By Ellen Braunstein

When Soviet soldiers handed a fresh fish to a group of liberated young women in 1945, Rosa Tennenbaum did what she knew how to do. She chopped it, seasoned it and made sweet gefilte fish, the way her family in Poland had prepared it for generations. The soldier took a bite, spat it out and demanded to know what she had done to his fish. Later, Rosa laughed at the memory. After years of terror, she had made something familiar — a small reminder of home, of ordinary life before the war.

Rosa Zygmund Burk, a Holocaust survivor who rebuilt a quiet, steady life in the United States and became the heart of a close Philadelphia family, died Sept. 16. She was 100.

She was born on June 1, 1925, in Szydłowiec, Poland, to David and Ethel Tennenbaum. Her father worked in a shoe

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