“What gives me life is talking about death.” Tziporah Feivlovitz is driven to tell the world 

Visitors to Rechov Chanita in the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood of Haifa see an ordinary street, featuring the standard white stone apartment buildings. But for 11 years, on Yom HaShoah, the scenery would change.

The Feivlovitz family, who owned a kiosk on Rechov Chanita, would string a long rope reaching from the kiosk until the bank located 100 yards down the road. They’d then hang thousands of Holocaust photos from the rope. Children who came to see the exhibit would sit down on the sidewalk and Pinchas Feivlovitz would tell them his story

Pinchas and Tziporah Feivlovitz, both Holocaust survivors and eventually residents of Neve Sha’anan, made it their lives’ goal to memorialize the Holocaust. Their modest, excruciatingly painful exhibit was a small part of their collective work, which included four books and led to Tziporah flying twice a year to lecture in Germany.

Pinchas’s delivery to the children always ended with the same poignant directive: “Remember, don’t forget.”

Because that was the Feivlovitzs’ message to their children, their neighbors, and all future generations. Remember. Don’t forget.

Childhood Cut Short

Tziporah Klein was born in 1927 in Transylvania, Romania, and enjoyed a halcyon childhood. Her father, Aharon Hy”d , was a textile merchant, as well as a chazan. He also played the violin. She had two older brothers who helped out in the business, and a sister, Tova, as well as a younger brother, Avraham Moshe.

Tziporah remembers the prewar period as idyllic. “We were a very musical family. Every Shabbos, we sat around the table, singing zemiros with beautiful harmony. My father was a talented musician, and he played a lot. We often had guests and loved to host.”

In 1940, after a territorial dispute arbitrated by the Axis powers, Hungary annexed Northern Transylvania, where the Kleins lived, and life began to change for Transylvania’s Jewish population. They were no longer allowed to engage in business, and their stores were confiscated. The older Klein brothers were drafted to Hungarian labor camps.

“I remained at home with my parents and younger siblings,” Tziporah recalls. “We hardly went out to the street because it was dangerous. I was sent out every so often to help with parnassah, to secretly send merchandise to Budapest.”

In 1944, things escalated drastically, and Hungarian Jewry were deported.

“We were nearly the last ones to come to Auschwitz,” Tziporah says. “At the time, it was no longer a secret that something heinous was going on there, but until the moment the Germans arrived, my parents didn’t believe that it could actually happen to us.

“One night, Hungarian military police knocked at the door and demanded that we leave the house immediately. All the neighbors gathered around us to see us leaving, waiting to loot our possessions and money. We were taken to the big shul. After three days and three nights, we were packed onto a cattle train. .