A Journey of Hope

The crowded vessel lurched atop the Black Sea, a Red Cross flag flying high above the mast to disguise the Jewish refugees it carried within as Isadora Rosen climbed on to the deck of the 130-foot cargo boat to escape the groping hands of strangers. The skinny 20-year-old girl from Romania, one of 600 orphans aboard the ship, could not have known what the future would hold for her.

She could not have known that on that cold December night aboard the ship she would meet a Czechoslovakian man named Joshua Benanav, himself an escapee of a Jewish slave camp, and that despite their language barrier she would marry three days later.

She could not have known a decade later they would emigrate to America, that her husband would become a real estate developer and she a top saleswoman at Lord & Taylor in Scarsdale, N.Y., that together they would raise a family. And she couldn’t have imagined that nearly 70 years after her journey of escape from the Nazis across the Black Sea that her grandson would visit a university in Saratoga Springs to share her story of survival. 
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