Parshas Vayakhel (Parah) 5785
- Torah Tavlin
- Mar 20
- 3 min read
ויעש את הכיור נחשת ואת כנו נחשת במראת הצבאת אשר צבאו פתח אהל מועד ... (לח-ח)
In 1935, the Nazi drive to isolate and demonize the Jewish people was soaring to new heights. A series of decrees known as the Nuremberg Laws made brutal distinctions between Aryans and non-Aryans: Jews, Roma, and Black people. Overnight, German Jews were stripped of their citizenship, forbidden from holding government jobs, and restricted from public spaces lest they “infect” Aryans. A key driver of this pseudo-racial propaganda was a magazine called Sonne ins Haus, or “Sunshine in the Home,” which promoted the Nazi myth of Aryan perfection and non-Aryan pollution. In 1935, the magazine ran a contest across Germany to find the perfect Aryan baby. Ten famous portrait photographers were asked to submit ten portraits of beautiful German babies. Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist of the Nazi party, would judge the winner himself.
Goebbels chose an adorable six-month-old girl as the winner: the ideal Aryan child. Her name, unbeknownst to Goebbels, was Hessy Levenson. Her smiling likeness was plastered on the magazine’s cover as proof of Aryan superiority, becoming a popular propaganda picture, imprinted on postcards and greeting cards across Germany for years to come. There was only one snag: Hessy was, in fact, Jewish. The greatest Nazi example of Aryan perfection was a Jewish baby from a Jewish immigrant family. Hessy’s parents, Jacob and Pauline Levenson, moved to Berlin in 1928 when Jacob landed a coveted spot as a singer in an opera house. He used the stage name Yasha Lenssen to disguise his Jewish name. As anti-semitism increased across Germany, the management found out his real, Jewish-sounding name, and fired him. Life became increasingly difficult for Jacob and Pauline, as for all Jews in Germany. Spurned by musical establishments, neither could find work as singers. Jacob took a traveling salesman job to make ends meet and the couple moved into a tiny studio apartment in Berlin.
In 1934, Pauline gave birth to Hessy. When Hessy was six months old, Pauline and her sister took her to one of Germany’s famous portrait photographers, Hans Ballin. He snapped a picture of the pudgy Hessy wearing a bonnet, with a few brown curls visible underneath. After Ballin developed Hessy’s portrait, Jacob and Pauline kept it displayed on the piano in their tiny flat. As Hans Ballin was one of the photographers tapped to send in ten photos for the contest, he assembled ten baby portraits and then, on a whim, threw in Hessy’s picture too, and sent it off to the magazine. A few months later, the Levensons’ housecleaner was working in their apartment and remarked that she’d seen a magazine with their baby’s photo on the cover. The Levenson’s were horrified. Sonne ins Haus was well-known as a Nazi magazine. They worried what would happen if it came out that the baby gracing the latest cover was discovered to be a Jewish baby.
Pauline rushed to Ballin’s studio and told him there must have been some mistake; Hessy, the winning baby, was Jewish, she explained. Ballin laughed and replied that he knew that and sent in her portrait as an act of defiance. “I wanted to make the Nazis look foolish. I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of this jest. And you see, I was right. Of all the babies, they picked this baby as the perfect Aryan.” Years later, when she was an adult, Hessy was asked what she would say if she could speak to Ballin about his decision to send in her photograph: “I would tell him, good for you for having the courage.”
After Hessy’s father Jacob was briefly arrested by the SS on fabricated charges of tax evasion in 1938, the family realized it was too dangerous to remain in Germany. They fled first to Latvia, then to Paris, where they remained until moving to New York in 1949. Reflecting on her experience as the poster child of supposed Nazi “Aryan” perfection, Hessy noted that the fact that her Jewish face was celebrated throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe seemed to be one small way she could retaliate. “I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge.” However, her greatest triumph was when she donated an original Sonne ins Haus magazine with her picture on the cover to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. She told reporters: “My strongest memory from childhood was running away. My father told me that when there would be a State of Israel, there would be no more running away.” In Jerusalem, donating the Nazi magazine that celebrated a Jewish baby as the ideal child, Hessy was proof that the Jewish people have survived - and thrived - despite all of history’s attempts to wipe us out. (Aish.com)