By editor, on August 16th, 2011
The Flatbush Scoop
Among the more than 200 showings of the documentary Pikuach Nefesh that took place on Sunday, August 7th throughout the US and Canada and around the world from Australia to Israel to South America, one of the most remarkable was held in a storefront on Ave. H in Brooklyn, NY, where the audience consisted of approximately 40 Deaf and Hard of Hearing members of Our Way Outreach Program for Jewish Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Pikuach Nefesh is the third documentary of the highly successful Yizkereim: Remember Them series, and the first of these films to include captions.
Among the participants at Avenue H was Mrs. Eileen Katz. Born deaf, she attended a school for Deaf Jewish children in London and was there when ten deaf children arrived in 1939 on the Kindertransport (Children Transport) from Germany, organized by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. Eventually all the children were transported to southern England to escape the bombings in London. Eileen Katz and her classmates, including the ten new arrivals, were sent to Brighton.
Dr. Solomon Schonfeld of London, one of the two young individuals of the Holocaust whose personal acts of self-sacrifice, courage and determination were profiled by the documentary, dedicated all his time and resources to saving children from the coming inferno of the Holocaust. Only 26 years old, he took it upon himself to coordinate the transport of hundreds of Austrian and German children to England and to arrange for their resettlement, their education, and later on, their livelihoods. He urged every Jewish member of the London community to open their homes to the Jewish refugee children.
Mrs. Katz told of the children
