Mourning Masha Zeleznikow
Tributes have flowed for Holocaust survivor, community volunteer and restaurateur Masha Zeleznikow, who died last Saturday, aged 89.
TRIBUTES have flowed for Holocaust survivor, community volunteer and restaurateur Masha Zeleznikow, who died last Saturday, aged 89.
Zeleznikow, a mother of three and a grandmother, was honoured for decades of volunteer work with Jewish Care Victoria last year, receiving a Minister of Health Volunteer Award during National Volunteers Week from Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy. She also received Jewish Care Victoria’s Leo and Mina Fink Community Service Award for her longstanding service.
She founded the Tuesday Club, a social group for Russian speakers, after Jewish Welfare (Jewish Care’s predecessor) asked her to visit a migrant recovering from a suicide attempt. It led Zeleznikow to arrange social activities for new arrivals and assist them with work, housing and schooling. The Tuesday Club continues today under Jewish Care’s Healthy Ageing Program.
Describing her ties to Jewish support groups as “strong and unwavering”, Jewish Care president Mike Debinksi praised “Masha’s desire to help those who could not help themselves”.
Zeleznikow once told The AJN: “I still remember our war years in Kazakhstan – my mother made huge pots of soup which I took to starving yeshivah boys. And now, so many years down the track, I still love to help others.”
B’nai B’rith Victoria president Faye Dubrowin and B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich stated Zeleznikow, a former B’nai B’rith Victoria president, “turned ideas into action with remarkable speed, as was the case with the Raoul Wallenberg Yad Vashem Victorian Teachers Seminar, born out the Gandel project for Australian Educators, which together with her husband she grew into a transformative educational project”.
For 50 years from 1958, Zeleznikow and her late husband Avram, a wartime partisan fighter who died in 2013, were a legend on Acland Street, St Kilda, as proprietors of the Scheherazade cafe, whose ambience and European fare enlivened Holocaust survivors battling loneliness and memories.
The St Kilda eatery, named after the Scheherazade restaurant in Paris, where Masha and Avram were reunited after the war, inspired novelist Arnold Zable’s 2001 book Cafe Scheherazade and a 2011 stage play.
Zable this week recalled Polish-born Zeleznikow, who had to abandon her dream of finishing her medical studies when the war began, and fled with her family to live in Siberia and Kazakhstan, as “a very determined woman”. Losing two children, one to a car crash, another to cancer, “she endured a lot in her life”.
Yet the resolute co-proprietor of the Scheherazade could be “like a mother” to her restaurant patrons, said Zable, plying them with a kind word and a familiar menu.
Musing about the bland tastes of a bygone Melbourne, Zeleznikow once recalled to The AJN: “I was frightened when Australians would come in and order the cholent. I wasn’t at all sure they would like it.”
PETER KOHN
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