The Heschel School

Moishe Brot was born in Łódź, Poland on October 25, 1916 to Brucha and Pinchas Brot. He had two sisters, Rose and Etta (known as Edga in Polish), and a brother, Abraham. The family was traditionally observant and made a living by working in the textile business. 

In 1939, as the Germans invaded Poland, Morris and his father fled to Russia, hoping to subsequently bring the rest of the family to join them. However, they were arrested by the Soviets and sent to different Siberian labor camps. Meanwhile, back in Poland, Morris’s brother Abraham was arrested by the Gestapo, never to be seen again. His mother, Brucha, was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, as were his sisters, Rose and Etta shortly afterwards, at which point they were separated.

Etta was sent to the gas chambers while Rose, a strong young woman, was selected for work even though she was holding her six-month-old child at the time. She later relayed how the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, who oversaw the selection process, took the child from her arms and slapped her when she resisted, calling her a swine and falsely reassuring her that her baby would be taken to a children’s ward. Her husband, the baby’s father, perished in the Holocaust as well.

Minia Brot née Rosenberg was also born in Łódź, Poland, on December 25, 1920. Sadly, she died at the young age of 34, and many of the details of her family history were not recorded. However, it is known that her father’s name was Kalman Rosenberg and that she had six siblings. Like Moishe and his father, Minia fled to Russia around 1939, shortly after marrying her first husband. Moishe also was married before the war to a woman who perished in the Holocaust. 

Moishe and Minia met in Russia and returned to Łódź together after the war, along with Moshe’s father Pinchas. There, they were reunited with Rose, and Minia discovered that she was the sole survivor in her family. Rose met a fellow survivor, Morris Kazman, whose wife and three children perished in the Holocaust. As fate would have it, he was the tailor who had made the wedding dress she wore when she married her first husband before the war. The two couples—Morris and Minia; Rose and Morris—were married in a joint ceremony in 1945. 

In 1948, the surviving members of these families emigrated to Toronto, Canada, where Moishe’s grandparents had settled in the 1920s. There, Moishe became known as Morris, and continued in the family profession, opening a textile store in Toronto’s garment district. Moishe and Minia Brot had one son, Karl, in 1950. (His Hebrew name is Kalman, after his maternal grandfather.) After Minia passed away, Morris married Freida Sacks, who survived the Holocaust with her son Manny in Germany by hiding and passing as Germans. Freida died in 2001 and Manny in 2009.

Rose and Morris Kazman had five children together—Brucha, Marsha, Marty, Steven and Max—and many grandchildren. Karl Brot and his wife, Enid had two daughters, Marnie (named after her grandmother, who died in 1954) and Tara. Moishe passed away in 1977, at the age of 60; following the death of his parents, Karl remained close with his only aunt and uncle and his five cousins and their families. His older daughter, Marni, is the mother of Heschel students Ruby and Ava Selman.