Brooklyn program helps Holocaust survivors confront trauma and loneliness

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one Brooklyn program is working to combat loneliness and decades-old trauma among survivors living far from the places where their lives were forever changed.

The borough is home to one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.

"She's like a friend, a person who understands me"

Marat Rivkin, 88, has only one photograph of himself with his mother from World War II. It was taken in 1941 at a Soviet train station, so he could get help finding her if they were separated.

"My mother ran in and said, 'The war has begun.' I didn't know what she meant, but she was crying and told me and my grandmother to begin packing," Rivkin told Brooklyn reporter Hannah Kliger in Russian.

Rivkin recalled childhood memories of Nazi-allied forces destroying Jewish ghettos in his hometown of Slutsk, in what was then Soviet Belarus.

"They began to bomb and my grandma threw me into poison ivy and covered me with her body. She told me, 'If they kill me, you will survive,'" he said.

Soon after, Rivkin and his family fled, traveling nearly 1,000 miles to a village outside of Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd. Today, he is among hundreds of Holocaust survivors living in Brooklyn.

In recent years, Rivkin has formed a close bond with Olga Smirnova, a clinical social worker who visits him weekly through a home-visit program run by Maimonides Medical Center.

"She's like a friend, a person who understands me. Things sometimes feel difficult, but she gives me advice," Rivkin said.

• Related story: Holocaust survivor in White Plains, N.Y., shares her story

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Smirnova said trauma-informed therapy often looks different for survivors.

"We can use childhood experience like a resource, but for Holocaust survivors, we cannot do it because it's a lot of traumatic experience," she said.

The visits focus on loneliness and emotional distress, issues that many survivors say have intensified amid the war in Ukraine and rising antisemitism in the United States.

Rivkin is one of dozens enrolled in the program, which is led by Dr. Abraham Taub, Chair of Psychiatry at Maimonides.

"This program actually is super meaningful to me. I am the grandson of four Holocaust survivors," Taub said.

As time continues to pass, Taub says, long-suppressed trauma can resurface.

"As people age, their defense mechanisms sometimes get a little bit weaker. And so things that they've been suppressing, or possibly even repressing, for decades, it's more challenging for them to do that," he said.

Several years ago, the program shifted its focus to better serve Russian-speaking survivors from the former Soviet Union. Many did not experience concentration camps but were forced to flee villages and towns as Nazi forces advanced, destroying homes and killing millions.

Rivkin later spent decades as a Soviet dissident before immigrating to the United States in hopes of building a new life. Now widowed, with grown children and grandchildren, he said the visits provide a rare sense of understanding and connection.

"I will ask now ask every family to be more in touch with Holocaust survivors," Smirnova said. "Just call and say 'hi' because this is the generation who is waiting that somebody will call them."

The program's organizers say those small moments of contact can make a profound difference for survivors whose past continues to shape their present.

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