A married couple who survived the Nazi genocide and their three children who followed in their parents’ professional footsteps as doctors of psychiatry will lead a groundbreaking program on the legacy of the Holocaust and its application to treating psychological trauma at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany on Sunday, March 19.

The program is consponsored by United Jewish Communities, Holocaust Council of MetroWest, and Jewish Family Service of MetroWest. Part of the program was generously funded by The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

Beginning at 9 a.m., Drs. Anna and Paul Ornstein will share the podium for “Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychological Trauma and Treatment,” a five-and-a-half-hour conference for mental health professionals and others interested in the aftermath of tragic historical events.
In the afternoon, they will turn the microphones over to their daughters, Miriam and Sharone and their son, Rafael. All three are practicing psychiatrists.

The siblings will co-lead an afternoon panel discussion, “Living the Legacy: Personally and Professionally.” Part of that legacy, said Sharone Ornstein in an interview with NJ Jewish News, is a focus not on the deep psychic scars endured by victims, but on the survivors’ inner strength.

“I think one of the things my parents encountered is the tendency to look at only the ways trauma has damaged a person,” said Ornstein, who lives in Glen Ridge and shares a practice in Manhattan with her husband, Jeffrey Halpern. “What they have looked at are the ways in which somebody’s psychological capacities are drawn upon to survive in the traumatic situation and afterward. What people do to rebuild and pick up their lives is really a testament to incredible strength, creativity, and stamina. To continue to live in a positive way is something we have to try to understand.

“Part of my parents’ motivation is to suggest that we cannot just see pathology in survivors. There can also be many positive things.”

The elder Ornsteins — both born in Hungary — met before World War II. Anna was interned at Auschwitz. She and her mother were the only members of her family who survived. Paul served in labor camps, then went into hiding. The couple managed to find one another after the war. They moved to Heidelberg, Germany, to study medicine, then immigrated to America for post-graduate training at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

They reside in Cambridge, Mass., and are faculty members at Harvard Medical School. A large part of their work has been the study of the psychological effects of the Holocaust and similar traumas.

“My parents’ personal and professional interests are intertwined,” said Sharone Orenstein. “Their own pre-trauma experiences and what they were able to build since the trauma have been very helpful to them.”

Treating Holocaust survivors and trauma victims is not the central focus of her own practice, however; “In spite of whatever generalizations one can make about what phenomena one sees in survivors, I am most interested in one’s own particular story — given who they were prior to the genocide, what their relationship was with their parents,” she said. “The conditions of the Holocaust were highly specific. You cannot make generalizations.” Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, agreed.

“If some children whose parents were survivors lived in a household where tension reigned and there was little joy, if the parents didn’t get over their experience and function normally, the depressed became the oppressors. Every survivor’s household was different,” she said.
Wind’s parents survived Polish labor camps. Even as they “lost everybody and everything, both had secure childhoods,” Wind said. “They grew up knowing they were loved and valued, so it was easy for them to love and value us,” she said, referring to herself and her two brothers.

Wind said such lessons apply as well “to Vietnam survivors, Rwandan survivors, and survivors of the other terrible atrocities that are going on in the world. We quickly realized that other people would be interested as well. So we are getting people who are not mental health professionals, but who have an interest in the Holocaust and the continuing genocide.”
Wind said that having the entire Ornstein family on hand for the program presents an opportunity that should not be missed.

The younger family members’ presentations as professionals on the treatment of trauma as well as on the experiences of survivors’ children, said Wind, “would make this conference very unique.”

“If it was just the elder Ornsteins, it would be dayenu — it would be enough — because they have such a following in mental health circles. They are warm, charming, endearing people, and it is very easy to be with them and to hear them.”