Now when she benched lecht on Friday night, Freida Sima davened not just for her family in the U.S. and Europe but also for the stars. “Ribbono shel Olam – Master of the Universe – please let them stay blue,” she murmured week after week. “Let them never turn gold,” she would add, as a gold star meant a family member had lost his or her life fighting for America.
Many of Freida Sima’s younger cousins also served overseas, and their wives and children often moved back to live with their parents, the “uncles and aunts,” for the war’s duration.
Feeling a need to do something to strengthen everyone’s morale, Freida Sima would cook large batches of food and bring them over to her extended family throughout the Bronx. One young cousin recalled meeting her on a cold snowy day pulling a sled through the snow and slush: “What was so important that it had to be delivered in that horrible weather?” the cousin asked years later. “She had a freshly made batch of chicken schmaltz that she had put up in Nescafé jars and was delivering them to family and friends. I’ll always remember those Nescafé jars!”
If her boys were fighting at the front, Freida Sima would fight her war in the kitchen, doing what she could to keep the family together and well fed.
Meanwhile, the war in Europe was taking its toll on the Scharfs and Eisenbergs in America in more ways than one. There was no news from the family overseas but reports spoke of the Romanians reoccupying Northern Bukovina and deporting the Jews to an area between the Dniester and the Bug rivers known as Transnistria.
With war and death on everyone’s mind, Abie decided it was time for the Scharf-Eisenberg Family Circle, which had functioned mainly as a social group since its inception in 1928, to become a burial society as well. In March 1941 the Circle purchased plots in Wellwood Cemetery on Long Island. The family would not only live together and celebrate together, but when the time came they would also be buried together.
Meanwhile, more and more family members, including some of Mordche’s nieces who had trained as nurses, were sent overseas. One even met Harry in Italy and brought back pictures of him in uniform. Hitching her way to Palestine on a joint Anglo-American military medical transport, she spent a week with Helena, the widow of Mordche’s cousin Isaac with whom he had been brought up like a brother.
Years earlier, during the Depression, Isaac, an ardent Zionist, had tried to convince Freida Sima and Mordche to move to Eretz Yisrael. “There is more than enough work here for painters,” he assured them. Mordche had considered it, but the election of Franklin Roosevelt brought new hope to the country and he decided to put off the decision for a year.
Had it not been for FDR’s New Deal, Freida Sima would often reflect, daughter Shirley might have grown up in Tel Aviv. Instead, the family remained in the Bronx and only now was slowly beginning to “breathe” financially once again.
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As the war progressed, the family in America got used to a routine of living a double life. To the outside world it projected “business as usual.” The adults worked while the younger children graduated from elementary and junior high school. Part of the family moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan, which became a new locale for gatherings. The Kraus family was joined by another Shirley, Harry’s fiancé Shirley Goldberg, who spent time with them while Harry was overseas.
