Jewish Telegraphic Agency - 04.01.2002

 

 

Son of Holocaust survivors a real-life hero to Uzbek Jews

By Bryan Schwartz

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (JTA) — Joseph Khodos does not know his official job title, but his co-workers call him the "Main Man of Jewish Uzbekistan."

Khodos organizes food, clothing and other necessities for more than 2,700 indigent Jews in Uzbekistan at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's office here, in Uzbekistan's capital city. His efforts make him a pillar of this former Soviet republic's embattled 15,000-member Jewish community.

Odds are that Khodos, the son of two Holocaust survivors, never should have been born.

"My father survived the Nazis because he doesn't look like me," Khodos says, matter-of-factly. Then, laughing at himself, he adds, "Nobody could mistake me for a non-Jew — isn't it true?"

It is true. Khodos looks like just another aging, nice Jewish boy.

With his coke-bottle glasses, bushy gray-brown beard and moustache, fading corduroy shirt, ill-fitting charcoal gray slacks and beaten black loafers, Khodos' appearance personifies a high school physics teacher — which he was. But today, Khodos, 41, is a hero to many in his rapidly diminishing Jewish community.

During World War II, more than 1 million European Jews fled through Uzbekistan, thousands of miles from Hitler's armies. Some 200,000 remained after the Holocaust, joining tens of thousands of native Bukharan Jews, who had dwelled here since antiquity.

Today, the 10,000 Ashkenazi Jews still in Uzbekistan and thousands of Bukharans who protected them during World War II maintain a special appreciation for Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins this year on the evening of April 8.

The Khodos' family history reads like an action movie script.

Khodos' father, Betsalel, was born in Pogar, Russia, in 1920. From 1941 to 1945, he survived in Nazi labor camps in Germany. When the Russians liberated the Nazi camps at the war's end, they shipped Betsalel Khodos to Siberia because they though he must have been a German spy. Otherwise, they reasoned, why hadn't he been killed?

From 1945 to 1951, Betsalel Khodos languished in Siberia. When he was finally released from Soviet prison, Khodos immediately went searching for remnants of his family.

Betsalel Khodos found his father and siblings thousands of miles from Pogar and Siberia, at the famous, Central Asian crossroads of the ancient Silk Road: Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. Betsalel's family, who had not seen him in nearly 12 years, could not believe their eyes.

The story of Joseph Khodos' mother, Cecilia, is no less dramatic. Her family lived in Gadyatch, Ukraine. In 1937, Stalin's henchmen kidnapped her father, sending him to prison. Her mother died in 1941, after contracting pneumonia while fleeing. The Nazis murdered Cecilia's grandparents. Relatives adopted Cecilia, then 12 years old, and they hid from the Nazis in a Ukrainian village until the war ended.

In 1945, Cecilia Khodos heard that her father had survived Hitler in Stalin's gulags. Finally released from the Russian prison, her penniless father was exiled to the edge of the Soviet empire: Uzbekistan. He worked in Uzbekistan until he could send for her, and brought her to Samarkand in 1946.

The two young survivors, Betsalel and Cecilia, were married in 1954. Joseph was born in 1961.

Though the Khodos' and other Ashkenazi Jews were grateful to have survived the Holocaust and be in Uzbekistan, life was hardly easy for Jews in the Soviet Union after the war.

Because of the Soviet prohibition on Jewish study and practice, Betsalel Khodos could scarcely gather an illegal minyan of 10 Jewish men for prayers.

"One very old man had a Sefer Torah in his house where the secret minyan was meeting," Joseph Khodos remembers. "Once the KGB came and they registered all the Jews in the minyan and took all of the prayer books. They told us it was illegal and we must close. Afterward, the KGB ordered all the old men to come in for questioning."

Such brushes with the law terrified Joseph's parents' generation, who were weaned running from Hitler and Stalin.

None of the other Ashkenazi survivors was willing to risk holding the minyan in his home when the very old man who had hosted the minyan died. So Joseph Khodos' father began to meet for prayers with the Bukharan Jews.

Even today, many Bukharan Jews remember fondly the families they saved and comforted during the Holocaust and subsequently — though they are too modest to think of themselves as rescuers. Luba Davidov, wife of Raphael Davidov, the president of Bukhara's Jewish community, says, "We had Polish Jewish guests during World War II," giving no indication that her "guests" were in fact refugees.

All humility aside, the Davidovs and other Bukharans are acutely aware of the Holocaust and grateful for Jewish survival. On Yom Hashoah, hundreds of Ashkenazi and Bukharan Jews join together commemorating the tragedy in a corner of the ancient Bukharan Jewish neighborhood, the mahalla. They light candles, sing songs, and wear yellow Stars of David marked with the word "Jude," reminiscent of Hitler's discriminatory requirement that Jews always prominently display identity badges.

As for Joseph Khodos, he spends all of his time contributing life's essentials to the Uzbek communities that gave him a chance at life. When he resigned his physics teaching job in 1990 to help organize food parcels and other welfare programs for needy Jews around Uzbekistan, Khodos' salary was $50 a month. He still sleeps in a small room at the back of the JDC's office and keeps kosher in the office's small kitchen. Khodos volunteers as a prayer leader regularly in Tashkent, and in Samarkand, where he goes most weekends to take care of two remarkable survivors — his elderly parents.

On Yom Hashoah, Uzbekistan's Jewish community remembers how close it came to never knowing Joseph Khodos.

Bryan Schwartz, an Easton, Pa.-based lawyer, is completing his first book, "Scattered Among the Nations: Photographs and Stories of the World's Most Isolated Jewish Communities."