Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year.
It is the start of the High Holy Days — a time of celebration and a time to revel in the honeyed sweetness of life and goodness of God. It is marked by the phrase “Shanah tovah,” meaning “good year.”
This year, Rosh Hashanah began Sunday at sunset. It ended two days later as the sun set Tuesday.
When it began, Judah Samet started his 84th good year. When it ended, Samet was gone.
“In Jewish tradition, if you die on Rosh Hashanah, it’s considered a sign of a righteous life,” said his daughter, Elizabeth Samet.
It was a life marked by the peculiar kind of luck that intertwines with tragedy. The Hungarian-born Samet was 7 when he and his family were caged in the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. He was 80 when a chance conversation with his housekeeper made him four minutes late for synagogue Oct. 27, 2018, putting him in the parking lot as bullets flew at Tree of Life synagogue.
It was not a genocidal dictator that ended Samet’s life or an assassin with a gun in a place of worship. It wasn’t the coronavirus pandemic. It was stomach cancer.
But Samet’s story does not die. After years of being quiet about his Holocaust experiences, he started to speak about them just a few years before the shooting.
“I didn’t want to talk. But then I noticed that all the survivors are old, and, pretty soon, there won’t be anybody to tell the story,” he said.
Thankfully, he did. Thankfully, for all of the survivors who repeat the stories so no one can forget a little boy slowly starving in the Nazi war machine, kept alive by his mother’s ingenuity in scavenging for food and losing his father to typhus just three days after being liberated from the camps. Thankfully, for survivors of mass shootings who speak up to tell of the horror they saw on days when too many lost their lives.
Samet was supposed to testify at the trial of accused shooter Robert Bowers. But the plodding, foot-dragging pace of the justice system did what war and tragedy couldn’t. It outlasted Judah Samet.
Maybe the last thing Samet can be — after son and husband and father, prisoner and paratrooper, Pittsburgher and, above all, a devout Jew — is a model to others in the wake of crime. His example is one of perseverance and victory through survival and a refusal to stay silent.
As family and friends say goodbye, one phrase probably will be used over and over: “May his memory be a blessing.” The words are traditional and appropriate for a righteous life well lived.
