Every Friday for the past 35 years, Fanny Starr would give out food to individuals experiencing homelessness in Denver.
The ritual served as her pre-Sabbath mitzvah — an act of kindness that stemmed from decades-old trauma during the Holocaust that she vowed to keep in her memory until her last breath.
“When she was in the (concentration) camps, she knew what hunger and starvation were,” Starr’s daughter, Helen, said. “She made a pact: ‘I will not allow anyone to starve or be hungry.'”
On Friday, Starr took her last breath in her Denver home. At 98, she was Colorado’s oldest living Holocaust survivor. This year she helped pass a bill in the legislature to require Holocaust and genocide education in schools so younger generations could continue a refrain passed down by Jewish families for the past 75 years: “Never again.”
“One of the things she always said was, ‘I pray that we are not forgotten,'” Helen Starr said Saturday. “She wouldn’t just say ‘me.’ She would say ‘my 6 million fellow brothers and sisters.'”