JTA
by Anthony Weiss
May 19, 2014

‘We talk about defending ourselves, but we have to do something aside from sharing email articles,’ says president of the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — It’s a sunny morning in Southern California and Lea Rosenfeld, a soft-spoken, bespectacled woman who looks like a Jewish grandmother, squares her feet, faces her target and squeezes off five shots with a handgun.

All of them miss.

“I never even held a gun in my hands before,” she later confesses. “I’m still shaking.”

Still, Rosenfeld keeps shooting in the hot sun. She says she’s doing it because of her parents and what they endured: Both were Holocaust survivors.

“My question has always been why they didn’t fight back, and my mother could never give me a good answer,” Rosenfeld told JTA. “They weren’t prepared for it, they didn’t believe it was going to happen and they didn’t have anything to fight back with.”

That’s what motivated Doris Wise Montrose, president of the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, to organize the recent day of firearms instruction at the Angeles Shooting Range in northeast Los Angeles.

….Recently, however, Montrose decided that lectures and emails were not enough.

So it was that on a Monday in mid-May, she and seven others — three of them children of Holocaust survivors — gathered to receive “point and shoot” instruction from Itamar Gelbman, 32, a former lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces.

“We talk about defending ourselves, but we have to do something aside from sharing email articles,” Montrose said.

Gelbman — a strapping 6-foot-3-inch grandson of survivors who has served as a bodyguard for Britney Spears (“Never again,” he vows) and run for Congress from Texas (he lost) – began by running through safety instructions. He taught the handgun technique used by the IDF: square feet, square shoulders, both eyes open.

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