Room on the Kaddish Plate

Mere hours prior to the onset of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), new discoveries about our family came to light. Would we find the answers to unanswerable questions?

—

If you’re young, and never had to say the Jewish memorial prayer — known as Kaddish — for a loved one, I’ll let you in on a secret.

It’s no fun. 

Even for those who faithfully attend thrice-daily services, the pressure to show up on time (always a challenge, for some of us), and to be alert and on-call at the various stages of the prayers can be daunting. 

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. 

On the one hand, it’s a special privilege to honor our loved ones, assisting in the elevation of their souls by reciting the Kaddish. At the same time, by the end of the traditional eleven months, it can be downright exhausting. My quick calculations come out to well over 2,000 recitations during that time. 

That’s a lot of tongue-twisting Aramaic!

Yitgadal v’yitkadash shemei rabbah…

During the period following my mother’s passing a number of years ago, I had a number of ‘misses’, including some due to mandatory isolation following COVID exposures. 

No attending synagogue. No minyan. No Kaddish. 

No worries. 

My siblings had it covered. And I harbored not the slightest doubt that my mother well understood why I couldn’t check off the Kaddish box those days. 

The end of her Kaddish cycle marked a milestone for me. As my father had pre-deceased her a decade or so earlier, never again would I have to brave the prolonged rite. I breathed a sigh of relief that that part of my obligation to those who had passed had indeed passed. 

—

I was wrong. 

Not long after I concluded my mother’s Kaddish, Marvin, a delightful individual and beloved business associate, left this earth. His death followed that of his darling wife by only a scant few days. He went from her funeral almost straight to the hospital, and never left. 

Marvin had no sons to say Kaddish for him, and I was honored to step in. I was happy to pay homage to my friend. And then I was done, for real.

Or so I thought.

My brother-in-law for 41 years, Skip, lost his battle with cancer last summer. And so I currently find myself over halfway through another series of Kaddish recitals. 

It dawns on me that I’m probably still not done. 

Yet how full can the Kaddish plate become? 

A bit more, it seems. 

My Uncle Abe recently returned his soul to the Creator, after 92 years. He’s actually my wife’s uncle, but after decades of being one family, he was mine, too. A gifted architect, whose artistic fingerprints grace some of the world’s most prestigious landmarks, he died a long and sad death last week. 

Never married. No children. No one to say Kaddish. 

So, of course we make room on the Kaddish plate for Uncle Abe, overlapping the Kaddish being offered for Skip for the next few months.

Now my Kaddish plate is overflowing — with room for no more. 

—

As Yom Hashoah begins, my wife, Chana, finds herself in Prague, Czech Republic. She and her sister, Liz, are spending a week there, encountering and engaging with the place of their father’s youth. 

Harry Bush was a gregarious, fun, and popular man, who had countless friends. He built a family, and a business, and was beloved in his adopted Seattle community. 

The lovable Harry Bush, at our wedding in 1983.

But Harry was also a man who was incessantly tortured by the demons of the Holocaust which had burrowed deep inside his soul. From the time of his liberation from a death march, until the day he drew his final breath close to three decades ago, Harry was a survivor who bore deep, raging wounds. 

To live in his house was to wake to piercing screams in the dark of night. As a young, strapping teen who was arrested in Prague and sent to Tereizin early in the war, he lived the horrors of some of Europe’s most infamous hells, including Auschwitz. His body was eventually freed, but a part of his psyche remained caged behind barbed wire fences. 

Those were the dueling sides of the Harry Bush I knew and loved. I never knew the Harry of his childhood — then known as Jindrich Busch. The happy energetic young boy, one of two sons and two daughters, who lived a modest life in Czechoslovakia.

That was before they had to wear their yellow stars. Before the tempest of war, and the ominous sea of black and red flags robbed them of their youth, their pride, and their very self.

But Harry’s early life was also incomplete. He barely knew his father, whose name was, ironically, George Busch. George was, purportedly, a traveling art broker, whose journeys across Europe found him far from home most of the year. His profits seemed minimal, barely sustaining his dependents, and family lore was replete with fanciful speculation about what his life was really like, and what became of him with the war.

Personally, I wondered if George was a government agent — perhaps the James Bond of his day — gallivanting across Europe, saving humanity under the guise of art dealing. I fantasized about him surviving the war. Perhaps even now, I thought, he sits on a beach in Panama, 130 years old or so, sipping a margarita and thinking of his family. 

But reality returns my wondering, wandering mind back into my body, and the harsh truth remains: almost certainly he met a gruesome end along with millions of his co-religionists, in the blood-drenched, vice-like grip of the Nazis. 

As a family, we were resigned to the fact that we would never in this lifetime know the true details of George Busch’s death. 

—

An unexpected discovery.

A fraction of the 78,000 names of Jewish Czech martyrs found on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.

During a visit today to Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, Chana and Liz scanned the walls, which are painted with 78,000 names of Czech citizens who were killed in the Holocaust. She knew what names to search for, from a previous trip we took eight years ago with her brother, Moshe. It was on that excursion that we found out that Chana had an uncle she had never before heard of. Leopold Raber married her aunt Greta. Perhaps they married after Harry had been taken away, and so he never knew about Leopold, and thus never spoke of him. The couple were taken to Tereizin, and eventually were murdered in Treblinka. 

Imagine not knowing that you even had an uncle. 

—

But today’s visit yielded an even greater shock. 

Alongside other Busch inscriptions on the synagogue wall was another name: Gustav Busch, whose wife’s name, Elzbeta, was very similar to Harry’s mother’s name, Eliska. Was it possible that Gustav and George were one and the same? That Elzbeta was another name for Eliska? If there was a record of what happened to them, might we finally unravel a piece of the enigma of the mysterious George Busch?

The exciting discovery of the names Gustav and Elzbeta Busch on the wall.

Would we find out what became of him? Would there be a day to say Kaddish for the grandfather Chana never knew? Surely we could salvage a position of honor on the Kaddish plate for his yarhzeit — the anniversary of his death! 

—

Like the brilliant burst of a Roman Candle, the excitement of their discovery was wondrous — but fleeting. Further investigation showed that Gustav was not George, and Elzbeta was not Eliska. 

—

For our family, as for millions, there are no tidy endings to their Shoah stories. 

No way to know what happened. 

When to mourn. 

Where to go to find the resting place of their bones or ashes. To whiff the air and perhaps inhale a molecule which – once upon a time – flowed through their bodies.

Chana and her family are among the countless who are left with puzzles in place of answers.

—

But all this confusion leads to greater clarity — a clarity borne of yielding to the uncertainty; surrendering to the unknown. We will never know what happened to George Busch, but we know he is in G-d’s hands. 

And we know that while there may seem to be nothing we can do, we can indeed memorialize George Busch, along with those of his children who were swept up in those horrible, horrible days.

We will swap out our old Kaddish plate, and get a bigger one. We will choose a date for their yahrzeit, and we will recite the Aramaic formula attesting to G-d’s greatness, even while remembering the darkest of times.

Especially while remembering the darkest times. 

—

Yitgadal v’yitkadash shemei rabbah…

As I recite those words on Yom Hashoah, I realize that, over eight decades later, this may be the very first time that anyone has said Kaddish specifically for George Busch of Prague. Of Europe. Of places unknowable. I expand my Kaddish plate further and further, until it is so large that it can fit anyone who has no one to remember them.

As the plate swells to contain all those additional souls, it morphs from its roundness into the shape of a heart. In the expansion process, the plate cracks. A large crevice runs down its middle.

We are left with long-overdue tribute. 

And a gaping, broken heart.