Our Families and the Holocaust

In recent months, two Temple Sinai members, Peter Lowy and Steven Seltzer, have each had books published about the personal stories of survival and resilience of their family members during and after the Holocaust.

Please join us for an evening of observing Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, with prayers and songs, and by hearing from both Peter and Steven about these two books that retell their families’ remarkable stories.

Steven Seltzer, a Temple Sinai member since 1990, is the son of Ruth Seltzer, who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport in 1939 and reached the United States in 1941. In recent years Steven reconnected with his family’s hometown of Lambsheim, Germany—visiting with his wife Rochelle, reclaiming German citizenship with his sons, and returning in 2023 to rededicate the gravestone of his grandfather, Julius Salmon. Steven’s book, The Long Road from Persecution to an Unlikely Reconciliation: From the Holocaust to German Citizenship, is a memoir of his mother’s and his own Jewish journeys.

Peter Lowy and his wife, Linda, joined Temple Sinai in 2024. They recently took their daughters, sons-in-law, and three grandchildren to Prague to install Stolpersteine (square brass memorial plaques) to commemorate Peter’s paternal grandparents and father, in front of the apartment where they lived before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Peter’s father, Louis Lowy, survived the war and married another Holocaust survivor, Peter’s mother, Edith “Ditta” Lowy. His father’s story was published in The Life and Thought of Louis Lowy: Social Work Through the Holocaust by Lorrie Gardella (2011, Syracuse University Press), and his mother co-authored The Dressmaker’s Daughter, with Joshua Green, based on her experiences (2020, Scholastic Press).