Holocaust survivor, 76, finally gets his bar mitzvah

It may have taken 63 years but Herman Rosenblat is finally able to celebrate being a man.

Rosenblat, formerly of Bay Terrace, received his Bar Mitzvah today at Congregation Beth Sholom Chabad in Mineola. Although most Jewish boys celebrate at age 13 — the age when the child becomes responsible for himself under Jewish law — Rosenblat was hardly in a position for balloons and streamers: the 76-year-old Polish immigrant spent his 13th year in a concentration camp during World War II.

Rosenblat celebrated with about a dozen friends and local congregants, eating cookies and dancing the Hora. But his journey from near death in a German concentration camp to celebrating his life in a Mineola temple is just one of Rosenblat’s amazing tales.

Perhaps his most astonishing is the story of how he met his wife, Roma. While in the concentration camp, the teenage Rosenblat met a girl on the outside who would throw him apples and bread over the barbed wire fence that separated them. The little girl gave him hope, he said, in a world that was filled with death. Seventeen years later, after being freed by the Russians and immigrating to New York, Rosenblat reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date. After a few minutes of talking, the girl, Roma, asked him where he was during the war. When he told her, she got quiet and then told the story of how she used to feed apples and bread to a teenage boy in a concentration camp. The two realized they had been reunited and Rosenblat proposed on the spot. Six months later they married.

“My wife has always been there with me,” he said in a speech after his Bar Mitzvah.