iVolunteer – Learning From History, Easing Loneliness

NEW YORK, NY — When Terry Nayman was 14 years old in Poland she saw Nazis burn her father’s beard and knock her mother’s teeth out. She never imagined that 70 years later she would talk to two people about it in her Lower East Side apartment.

Though Justine Gundelfinger, a South African model and actress in her 20s, Sonia Nusenbaum, a Polish Holocaust survivor in her 60s, and Mrs. Nayman, now 84, made an unusual group, they spoke for hours. Ms. Gundelfinger has befriended seven more Holocaust survivors in New York. A videoincluding her description of her work can be found here.

She met them through a program called iVolunteer that matches young volunteers with some of Manhattan’s roughly five thousand Holocaust survivors to alleviate their loneliness.

Elisheva Tauby, 26, and her husband Tzvi founded iVolunteer in September 2007. “It’s primarily for companionship,” and often goes beyond that, Mrs. Tauby said. She also founded a similar group in Brooklyn, Connect2.

Mrs. Tauby said many survivors never had children and lack family support.

Even for those with families, there are special considerations. “A lot of survivors were very hard on their kids,” Mrs. Tauby said. Sometimes “the kids don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

Ms. Nusenbaum, who never married, supported Mrs. Tauby’s claims. Ms. Nusenbaum made it to America after years in German refugee camps with her mother, the only living member of her family.

“I would buy my mother a gift,” Ms. Nusenbaum recalled, “and she would yell at me.”

Mrs. Tauby said many survivors eventually “look at the volunteer as a part of their family.”

Yet the survivors do not simply receive charity. They often become surrogate relatives for volunteers from outside the city like Ms. Gundelfinger.

Ms. Gundelfinger said she missed her paternal grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, who have died. “If I could have another day with them … I dream about that,” she said.

Mrs. Nayman showed everyone prewar photographs of her family. When she was 17, the Nazis sent her to another family in the Lodz ghetto. From there she was transported to Auschwitz, then forced to work in an ammunition factory in Bachledova, Czechoslovakia, until she was liberated, without a living relative.

She married her husband, Morris Nayman, in Germany in 1946, shortly after liberation. They eventually came to New York City, had a son and a daughter, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, who visit when they can.

Mr. Nayman died in 1992. “It’s very hard to be alone,” she said.

Mrs. Nayman tries not to let her Holocaust experience affect her daily life, but said she sleeps poorly, lying awake asking herself: “Did I have parents? Was I always alone in the world?”

When Ms. Gundelfinger visits, she said, “I’m not alone, I have someone to talk to,” and that Ms. Gundelfinger was “a true friend … she’s like a daughter to me, like a granddaughter.”

“I’ve learned what true suffering is,” Ms. Gundelfinger said. “I feel that I’ve seen a change in myself … and a change in them. And it’s a positive change, and that’s what makes me feel like I must continue the friendships.”