Silver kiddush cup with scenes of Lublin entrusted to a Gentile neighbor

Zofia Jedrusiak lived in Lublin, Poland. She was married to Michal who was a building superintendent. She had a daughter, who married Feliks Sulczyski, the owner of the building on 8 Swietoduska Street in which they lived. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; Lublin was occupied on September 18. Almost immediately, Jews were required to register for forced labor service. A ghetto was set up to contain the Jews in early 1940. In October 1941, the Majdanek concentration camp was set up in the city suburbs. One day in 1941, Zofia, who was not Jewish, was sitting on a bench outside the building and a Jewish woman sat down next to her. She gave her a silver Kiddush cup and asked her to keep the cup for her. She said that Zofia should return the cup to her son if he returned to Poland after the war. She told her the cup had been a present for her son on the occasion of his bris, or circumcision, when he was an infant. Zofia later gave the cup to her daughter Halina Dzidka Eckersdorf. They had a daughter Anna, born in 1942. After the war, they moved to Łódź. Economic conditions in Poland were very difficult, but while the family had to sell other valuables for money, they kept the cup. Halina often told her family: this cup does not belong to us; someday someone will come to claim it. Halina died in 2001 and left the cup to her daughter, Anna Eckersdorf-Kalinowska. In September 2002, Anna gave the cup to a friend, Joel Dancyger, who had left Łódź for the United States in 1968.

The kiddush cup was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2003 by Joel Dancyger on behalf of Anna Eckersdorf-Kalinowska, the granddaughter of Zofia Jedrusiak.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Joel Dancyger on behalf of Anna Eckersdorf-Kalinowska

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.