat down to her seder in her dining room. There was no one else there, but she was not alone. She transported herself back to her childhood home, back to a seder table with her father and mother at the head, with her brother and sisters at her side, with her aunts and uncles spoiling her. When we called her after Yom Tov, she told us that this was one of the most special seders of her life.

That is the kind of childhood and the kind of life that she and my father, Avraham ben Yisrael Eliyahu, gave to us. In fact, so resolute were they to celebrate the blessings in life, that they together made a pact: If there was ever a simcha that they were invited to, a brit, a Bat Mitzvah, a birthday party…they would run to it.  Saying those words makes it sound easy, but for the two of them to live that promise was nothing less than heroic.

My mother now joins her family, my beloved father and others who loved her and who have waited for her in Gan Eden. My uncle Bumi, her brother of blessed memory, once told me that after the war, he learned that his father and sister – my Zeidi and my mother – survived.  He took the train home from Budapest and when he arrived, he found my mother and their father waiting for him at the station. He was surprised.  “How did you know that I would be on this train?” he asked. They told him, “We knew you were coming; we just did not know when. So, we came here every day to wait for you.”

And so, Mommy, as you rejoin those for whom you waited and who waited for you, we want to ask something of you.

This is the month of Nissan, it is the month of geula-redemption; this is Pesach, it is z’man herutaynu– the time for our freedom; now is the time for you and daddy and your families to tell God that we know the geula is coming, we are not sure when, so we are waiting here every day.  Remind God that we are waiting. Please send that geula now. We are waiting.