The Story of the Kushner Family
by Christine Bielsky
The story of Jared Kushner's grandparents Reichel and Joseph Kushner is so heartbreaking and inspiring that it makes me believe in the resilience of the human spirit, because Reichel, who became the matriarch of the entire Kushner family, led efforts during the Holocaust to escape from the Navahrudak ghetto in what is now Belarus by organizing prisoners to dig a tunnel with their bare hands under the barbed wire fences while Nazi guards patrolled above them. After escaping into the woods in 1943, Reichel joined the Bielski partisans, a group of armed Jewish resistance fighters who lived in the forest and saved more than 1,200 Jewish lives, and this incredible story would eventually become the basis for the 2008 Hollywood film Defiance starring Daniel Craig. Reichel later married Yossel, who became known as Joseph Kushner in America, another Holocaust survivor, and the couple spent three and a half agonizing years in a displaced persons camp in Italy waiting for a visa to the United States because as Reichel said decades later, nobody wanted to take us in, remembering that terrible time when they were stateless refugees with nowhere to go.
When they finally arrived in America in 1949, Joseph worked as a construction worker and carpenter in Elizabeth New Jersey, then began building modest houses one at a time, slowly accumulating enough money to start a small real estate business that would eventually become the foundation of the Kushner family fortune. What moves me most is that Joseph and Reichel helped create a tight knit community of Holocaust survivors in Livingston New Jersey known as the Builders, where they raised their children speaking Yiddish at home and instilling in them the values of hard work, family loyalty, and never forgetting where they came from. Their son Charles Kushner, born in 1954 and named Chanan after a maternal uncle who died in a German concentration camp, took over his father's modest construction business in 1985 and transformed it into Kushner Companies, growing the portfolio from 4,000 New Jersey apartments to more than 10,000 residential units plus commercial properties and even a community bank, making the family enormously wealthy.
Jared Corey Kushner was born on January 10, 1981 in Livingston New Jersey, the oldest of four children, and he grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish home where his grandmother Rae would tell him stories about tunneling out of the ghetto and living in the forest, stories that shaped his understanding of survival, resilience, and what it means to rebuild after losing everything.
Here is the trailer for Defiance the movie based on the above story.
Additional Links:
Bill Kreisberg ·edpnotrosS3ahc1g3h6tl1706h326l198i9fm0g29htic4tamh04ta441h8i ·
A Holocaust Story: The Legacy of the Bielski Brothers ·
Christine Bielski ·Soersodpnt7c 38hmcaciMlt2 t3a9:it715 9rig30192i7uhl0 A00Mcut ·
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