Jacob Kolton, 88, had a Profound Impact on Others

Jacob Kolton, a Holocaust survivor who moved thousands with his story of a renewed faith late in life despite the atrocities he endured, died last month in New Jersey. He was 88.

“He had a tremendous impact on young people,” said Rabbi Mendy Kasowitz, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Essex County, N.J.. “This was a man who lived the pain of the Holocaust. His willingness to share that pain with us left a tremendous impact on our lives.”

A teenager at the onset of World War II, Kolton was first forced to work in Nazi headquarters in his home town of Zwoleń, Poland. In the spring of 1942, the Germans began transferring local Jews to concentration camps, while murdering many of them in cold blood. Kolton was given the job of filling their “graves”.

During the next three years Kolton and his brothers were taken to a series of concentration camps, experiencing unspeakable suffering and humiliation. “At war’s end,” he wrote late in life, “I and only one of my brothers came out of the camps—naked in spirit, emotionally confused, hungry for human needs.”

After the war, Kolton spent years in displaced persons camps in Germany, where he met his wife, Bessie. They immigrated to America in the early 1950s and together raised a family, while Kolton practiced his trade as a jeweler.

After retirement, Kolton began attending programs for seniors at the JCC of West Orange, N.J. There he met Kasowitz, who was teaching a weekly Talmud class.

Soon after they met, Kolton attended synagogue for the first time since he had entered the concentration camps more than 60 years before. He began to put on tefillin, ritual boxes worn during prayers, and began to again celebrate the Jewish holidays.

Kolton regularly attended a Shabbat morning class on Chassidism given by Rabbi Moshe Herson, dean of the Rabbinical College of America. “He was a serious student,” says Kasowitz, “and would always ask intellectual and thought provoking questions. He wanted to understand everything that he was being taught.”

One night, Kolton was attending a course on the Holocaust, “Beyond Never Again” developed by the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, the adult education division of Chabad-Lubavitch.

JLI’s director, Rabbi Efraim Mintz was teaching the class, and as it was concluding Kolton suddenly raised his hand.

“I was there, and I would like to sing a song,” requested Kolton.

Kolton then stood up and began to sing “Ani Maamin”, the haunting song of faith that was sung by Jews on the way to the gas chambers.

“It was unimaginably moving to hear this, especially at the conclusion of a course on the Holocaust,” says Kasowitz.

“He was consistently affected by the Holocaust,” says Zella Geltman, who taught a creative writing class at the JCC that Kolton attended. “He seemed to exasperate himself by it.”

Kolton would tell of his great suffering during the Holocaust, seeing his entire town wiped out. “For Holocaust survivors,” he wrote in an award-winning essay, Coming to America, “life and tragedy have formulated their own entity, never to come to terms. The stories, tangible as they are, remain constant images of a bitter truth, when human indifference, anti-Semitic compliance and Nazi ideology combined to destroy Jews and Judaism.”

He described how the Nazis destroyed the Jews’ morale by breaking their spirit and weakening any will power they had. “Under the cover of darkness,” he recalled, “they struck those houses marked ‘Jude.’… each morning the news of the Nazis’ ‘sport’ spread all over the town.”

Kolton questioned what happened during the Holocaust and asked how G-d could let it happen. “He was convinced,” says his friend Walter Dmytreshin, “that there was a G-d. Still he would ask, ‘Why would G-d allow this?’”

“G-d created heaven and earth, and gave free will to the human family to obey his commandments,” concluded Kolton, who placed all the blame on civilization.

“When mankind supposedly from a civilized nation could shoot infants in their cradles, I question civilization,” Kolton wrote.

Despite his ongoing pain, when Kolton came to the synagogue, he was a different man. “He always embraced everyone and wanted everyone to be happy,” said Kasowitz.

Kolton would encourage others to attend the synagogue and he would take center stage, singing to the crowd. “He loved to sing,” says Dmytreshin, “if there was any kind of Jewish music he would be the first to sing.”

“He would talk about going to synagogue with his father in the shtetl, and he said he felt that he was coming home,” Kasowitz said. “His Judaism was taken away by the Nazis, and he slowly started coming back. Coming to the synagogue gave him a new-found energy and excitement. He bonded with everyone. He was extremely dedicated to his Judaism the last few years of his life. It was an honor for me to know him.”

When it came to his life in the United States, Kolton wrote that he cherished “the precious aspect of being free to learn, to grow, and to prosper. Most of all, we wanted to be away from Europe. It would be the healing time we longed for.”

Kolton’s wife Bessie and their children were the most important things in his life, says Dmytreshin. “He spoke so highly of her. Every time he would mention her, he would have tears in his eyes.”

“For my wife and myself,” Kolton once said, “we want to thank America, for having given us freedom and the ability to live in the land of the free.”