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Chef Alon Shaya recreates a family’s recipes rescued during the Holocaust

Chef Alon Shaya, who grew up on the Main Line, says “a light bulb went off" when he realized that Steven Fenves, son of a family uprooted during World War II, was alive. "Rescued Recipes" was born.

Holocaust survivor Steven Fenves, with chef Alon Shaya (left), shows a prisoner number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz to guests at a June 2022 fundraising dinner for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Holocaust survivor Steven Fenves, with chef Alon Shaya (left), shows a prisoner number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz to guests at a June 2022 fundraising dinner for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.Read moreDeb Lindsey / The Washington Post

Alon Shaya left Israel with his family when he was 4, and grew up on the Main Line, attending Harriton High and Central Montco Tech before heading off to study at the Culinary Institute of America.

Shaya, now 44, settled in New Orleans in 2003 — winning best chef in the South from the James Beard Foundation in 2015 — before rekindling his relationship with the food of his homeland. In 2016, his Israeli-inspired restaurant at the time, Shaya, won the Beard for best new restaurant.

He followed up with a memoir, Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel.

The journey back to Israel led him to his passion project, which he calls “Rescued Recipes.” It stops in the Philadelphia area Saturday.

About 10 years ago, Shaya visited Israel on a culinary tour. At the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, he came across recipes written in death camps by female prisoners. “It was just so moving to me that people would, in their darkest hour, revert to talking about food and writing about food and reminiscing about meals that they would have with their family,” he said. “It just kind of stuck with me.”

» READ MORE: How Alon Shaya's home-ec teacher saved his life

Shaya mentioned this to a friend who had a connection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Shortly after, Shaya and his wife, Emily, visited. “They had pulled out a lot of different recipes that people wrote on the back of things like receipts and torn-up pieces of flags and scrap paper,” he said.

The Shayas also saw a cookbook written in Hungarian that had been recovered from the home of the Fenyves family in Subotica, Yugoslavia, after the authorities had rounded them up in May 1944 and sent them to a Jewish ghetto.

They learned about Lajos and Klári Fenyves, daughter Estera, and son Steven, who was 12 at the time. Steven, who survived the death camps and moved to the United States, later found the family’s cook, who had swiped the cookbook to save it from looters. Steven Fenves (who had Americanized his surname when he became a citizen) donated it to the museum.

Shaya said that when he learned that Fenves was alive, “a lightbulb went off. I could get a first-person narrative around the recipes and around the food and around the story of the cookbook that Steven had to share and his family has gone through.”

He reached out to Fenves, a retired civil engineer renowned for his work in the structural integrity of concrete and steel, who lives in Maryland.

A friendship was born.

Fenves translated the recipes into English and emailed them to Shaya. “I would call him, asking questions about his memories of them,” Shaya said. “He would give me feedback about what he remembered or, what he didn’t remember.” Shaya cooked the dishes, packed them in dry ice, and sent them overnight to Fenves.

Tasting the food of his childhood deeply affected Fenves, who turns 92 on June 6. “I have been giving Holocaust survivor talks since 1976,” he said. “A few years ago I experienced something like burnout and my talks changed, eventually becoming mere recitations of facts without any emotion showing.”

The interaction had reignited Fenves’ passion, Fenves said. “I resumed my talks as a committed spokesman for the 6 million victims, recalling and retelling the emotions engendered not just by the taste of foods, but also by the joys of the intense family and social life that was taken from us,” he said.

Fenves and Shaya have hosted dinners together. Usually there are eight dishes from the family cookbook, such as semolina sticks, potato circles, and a walnut cream cake. Fenves attended a dinner in Washington last year, but he no longer travels.

Tickets for Saturday’s dinner at a home in Villanova, starting at $1,000 per person, are still available.

Shaya is planning other dinners around the country. So far, he said, he and Fenves have raised $400,000 for the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s conservation efforts.

Shaya said he was not sure where the project will go, beyond the dinners. Perhaps it will become a book, Shaya said.

“It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career,” said Shaya, who now owns Saba and Miss River restaurants in New Orleans and Safta in Denver. “I always look to do more than just make dinner for people. This has been definitely something that I look forward to telling my daughter [Ruth, age 2] about one day when she’s old enough.”