Once in a while, people lose family members.\u00a0 A war comes or an earthquake or a famine, and people flee, losing track of where their parents or children or uncles and aunts and grandparents are.<\/p>\n

This happened to Boris Furman’s family during the Holocaust.\u00a0 People were torn from each other and separated by geography, some separated by death without other family members knowing.<\/p>\n

On Dec. 31, 2021, This American Life<\/i> featured Boris’s story as told to Dana Chivvis (Act 3 of Episode 757<\/a> “This Must Be the Place.”<\/p>\n

In Hebrew, tikkun <\/i>means repair.\u00a0 In Judaism tikkun <\/i>is an important concept meaning the redemption of a tragic situation or even the repair of the world– tikkun\u00a0ha Olam<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Boris’s family needed repair for being pulled apart during the Holocaust.\u00a0 His mother lost her entire family as she fled to the US, where she met and married Boris’s father, also a survivor with no family.<\/p>\n

“When I grew up, I didn’t have any extended family,” says Boris. “I didn’t have any. My kids have a gazillion cousins and aunts and uncles. I had one.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Years later as he married and his children grew up and left home, he began tracking where each person was every day and even calculating a “family average location.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As he talks to Dana, she observes that his obsessive recording of each person’s location and calculating an average location is actually kind of “a math prayer.”<\/p>\n

It’s a way of saying, “We exist–we know where we are.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s not to record where<\/i> they are but that <\/i>they are,” she concludes.<\/p>\n

Right now in Ukraine, people are fleeing, fighting, and losing touch with family members.\u00a0 Sometimes there is no cell signal.\u00a0 Phones are lost, or there’s no electricity to charge them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

People are dying: young Russian soldiers, Ukrainian citizens, visitors, students from other countries studying at Ukrainian universities.<\/p>\n

May each family find tikkun<\/i>… may our world in March 2022 be repaired.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People marching for Ukraine, Feb 27, Santa Monica CA Once in a while, people lose family members.\u00a0 A war comes or an earthquake or a famine, and people flee, losing track of where their parents or children or uncles and aunts and grandparents are. This happened to Boris Furman’s family during the Holocaust.\u00a0 People were<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[710,1197,709,708,84,95,151],"ppma_author":[1162],"class_list":{"0":"post-6438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-womens-rights","8":"tag-lives","9":"tag-losing","10":"tag-maria","11":"tag-martha","12":"tag-people","13":"tag-rights","14":"tag-womens"},"yoast_head":"\n