The connection to my ancestral roots took an unexpected turn about six or seven years ago. I picked up the copy of the Jewish Week, a weekly Jewish newspaper published in New York where I live. Usually this paper has marginal interest to me, and I get through it in about five to ten minutes. But this time was different. On the left hand column of the front page was an article about a landsmanshaft organization that, surprisingly, was still extant and holding meetings. I nearly fell off my chair, literally, when I read that this organization was the Zembrover landsmanshaft.

Here is a brief description of the landsmanshaftn (the plural form of landsmanshaft) from the Center for Jewish History website:

Landsmanshaftn are societies formed by Jewish immigrants from the same villages, towns, and cities in Central and Eastern Europe. The landsmanshaft became a dominant form of Jewish social organization in the late 1800s. The many types of landsmanshaftn include religious and socialist organizations, as well as American-style fraternal orders. Landsmanshaftn provided immigrants with formal and informal social networks, and members helped one another with financial needs such as medical care and burial plots. In 1938, a Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) project identified 2,468 landsmanshaftn in New York City (see references below). The number of landsmanshaftn began to decline in the 1950s, though some societies continue to exist today. 

My Zaide served as an active member and officer of the Zambrow landsmanshaft for many years until his death in 1964. Here he is at a meeting to celebrate the purchase of a $10,000 Israel bond. On the top photograph, he is the 5th from the left, Joe (Yosef) Waxman.

While the function of these organizations took on added importance in helping the survivors of the holocaust, by the mid-1950s and through the 1980s, as the original Eastern European residents passed on, these organizations in the main ceased to function. Children of immigrants were more interested in establishing their identity as Americans than in clinging to their parent’s roots. Besides, as the second generation American Jews achieved economic success, these organizations lost their reason d’être, to provide mutual aid as well as burial grounds.

And here I learned that this organization still existed. I got in touch with the reporter of the article who put me in contact with the current president. I began to attend its yearly meetings. All the attendees were the children or grandchildren of landsman (Jews who came from a particular town or district). I now serve as the Recording Secretary of the Zambrow landsmanshaft. My friends are amused that I belong to and participate in an organization that certainly is on the margin of present day Jewish concerns.

And yet for some reason, one that I cannot fully explain, I find it incredibly meaningful that my Jewish life includes a connection with the later-day incarnation of the organization toward which my grandfather devoted so much of his life and energy.