In these days of war and terror, I’ve been thinking a lot about graves. In particular, graves in Israel. And of Jews dying in and for their country, their land. Too many. The grieving. The gut-wrenching burials of the young who paid for fulfilling their duty to the nation with their lives.

I am reminded of the Yehuda Amichai poem, “Jews in the Land of Israel.” It concludes:

What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names,

What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names,

with our eyes of forests, with our beautiful children,

with our quick blood?

Spilled blood is not the roots of trees

but it’s the closest thing to roots

we have.

Amichai’s poem points to the connection between roots and graves. Both claim, and, by claiming, define, the ground they occupy. The search for roots probably explains the reason that, during my last two visits to Israel, I spent my first day going to a cemetery to locate and encounter the graves of my ancestors.

The search for roots, as well as the search for information. For where a person is buried and what’s written on his or her tombstone (matzeva), can be a valuable source of information. That’s why genealogy conferences–of which I’ve attended a fair number–are filled with talks about cemeteries. Gravestones record the name of the deceased. Jewish ones usually refer to the deceased as “so and so, the son/daughter of their father’s name (and sometimes also their mother’s name).” They invariably list the date of death and sometimes the date or at least year of birth. Lastly, they often provide some biographical information about the deceased, about how they were remembered by their children or next of kin.

And so few years ago, I set out in search of the grave of my great grandfather, Tzvi Dov Golomborsky. Tzvi Dov was the father of my maternal grandmother (bubbe). He holds a significant role in my family history. He, and his wife Bela Tzina, were the ones who established my ancestral connection to Israel. He was my first ancestor to leave his diaspora life behind and settle in the Land of Israel. He was also the first to be buried in the Land of Israel.

Before my cemetery visit, all I knew about him was that he made aliyah (moved to the Land of Israel), perhaps from Odessa, in the early part of the 20th Century.

I have only two photographs of him, one of which my bubbe, for as long as I knew her, hung in her living room, as if it were a shrine. (My mother hated these pictures, but that’s another story):

As you can tell, he dressed in the style of Eastern European religious Jews: clothed in black, hat and bearded. He arrived in Palestine during the period referred to in Zionist history as the “Second Aliyah,” the years from 1904 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The majority of immigrants during this period were “single young people, many with a socialist ideology coupled with a belief in the national redemption of the Jewish People in the Land of Israel. While some of the immigrants were established adults with families, who settled in the cities, the majority, being young and single, tended to find employment as laborers in the agricultural settlements.” (http://www.jewishwikipedia.info/aliyah.html#Second)

This description does not remotely describe Tzvi Dov. He came not by himself, but with his wife and children, five in total, all of whom happened to be daughters. Nor did he exhibit any socialist leanings. He settled in Jaffo and went into business, as a contractor to be exact, hiring labor to build roads in the Jaffo area, including the nascent city of Tel Aviv. Hardly the image of a youthful pioneer coming to settle and work the land.

Why, then, did he leave his home in Eastern Europe for what was then Ottoman Palestine? Perhaps, I thought, his grave might yield some answers to this mystery.

My Israeli relatives had told me that he was buried in the Trumpeldor cemetery in Tel Aviv.

The Trumpeldor cemetery is located in the center of Tel Aviv. Little did I know that it’s one of the most famous cemeteries in Israel. The cemetery is named after Yosef Trumpeldor, one of the first settlers involved in organizing Jewish self-defense. During World War 1, Trumpeldor worked with the British to create an all-Jewish military unit to fight with Britain. He was killed in 1920 defending the settlement of Tel Hai against an Arab attack, becoming one of the first martyrs of the Zionist cause.

The cemetery was founded in 1902, acquiring its current name sometime after Trumpeldor’s death. It is also referred to as the “Old Cemetery” since it was established seven years before the Tel Aviv’s first neighborhood, Ahuzat Bayit, was founded.

The impetus for its founding was a 1902 cholera outbreak. The Jews of Yaffo requested a burial space from the Ottoman authorities, which they granted in a deserted location outside the Yaffo city walls. “It was only five years later,” one writer explains, “that the first plan to build a modern Jewish neighborhood outside of Jaffa was announced. In essence, then, Tel Aviv began with its dead. The city followed its graves.”

The cemetery occupies about three acres (12,000 square meters) and contains about 5,000 graves. Upon entering the cemetery, I discovered that it was home to some of the most celebrated figures in Israel’s history.

Those buried there constitute a virtual “Who’s Who” of Israel’s historical and literary luminaries. One of the first graves I encountered was that of Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv. Then there was Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), one of the foremost Zionist thinkers of the early 20th Century. Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister. Famous artists Nahum Gutman and Reuven Rubin. The authors Shaul Tchernichovsky and Chaim Nachman Bialik. (For information about visiting, see https://www.touristisrael.com/trumpeldor-cemetery/8534/) And, though the cemetery is no longer available for burials, in 2013, the great folk rock musician, Arik Einstein, was given the honor of having the Trumpeldor Cemetery as his final resting place. (I unfortunately did not see his grave.)

The unchanging nature of the cemetery stands in incongruity with the explosion of Tel Aviv’s development. “In contrast to the surrounding rapidly escalating skyline, it sometimes seems that the Old Cemetery on Trumpeldor is the only spot in Tel Aviv that remains static and relatively untouched.” (A Hebrew video of the cemetery can be found at https://www.mako.co.il/news-israel/local/Article-f2146776635a241004.htm.)

The cemetery is packed with graves, one right next to the other.

Fortunately, after a relatively brief search, I located Tzvi Dov’s grave in section 2 (chelka b).

On closer inspection, I was delighted to discover that his tombstone contained important biographical information.

The tombstone reads: “Here lies Tzvi Dov Golomborksy, son of Chaim. Made aliyah from Shereshov in the year 1906. Died the 12th day of Cheshvan (October 26), 1928, in the 64th year of his life. May his memory be bound up in eternal life.”

So he was not from Odessa after all. He was from the town of Shereshov. Shereshov was located in the then Russian Empire, in the area known as White Russia. Today it is situated in western Belarus, about 40 miles east of Brest, which lies on the Polish-Belarus border.

Since he died in 1928, at the age of 64, he must have been born in 1864. That would put his age at 41 or 42 years when he made aliyah in 1906.

It’s possible, though not likely, that he became a Zionist in his middle ages. The more likely explanation for his emigration, given the year that he departed for the Holy Land, is fear for his and his family’s lives. From 1903 to 1906, a series of pogroms broke out across the Russian Empire, centered mostly in Ukraine and Bessarabia, but including White Russia. The most infamous one was in Kishinev, in which 49 Jews were killed, many others injured and homes and synagogues ransacked. This event sent shock waves throughout the Jewish world. There was also a major pogrom in Odessa in 1905. That same year saw pogroms in Brest following the Russian Revolution of that year, associated with the return of Russian soldiers from the Japanese-Russian war. (https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/brest2/bre093.html)

This explanation explains why he emigrated from Russia, but why did he go to Palestine rather than the United States. Immigration to the U.S. was still relatively unrestricted prior to World War I. Indeed, over a million people immigrated to the U.S. in 1906. One reason could be economic; he might not have been able to afford passage to America for himself, his wife and five children. The other explanation is his religiosity. America was known as a “treife medina”, (unkosher place) given the secular nature of the country and the difficulty of making a living while keeping fast to Jewish traditions, especially observing the Sabbath. He may have heard stories of people who immigrated to America and lost their faith.

Whatever his motivation, his decision to leave was fateful. The Russians evacuated Shereshov’s Jews during the First World War and and those who returned found their homes burned to the ground the German troops. The Jewish population numbered around 1300 before the outbreak of Second World War. They were murdered by the Germans between July to September, 1941.

Tzvi Dov, unlike many others buried in the Trumpeldor Cemetery, was not famous. But he contributed in his own way to the creation of the Jewish State. His work as a contractor helped form the physical foundations of the country. My entire maternal family owes its very existence to his bold choice to cut ties with Eastern Europe and transplant himself and his family in the Land of Israel. His family memorialized this fateful decision, in the middle of his tombstone, with the engraved words “Made aliyah from Shereshov in the year 1906.” These words, his actions, established the roots from which my mother’s family grew.