Sydney honours 105-year-old survivor

Sydney’s Jewish community farewelled 105-year-old Holocaust survivor Serena Feldman – whose life became a testament to resilience and forgiveness – at a funeral service the day after Yom Kippur.

Rabbi Yossi Friedman, who officiated with the assistance of The Great Synagogue chief minister Rabbi Benjamin Elton, described the service as deeply personal: his grandmother had travelled to Australia after the war on the same ship as Feldman, the Cyrenia, and the two women became close friends.

Serena’s survival story, Rabbi Friedman said, was remarkable. Born on May 18, 1921 in Komjatice, Czechoslovakia, she was deported to Auschwitz with her mother and sister, in a windowless cattle wagon, travelling for two days without food or water.

All three were initially selected for the gas chambers, but the gas failed to work that day, Friedman said.

Serena went on to survive three further selections by the infamous Dr Mengele, clinging to her mother and sister throughout months of cruelty and hunger. Remarkably, all three survived.

Freed in 1945, Serena returned to Komjatice to find that her father had been murdered, and the family home stolen.

She rebuilt her life first in Europe, and then in Sydney, where she settled after arriving in 1949.

Eleven years after her first daughter died shortly after birth, Feldman gave birth to Judy in January 1959. She later became a grandmother to Zoe, whom Friedman described as her greatest joy.

Rabbi Friedman reflected how it was not merely surviving the Holocaust that defined Serena,

but the way she chose to live afterwards.

Serena repeated one guiding message: “Never hold a grudge, and never hate anyone”.

He said she was not naive about hatred’s power, having witnessed its full horror, but she simply refused to let it take root in her heart.

Rabbi Yossi Friedman at Serena Feldman’s grave at Rookwood on September 22.