At sundown on Monday, Israel and Jewish communities around the world will begin observing Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Over six million Jews (including over one and a half million children) were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by Hitler’s Nazis. Millions of Roma, Sinti, mentally and physically disabled, homosexual, and Black people were among their other targets for extermination.
Ryan Sherriff, a veteran pitcher in the Red Sox organization, doesn’t consider himself to be particularly devout, but is proudly Jewish. He pitched for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic qualifiers, something he calls one of the best experiences of his life. (Due to injury restrictions, he was unable to rejoin them for this year’s WBC.)
He’s currently pitching for Triple-A Worcester.
In 2020, Sherriff became one of the only Jewish pitchers in World Series history. Born and raised in Culver City, Los Angeles, he grew up a Dodgers fan, and says it was “wild” to pitch against Sandy Koufax’s team in the Fall Classic. Sherriff made two scoreless appearances, and even came close to doing something Koufax never did: face a Jewish batter in the World Series. Ironically, he was too effective on the mound, and ended the inning before Joc Pederson came up to bat.
But it’s Sherriff’s maternal grandparents, Helen and Seymour Wildfeuer, and step-grandmother, all Holocaust survivors, who’ve shaped his Jewish life the most.
“I didn’t really understand it when my mom’s mom, my grandma, died; I was really young. But I remember one day, her feeding me breakfast at the table, and I saw what looked like a barcode, numbers on her arm,” he recalled. “I asked her, ‘what are those, and she said, these are the numbers that they gave us.’ ”
As he got older, Sherriff says he began to understand exactly what that meant. It was a “Holy crap” moment for him.
Early in his professional career, Sherriff says his mother’s step-mother came to see him play in Triple-A. “I saw the same thing with her (arm),” he said.
His grandfather was in Bergen-Belsen, a POW camp that became a concentration camp in 1943. Approximately 50,000 people perished there, including Jews, Roma, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Both women were at Auschwitz, the only concentration camp that tattooed prisoners. At first, they used a stamp, not unlike a branding tool, to tattoo prisoners on their upper left chest. Not long after, they switched to a single-needle method, permanently searing numbers into the inner or outer side of the left forearm.
With few exceptions, the only people who weren’t tattooed were the ones sent straight to the gas chambers when they arrived.
Sherriff’s step-grandmother turned 90 last week, and is now the last remaining Holocaust survivor in his family.
When Holocaust survivor and revered author Elie Wiesel passed away in 2016, TIME wrote that there were only about 100,000 survivors still living. In August 2022, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that there were an estimated 40,000 survivors still alive in the United States.
Concurrently, there’s been a steep rise in antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League’s annual report revealed that antisemitic incidents skyrocketed by 36% in 2022, with assaults up 26%, harassment up 29%, and vandalism up a stunning 52%. Understandably, it’s something the 32-year-old pitcher takes somewhat personally.
“When you have those people who are non-believers, it irks me a little bit,” he explains. “I visually saw, with my own eyes, what was going on, the proof.”
Sherriff isn’t the only Jewish member of the Red Sox organization. He signed with the team not long after they acquired fellow Jewish left-handed relief pitcher Richard Bleier from the Miami Marlins.
And, of course, the person who brought them both to Boston is Chaim Bloom, the team’s chief baseball officer and proud ‘Member of the Tribe.’ Bloom admitted recently that he’s been on the receiving end of occasional antisemitism, something Sherriff feels fortunate not to have experienced.
“Nobody’s done anything pretty significant, thankfully,” he said.
But Jewish people are all-too-familiar with the scene in the cult classic film, “Airplane!,” when the flight attendant comes around with reading materials and one of the passengers asks for something “light” to read. The offering is a minuscule leaflet, “famous Jewish sports legends,” which she gladly accepts.
It’s funny because it’s true. Today, Jewish people make up 0.02% of the global population. Seeing Jewish athletes succeed is an immense source of pride, and not only because that kind of representation matters.
Sherriff, like most Jewish people over the last seventy or so years, grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. A Jewish person not only surviving, but actually thriving, is the ultimate revenge.
“To the core, I grew up Jewish, but really, I just try to do the best I can,” he says. “The best thing I can do is play for Team Israel. And represent my grandparents every day.”