THE DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL
Daytona Beach, Florida
Monday, March 24, 2008
Cantor Arthur J. Fogel, 78, of Palm Coast, recently retired from Temple Israel of Daytona Beach and long-time cantor with Congregation Beth El of Massapequa, New York, died Saturday at Stewart Meyer Hospice House.
Cantor Fogel, a Holocaust survivor, was born in Czechoslovakia and came to the U.S. in 1947. In recent years, he spoke frequently with students and local organizations about his experiences during the war. In retirement, he continued to teach Hebrew and Yiddish classes for Hadassah.
Besides his wife, Sylvia, of 48 years, also of Palm Coast, Cantor Fogel is survived by son, Martin, of Long Island, New York; son, David and daughter-in-law, Penny, of Hermosa Beach, California; and daughter, Stephanie Heller, and son-in-law, Gary Heller, of New Rochelle, New York. He is also survived by four grandchildren, Emily and Max Fogel, and Zoe and Sasha Heller.
Memorial services will be held Tuesday, March 25 at 1 p.m. at Temple Beth Shalom, Palm Coast.
Any donations in Cantor Fogel's memory are requested to be donated to Flagler Pines Nursing Home, Hadassah of Palm Coast or Temple Beth Shalom.
THE DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL
Daytona Beach, Florida
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Arthur Fogel - Holocaust survivor relished freedom
PALM COAST - Arthur Fogel was remembered Tuesday as a man who refused to let the pain of the past destroy his future.
His was a life of tragedy and triumph, of losing his family in the Nazi death camps in Poland and Germany and ultimately starting again after being liberated as an orphaned teenager.
Family members and friends at Temple Beth Shalom recalled Fogel, a retired cantor who died Saturday at 78, as a humble and kind man of strong religious conviction and character.
His son David said his father could have become bitter but instead built a life on family and faith, relishing freedom and treating people with love, "even though he carried those scars."
Fogel was 15 when his father, mother and five sisters, who had been uprooted weeks earlier from a tranquil, rural town in what is now the Czech Republic, were loaded onto a cattle car and sent from a Jewish ghetto in Hungary to Auschwitz in May 1944.
Standing beside his father, Fogel watched as his mother and sisters were separated and herded into another line. In an instant, they were gone, forever.
A month later, Fogel and his father were sent to another concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
Fogel recalled in a 2005 News-Journal interview, commemorating the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, that being so young proved an advantage. He survived by sheer instinct, even without food.
When liberated in April 1945, Fogel and many other children of Buchenwald, including famed author Elie Wiesel, were sent to a school in France for two years. He then moved to Canada and several years later to New York City. He lived the past nine years in Palm Coast with Sylvia, his wife of 48 years.
"He kept it to himself for a long time," she said of the Holocaust, rarely discussing it with his three children when they were growing up. "But later in life, he realized it was a story that should be told."
Fogel often talked to school, civic and religious groups about his experiences, of those days when the Nazis stole his family and childhood.
"I think of Auschwitz. I know it as a graveyard because I lost my mother and my sisters there," he said in 2005. "That's where my family's life was terminated by the Nazis."
