Yitta Schwartz, Holocaust survivor, has passed away in New York leaving some 2,000 (two thousand) living descendants.
The vagueness about the precise number is, I expect, the result of a superstition some Jews have about not counting one's grandchildren (or in this case, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren). Still, if you do the maths, in a society with an average of 9 children per family, a woman who has 15 who live into adulthood wouldn't have much problem of reaching 200 grandchildren, and from there on, adding another 1,800 is easy.
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3 comments:
More likely the vagueness is because obtaining an accurate figure would require ringing every family to see if there had been any births or, heaven forfend, deaths. Say that 500 of her 2,000 descendants are fertile women - not an implausible figure. Most of them are Satmar. I don't suppose a week goes by in which a child isn't born to one or another of them.
What a woman! I wonder whether someone wrote down what she had to tell. It should be quite interesting.
Judith
now I've looked at that article I understand why German Jews are so reluctant to support the banning of the head scarve. What a dilemma!
on the one hand I have the experience that getting scowled at and head scarves go together in certain city quarters on the other hand I don't couldn't care less about dressing styles from nuns to punks (I like Yitta's style of head scarve tying;)
Scowling back is not possible because if I did it I would be classified racist - so how does one act/behave when one knows that one is provoked/despised/intensely disliked (while being perfectly innocent) and wants to stay polite?
Silke
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