Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor David Lenga shared this recipe and story in "Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors." It is reprinted here with permission of the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

To have cholent in a Yiddish home, in prewar Poland, in Lodz, was a must. There was no Shabbat without the cholent. It’s just the way it was. Everybody looked forward to it. It was the taste of heaven. When I was a ten or eleven year old boy, my mother would put all the cholent ingredients into a black cast-iron pot. She would wrap it around very tight with paper and then with string. She would wrap it hermetically tight. She would put a lid on it and then give it to me—the oldest boy—to go to the neighborhood bakery. The bakery would put it in his oven and give you the top part of a ticket. Part of the ticket with the number would go on the cholent, and the other part you would hold on to and redeem your food later. And so I went every Friday before Shabbat to the baker to take the cholent for the family. All the other Jews were doing the same thing. There were hundreds of people lined up outside of the baker’s story: the whole neighborhood. Everybody did it.

Try David's recipe for blueberry stonekes and explore more recipes from other Holocaust survivors in "Recipes from the Kitchens of Holocaust Survivors".

This recipe was shared by Italo Camerino. Read more about his family in " How Roman Jewish Recipes Endured at One Family’s Home in Montreal" and try his recipes for carciofi all giudia ('Jewish style' fried artichokes), concia (zucchini salad), and aliciotti con indivia (anchovies with escarole).

This recipe was shared by Alex Sternberg. Read more about his family in "A Mother’s Chicken Paprikash Recipe Lives On" and try his recipe for spaetzle (fresh egg noodles).

This recipe was shared by Alex Sternberg. Read more about his family in "A Mother’s Chicken Paprikash Recipe Lives On" and try his recipe for chicken paprikash.

This recipe was shared by Italo Camerino. Read more about his family in " How Roman Jewish Recipes Endured at One Family’s Home in Montreal" and try his recipes for carciofi all giudia ('Jewish style' fried artichokes), spaghetti al tonno (spaghetti with tomatoes and tuna), and aliciotti con indivia (anchovies with escarole).

This recipe was shared by Italo Camerino. Read more about his family in " How Roman Jewish Recipes Endured at One Family’s Home in Montreal" and try his recipes for carciofi all giudia ('Jewish style' fried artichokes), spaghetti al tonno (spaghetti with tomatoes and tuna), and chicken meatballs with celery.

“My Friday afternoon chicken soup and galuska memories with my mom and grandma are some of my best memories,” Julia Silverberg Nemeth says. “After we ate, they read the Nok Lapja (Hungarian women's magazine) out loud to me and often the articles were humorous and they belly laughed for a long time.”

Read more about Julia's family in "Hungarian Recipes From a Secret Jewish Family in the Northwoods of Minnesota" and try her recipes for fánk (doughnuts topped with apricot jam) and mákos nudli (sweet poppy seed pasta).

This recipe was shared by Dorit Golender. Read more about her family in "The Lithuanian Gefilte Fish From a Grandmother She Never Knew." 

Dorit’s family recipe is for an old world style of gefilte. Traditionally, carp and pike were used, but both types of fish have become harder to find (especially in the U.S) and are typically replaced with whitefish or a mixture of other types of saltwater fish like hake or sole. Her grandmother Shula’s recipe also calls for stuffing the mixture into the fish skin before poaching (gefilte, after all, means stuffed in Yiddish). We have adapted Dorit’s recipe, with a focus on capturing the flavor, but making it easier to attain. If you are feeling adventurous, however, you can buy your fish whole (enough to yield around 2 lbs of fillet). Ask your fishmonger to clean and gut the fish from the neck so that the belly is not cut. Then, have them cut the entire fish into 1 inch slices, cleaning the fillet meat and remaining bones out of the rounds but still keeping the complete rounds of skin in tact. Follow the recipe until step 5 and instead of shaping the fish mixture into patties, stuff it back into the fish skin rounds and place over the onions before poaching.

If you are freezing the kreplach, in step #8, transfer the shaped kreplach onto a parchment lined plate and chill for 10 minutes. Then transfer to a bag or container and freeze for up to one month.

This recipe was shared by Becca Gallick-Mitchell. Read more about her family in "A Fifth Generation Thanksgiving Kreplach Tradition." 

This recipe was shared by Miri and Yoav Polachek. Read more about their family in " A Stuffed Cabbage Five Generations Strong" and try their recipes for Romanian eggplant salad, and chopped liver with caramelized onions.

Soy sauce is optional. It adds a salty balance to the sweet and sour flavors of the stuffed cabbage.

This recipe was shared by Miri and Yoav Polachek. Read more about their family in " A Stuffed Cabbage Five Generations Strong" and try their recipes for sarmale (Romanian stuffed cabbage), and chopped liver with caramelized onions.

Like the sarmale or stuffed cabbage recipe, this dish has its roots in Transylvania. In Miri’s family growing up, it was accompanied by chopped raw onion. Today, she serves it as a first course when they have guests, often with freshly baked challah that Yoav makes.

This recipe was shared by Italo Camerino. Read more about his family in " How Roman Jewish Recipes Endured at One Family’s Home in Montreal" and try his recipes for concia (zucchini salad), aliciotti con indivia (anchovies baked with escarole), and chicken meatballs with celery.

This recipe was shared by Italo Camerino. Read more about his family in " How Roman Jewish Recipes Endured at One Family’s Home in Montreal" and try his recipes for carciofi all giudia ('Jewish Style' Fried Artichokes), aliciotti con indivia (anchovies baked with escarole), and chicken meatballs with celery.

“My grandmother had a notorious sweet tooth,” Julia Silverberg Nemeth says. During WW2, Edith gave Juliana her sugar rations to sustain her — both physically and emotionally. Even decades after the war, when Julia was growing up in Minnesota, Edith continued to lovingly make sweets for her mother.

Among them was mákos nudli, a Hungarian dish of hand-cut pasta tossed with poppyseeds, topped with powdered sugar, and served in the family with apricot jam or plum jelly. Edith would make the dish for a sweet dinner around Purim and tell Julia the story of Esther. But, “I just didn't put it all together back then,” she says. Looking back, though, she sees things in a different light. “My grandmother's story reminds me of Queen Esther in the palace of Shushan, because she hid her Jewish identity.” 

For the last 10 years of Juliana’s life, she ate almost nothing but sugary treats. “I think my grandmother loved sweets as a way to combat all this sorrow,” Julia adds.

Read more about Julia's family in "Hungarian Recipes From a Secret Jewish Family in the Northwoods of Minnesota" and try her recipes for hen soup with Hungarian galuska dumplings and fánk (doughnuts topped with apricot jam).

This recipe was shared by Yonit Naftali. Read more about her family in "A Shavuot Feast Marks the Start of Summer for This Family." 

This recipe was shared by Yonit Naftali. Read more about her family in "This Family Holds On to the Past Through Their Purim Sweets" and try her recipe for fluden.

This recipe was shared by Yonit Naftali. Read more about her family in "This Family Holds On to the Past Through Their Purim Sweets" and try her recipe for beigli.

This recipe was shared by Hean Zeidner Kaspi. Read more about her family in "The Hungarian Crepe Cake That Survived WWII" .

Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Eugene Ginter shared this recipe and story in "Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors." It is reprinted here with permission of the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

“I will share with you a recipe for a chocolate sandwich that my mother made for me right after the war when we lived in Germany. She used this recipe to fatten me up. My mother used to say, “I’d rather spend the money on the butcher than the doctor.” After the war, things were tight. I had pictures of me where the biggest object on my face was my ears. I looked like Dumbo with the ears. I was so skinny, very emaciated. I had these gigantic ears and a small face, and I didn’t like food. If I saw a lot of food, I would throw up, I guess from the hunger… When my mother found me after the war, she tried certain things. I would only eat certain things. I liked chocolate. Who doesn’t? She would take a slice of black bread, put a lot of butter on it, then take hard chocolate and shave it down and pat it into the butter. She was trying to fatten me up. So, I would bite into this thing. How bad can black bread be with butter and chocolate?”

Read more about Eugene’s story in “The Boy Liberated from Auschwitz Just Before His Sixth Birthday” and explore more recipes from Holocaust survivors in "Recipes from the Kitchens of Holocaust Survivors".

Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Benjamin Lesser shared this recipe and story in "Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors." It is reprinted here with permission of the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

“The story of this compote goes back to Munkatch, Hungary. My grandfather had a stately home on a major street called Sugar—an appropriate name for that sweet home. He had a big orchard and gardens (in the rose garden there was a sukkah made of wine bottles, and I remember seeing prisms of sunlight through the glass). Many kinds of berries and fruits grew in the orchard: raspberries, blueberries, apples, plums, and pears. The orchard also had a red lattice walkway with hanging grapes. Every year, we would line up there and somebody on the tree would drop pears to us. We’d make a big chain all the way to the house, maybe twenty kids. We’d put those pears in tissue paper in the attic to ripen. And of course, we made compote.

When I was a child, we would always pick the fruit while it was hard, not yet ripe. Then we would put all of it in the attic to ripen. Once ripe, pears and all the other fruit picked from my grandfather’s orchard would be sliced and then cooked in the water.

When I make this recipe, I pick fresh pears from my trees, or if I need more fruit, I buy it dried, especially prunes, and place them in the water to achieve the same result.”

Explore more recipes from Holocaust survivors in "Recipes from the Kitchens of Holocaust Survivors".

Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor David Lenga shared this recipe and story in "Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors." It is reprinted here with permission of the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

“I was eleven years old when the war broke out. I was very eager to help my mom: washing the dishes, peeling potatoes, or helping with whatever she needed me to do in the kitchen—and she was grateful for that. I noticed how diligently she worked to put the ingredients together for the blueberry stonekes. The end product was so delicious—better than any baker could possibly bake. The whole family was wild about them. When you bit into the stonekes, they were full of blueberries and sugar—so juicy—the taste has stayed with me forever. The stonekes remained so much in my memory that I taught my wife how to make them when I got married.”

Try David's recipe for cholent with eggs and kishke and explore more recipes from other Holocaust survivors in "Recipes from the Kitchens of Holocaust Survivors".

Every winter, Edith would fry these doughnuts for the family. “I thought it was a Christmas tradition even though my mom told me the story of the miracle of oil when she made the donuts,” writes Julia Silverberg Nemeth. “I just thought all biblical stories were the same, as in Christian.”

Read more about Julia's family in "Hungarian Recipes From a Secret Jewish Family in the Northwoods of Minnesota" and try her recipes for hen soup with Hungarian galuska dumplings and mákos nudli (sweet poppy seed pasta).

During the Holocaust, Ilona Kellner, known as Ica, was imprisoned at Auschwitz and Hessisch Lichtenau, a munitions factory that was a subcamp of Buchenwald. Like all prisoners, she faced deep hunger, but at night, the women in her barracks would talk about recipes with one another. The act of resistance sustained them. 

From August 1944 to the spring of 1945 when Ica was liberated, she wrote down more than 600 recipes, often noting the name of the person who shared the recipe with her. This one came from a woman named Piri who was killed by an SS officer only days before Ica and the surviving women were liberated.

Ica kept her legacy alive by making these buns for her daughter Eva Moreimi, who continues the tradition, baking them every year for Shavuot. The technique used in this recipe is similar to those for cinnamon rolls: a yeasted dough is rolled out into a large rectangle, spread with a buttery filling, rolled up like a jelly-roll, sliced into buns, and baked in one pan. Darázsfészek is made with a walnut filling, but Eva notes it can be made without nuts by simply omitting them and swapping in a splash of vanilla extract. 

This recipe was shared by Eva Moreimi. Read more about her family in "The Woman Who Hid 600 Recipes from SS Officers." 

This recipe comes from a collaboration between Momentum and the Jewish Food Society. Find more recipes from this collection at "Recipes from the Momentum Community", created with the help of Rebecca Firsker and Ame Gilbert.