A Survivor’s Liberation Comes Full Circle at Great-Grandson’s Circumcision

Rachele Kilgore, a new mother in Chapel Hill, N.C., called a local rabbi, Rabbi Zalman Bluming—co-director with his wife, Yehudis, of Chabad at Duke University serving Durham Chapel Hill —to schedule a brit milah (“circumcision”) for her newborn son. It would be a small, intimate affair, with just her parents attending, she informed the rabbi. The ceremony was scheduled for 12 p.m. on Dec. 22.

Noon came and went, and Kilgore and her family were nowhere to be found. At around 1 p.m., the family arrived. Before the brit, the baby's grandmother, Dorothy Lipsky, asked to say a few words about the name the baby was about to receive. Shmuel, she explained, was the name of her late father—Shmuel Goldwasser, who had been a Holocaust survivor.

“When I gave birth to Rachele, it was Jan. 18, at 1:31,” said Lipsky. Her husband, Richard, called her father to tell him the news. “My father threw the phone away. I called my mother. ‘Mommy, why did Daddy not speak to Richard?’ And she goes, ‘You speak to him.’ I got on the phone and my father was crying, and he said to me, ‘On Jan. 18, 1945, at 1:31, is when I was saved from the ovens of Auschwitz.’ ” Concluding her remarks, Lipsky wished the baby to be a “miracle child,” just like his mother Rachele was.

The brit went ahead, and the moment the baby was named Shmuel for Dorothy’s father, Rabbi Bluming glanced at the clock. It was 1:31 p.m.

“I have a funny feeling my father is around here somewhere,” Dorothy said as the simcha took an even more poignant turn.

Shmuel Goldwasser was born in 1912 in Poland. He watched as the Nazis threw his 18-month old son in the air and shot the child, and then killed his hysterical wife. “How did you keep living after that?” his daughter once asked him. “I had to stay alive for my younger brother, Srulick,” he said.

Srulick survived the war, thanks to his brother’s persistence. Shortly before he was slated to be killed in Auschwitz, chaos broke out. The Red Army, which would liberate the camp days later on Jan. 27, 1945, was approaching and Shmuel’s captors ran for the hills. Today wouldn’t be his last.

Rachele Kilgore with her newborn son, Shmuel. Her father, Richard Lipsky, seated, served as the sandek. He is surrounded by his family and the Bluming family.

“My father was so close to Rachele,” Dorothy told Chabad.org. “She could do no wrong in his eyes.”

Rachele wasn’t sure she wanted a traditional brit done by an observant mohel, but she told her mother, “I’m doing it for Grandpa. It will be a kosher brit,” as the devout Grandpa Shmuel would have wanted.

Dorothy Lipsky, Rachele Kilgore and the mohel, Rabbi Yaakov Golomb, holding baby Shmuel.