An Object That Holds Time: My Father’s Tfillin--A Chain of Memory

The family treasure I submit is a pair of tefillin that belonged to my father. They are with me today in Vienna. According to our family history, they were first my grandfather’s and were later passed down to my father for his bar mitzvah.

My father was born in 1932. His father, Bernard (“Benny”) Gartenstein, was born in Kovel—then part of interwar Poland—and left in 1929. He departed before the devastation that would later erase nearly all Jewish life from the town. I never met him. In our family, his story exists mostly as a line of departure: a name, a place, and the knowledge that leaving early made everything that followed possible.

The tefillin are modest objects. Two small black boxes. Faded leather straps. Handwritten parchment sealed inside. They were not preserved as heirlooms. They were used.

My father wore them every single day. No matter how ill he was. No matter how rushed the morning. No matter the weather. Rain or shine, exhaustion or pain, they were part of his body’s memory. I grew up watching this without explanation and without instruction. It was not framed as faith, resilience, or identity. It was simply what he did.

After my father died, the tefillin came to me.

I have inherited stories about him. I have inherited photographs. But this is the only object that still carries his physical presence: the way the straps fall when they are opened, the softened edges of the boxes, the exact fold he returned them to every morning. Holding them feels like standing in the quiet space he created for himself each day. It is the closest I can come to being with him again.

My grandfather’s life is largely inaccessible to me. He left Eastern Europe as a young man during a period marked by political instability, antisemitism, and deep uncertainty about Jewish futures on the continent. Like many families who left before catastrophe, ours holds a particular kind of historical silence. There is survival, but not testimony. Continuity, but not narrative.

What connects the fragments is this object.

For my grandfather, these tefillin belonged to a Jewish world in Eastern Europe that would soon be almost entirely destroyed. For my father, they accompanied a life shaped by postwar reconstruction, migration, and the long, inherited shadow of loss that followed families who survived by leaving early or by leaving just in time.

As an educator working with historical memory, dialogue, and antisemitism, I spend much of my professional life asking how the past is transmitted when words are insufficient, archives are incomplete, and public narratives are deeply polarized. Students often experience history as distant and abstract—something that belongs to institutions rather than to their own lives.

This object challenges that assumption.

My intergenerational dialogue does not take place through recorded interviews with my grandfather. It takes place through my relationship with my father, who was also my closest friend, and through the way he lived his Judaism without rhetoric, performance, or explanation. The tefillin became our unspoken conversation about responsibility, belonging, and what it means to continue when the world that formed you is no longer there.

When I share this story in educational settings, I do not present the tefillin as a symbol of heroism. I present them as evidence of something quieter and more demanding: continuity sustained through practice. Through repetition. Through choosing, every morning, to remain connected to something larger than one’s own biography.

This object changed the way I understand my family’s past because it taught me that what survives is not only what is documented. It is what is rehearsed. Memory does not live only in stories. It lives in the body, in routine, and in objects shaped by use.

The tefillin hold absence, a grandfather I never met and a European Jewish world that cannot be restored. But they also carry a model for how memory can remain alive without being reduced to tragedy. In a time when identity is often flattened into slogans and historical memory is increasingly politicized, this small, worn object reminds me—and my students—that family history is rarely neat. It is layered, partial, and deeply human.

Sometimes, the most powerful historical source is the one that fits into and around your hands.