Sharmatova, a good, safe, healthy and sweet New Year to you, to your family, and to Kloosrael to the Jewish people throughout the world.

Shanatova.

A few weeks ago, a very special member of our community died.

She was aged 97, and her name was Suzanne Perlman of Blessed Memory. She was an artist

of some distinction. She studied among others with Oscar Karkoshka, the great art of the great

painter. And her life story was quite dramatic. She was born in

1920, in Budapest, where her parents had an art gallery. In 1940, she was married and in Rotterdam

in Holland, and just three days before the Nazis invaded Holland, she and her husband

managed to escape to Paris, there to actually jump on an already moving train to Bordeaux.

And from Bordeaux she was able to take a boat to Curacao where she lived for many

years. Now she and her husband ran their own art and antiques gallery in Curacao and most of the

customers in the shop were from the cruise ships that stopped there

and some of them were really quite wealthy and on one occasion a very very rich woman came ashore

came into the shop and asked whether, asked Suzanne, whether she had any shoes for sale

from the famous French designer, Monsieur Damage. Well, Suzanne didn't just not have any Damage shoes. She'd never actually heard of

Monsieur Damagee. So she said to the woman, could I actually see a shoe? And maybe I'll find someone in

Curacao who can get some for you.

The woman removed the shoe and Suzanne looked at it and turned it upside down and there on the soul.

She saw something written and she immediately saw what it was. Written on the sole of the shoe

was the word damaged. In other words, it was a defective shoe with a fault in it that had clearly

been sold at a cheap price. And over time, the final D of damaged had

got rubbed out and you could read it as Damage. So this woman had assumed that that was

...