Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Freighted Legacies Webinar
Sons of Survivors
Making Peace with Inherited Trauma
October 5, 2025 / 10AM PST / 1PM East Coast / 6PM London / 7PM Warsaw / 8PM Israel
Two lifelong friends uncover their families’ long-hidden Holocaust history, confronting silence, reclaiming memory, transforming inherited trauma into a powerful legacy of love
The authors of this dual memoir did not live through the trauma of the Holocaust; they inherited it. Whether their survivor parents revealed what they endured or erected barriers of silence, the horrors they experienced permeated the lives of their children. The arrival of their book opens a door not only to their friendship and their pasts but it also invites other “sons and daughters of survivors.”
Aron Hirt-Manheimer and Marty Yura grew up in the close-knit community of Yiddish-speaking refugees in America. After meeting in Los Angeles as high school students, the two became fast friends with much in common, including the fact that they were both conceived in the same displaced persons camp in US-occupied Germany.
This memoir traces their colorful growing-up adventures through fast-paced alternating passages. Though the Holocaust formed the backdrop of their lives, they didn’t talk much about it—until, as older adults, they embraced the imperative to bear witness. They set out to discover everything they could about what happened to their parents and other relatives in German Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, where the German Nazi concentration camps were built.
For Aron, the most powerful revelations were contained in a nearly forgotten memoir written by his uncle fifty years earlier in Argentina. Marty’s breakthrough came after participating in a Zen Peacemakers immersion retreat on the killing fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Navigating this haunted terrain together, the friends realized that the love they inherited from their parents transcends the trauma.
This journey of discovery continues for the authors with their book and now its promotion which has brought the two of them in contact with more “sons and daughters.” Aron Hirt-Manheirmer and Marty Yura offer an important account of their not-so-linear-process.
An initial unarticulated reluctance to speak emerges from their intertwining narratives. The later-in-life challenge of collecting the fragments of childhood memories (trauma), mysterious messengers and messages, and the wily past draw us, the readers, together for conversation with the authors.
WATCH THIS WEBINAR (ENGLISH) HERE
WATCH THIS WEBINAR (POLISH) HERE
Rabbi Haim Beliak and Dr. David Kader are also “sons of survivors.” Our conversation will focus on this significant book. The two authors Hirt-Manheimer and Yura as well as their interlocutors began life in displaced persons (DP) camps in the American Zone. We discovered that after fifty-five years of knowing each other, Aron Hirt-Manheimer’s mother and Haim Beliak’s mother were in the same concentration and work camps. They were liberated on the same “death march.”
Rabbi Beliak, the executive director of Jewish Renewal in Poland has marshalled a small determined cabinet of rabbis, and cantors, and professors– more sons and daughters of survivors to renew Jewish life in Poland. The Freighted Legacies encounter brings together the descendants of Polish Jews from around the world. Jewish Poles in Poland as well as Jewish Poles from Ukraine seek to address their trauma and discovering their Jewish past. Some of this effort requires making peace with trauma but also facing the trauma.
Dr. David Kader is a board member of Jewish Renewal in Poland. Dr. David Kader is a retired professor of law after many years of teaching at Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ.) Kader grew up in Fresno, CA and Beliak in Phoenix, Arizona.
This joint memoir attests to a legacy of love against hate.
READ EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK HERE
