I never met my great uncle. His Hebrew name was Shmuel, his English name Sam, but everyone called him by his Yiddish name, Shmulke. My grandfather’s younger brother, he, along with my grandfather and one younger sister, left his home town of Zambrow, Poland, before the war. Those who remained, their mother, three siblings and their families, were killed.

Shmulke’s journey was amazing. He left Zambrow in 1929, at age 23, traveling alone to the German port city of Bremen. From there, he boarded a ship for Cuba. Why Cuba? Presumably because he couldn’t get in to the United States owing to the restrictive American immigration laws that imposed a minuscule quota on those from Poland. (Under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, less than 6000 people of Polish nationality were permitted to enter the United States annually.) He remained in Cuba for three years and then smuggled himself on board a ship bound for the United States. But he was caught before the ship left, brought to court in Havana, and fined. That didn’t deter him, however. Shortly thereafter, he again smuggled himself on ship bound for New York, this time successfully. From there he travelled to Los Angeles where he married a woman he’d met in Cuba. They moved back to New York where he worked as a “shoe operator.” They then moved back in Los Angeles, where he spent his remaining twenty years or so.

Strangely, I never met Shmulke, even though my parents also moved to California ten years before he died. My parents never spoke of him even though–as my mother’s uncle–he was the only family we had west of New York City. We didn’t connect with him when we visited to Los Angeles. I don’t even recall them mentioning, let alone mourning, his death.

Shmulke was a mystery. The family member who, unlike his siblings, abandoned Jewish tradition and broke off family ties. Then, in a decisive act of severance, he left the family’s center of gravity of New York City for the far reaches of California.

As my interest in family history developed, I began to wonder about his mysterious life. Aided by online genealogical records and information obtained from the genealogy division of the Department of Homeland Security, I wrote two pieces tracing his journeys, as summarized above.

After spending so much time thinking and writing about him, I decided the time had come to pay him a visit. Aided by my long-time friend and Angeleno, Aliza, I set out last summer to trace his footsteps and find his resting place.

It wasn’t difficult to locate him. Through the wonders of the internet, it’s never been easier to find someone you’ve lost contact with. Especially when they’re dead.

There are at least two web sites to help you find a grave. One is, aptly titled, findagrave.com. Another is billiongraves.com. I’m not sure if they really have records of a billion graves. But they do have a lot.

Burial records are also included in genealogical websites such as Ancestry.com. That’s how I found out that Shmulke had died in 1975.

Findagrave (as well as Ancestry) had this death record:

And so I learned that his resting place was Mount Olive Memorial Park. The cemetery was not exactly in Los Angeles–as the record indicated–but in the nearby town of Commerce. (Commerce incorporated as a city in 1960 to prevent Los Angeles from annexing industrial land for tax revenue and raising taxes.)

Before visiting the cemetery, however, I wanted to get a sense of the life he had led when he first arrived in Los Angeles. According to his marriage certificate, he lived at “2721 1/2 Folsom”. Google maps showed this address to be in the Boyle Heights neighborhood.

Shmulke’s decision to live in Boyle Heights wasn’t surprising. The neighborhood was once the center of Jewish life in Los Angeles. “Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, about forty percent of the population in Boyle Heights was Jewish. The core of the community was Brooklyn Avenue, since renamed Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, which hosted a string of Jewish-owned businesses, including the original Canter’s Deli.”

As a middle class working man in the shoe trade, Shmulke would have fit in well in Boyle Heights. “Distinct from the upwardly mobile Jewish community that emerged in Hollywood and the Westside before World War II, Jews in Boyle Heights were primarily working-class families of Eastern European descent, largely secular, and politically engaged. . . . Yiddish was widely spoken throughout the neighborhood.” (https://www.laconservancy.org/jewish-american-heritage/)

As I discovered, not much remains of Jewish life in Boyle Heights. From 1950 and onwards, much of its Jewish population moved out, either to the Fairfax neighborhood or the expanding Los Angeles suburbs. Several factors led to the outmigration from Boyle Heights. One was the 1948 Supreme Court ruling that banned restrictive covenants, provisions in contacts that allowed landlords and homeowners to restrict the sale or rental of housing to Jews and other minorities. (While restrictive covenants did not explicitly target Jews–a typical covenant provided that property be sold only to people of the “White or Caucasian race”–there was, as one website puts it, “uncertainty over the ‘whiteness‘ of Jews”.)

Another factor was the postwar housing boom. “During the 1940s and 1950s, Los Angeles underwent a dramatic period of growth in which the majority of the region saw significant housing construction. Southern California’s reputation for low-rise, low-density development was cemented in this time period, with single-family residences proliferating throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.” (https://la.urbanize.city/post/mapping-las-housing-production-1940-2016) The ease of obtaining home loans, at least for White residents, further propelled the postwar Jewish exodus from Boyle Heights. The neighborhood was further degraded in the early 1960s when Highway 10 was built through it, cutting the neighborhood into two halves.

(An extensive history of Boyle Heights can be found at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/78922666edfe4e1695a303e5b36acd47)

Cantor’s Deli, which opened in 1931, moved from Boyle Heights to Fairfax in 1953, when, as its website puts it, “the character of the neighborhood changed.” As Jews moved out, Hispanics, many from Mexico, moved in. The area now is home to a significant community of Mexican Americans. According to a 2022 report, 93% of Boyle Heights residents identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino.

I visited the last remnant of the Boyle Heights Jewish community, the Breed Street Shul (Synagogue). It opened its doors in 1923 and lasted until 1996. During its heyday, it was known as the “Queen of the Shuls” and boasted the largest congregation in the United States west of Chicago. Here’s what the exterior looks like today:

Aliza and I tried to enter the structure, but, as the photos show, it’s a construction site. The synagogue is currently being rehabilitated, aided by a 2021 state grant to restore and reuse the building.

A graffitied over flyer on a nearby street pole contained photos and a history of Jewish Boyle Heights during its glory years.

Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, even visited the synagogue in 1998, two years after the building closed its doors, part of her campaign to identify and landmark important cultural heritage sites. It was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 2001.

After concluding our visit to Boyle Heights, we headed out to the Mount Olive Cemetery. I figured it would be large cemetery with perhaps an office that would help me find his grave. But it turned out to be a small cemetery off an avenue of typical Los Angeles sprawl.

We parked. No one else was there. There were no services, not even a restroom. I had no information where in the cemetery he was buried. I began to despair that I’d come all this way and be unable to find his grave.

The cemetery, which has been taken over by Chabad and renamed the Chabad Mt. Olive Memorial Park and Cemetery, had a telephone number posted at the entrance. Aliza called. No one picked up so she left a message.

I prepared to comb through gravestones looking for Shmulke. But, as fate would have it, soon after we exited the car, Aliza spotted the grave. It was exactly as depicted on the photo. I felt as if Shmulke was welcoming me for our first ever meeting.

I recited some psalms. My thoughts traced the arc of his life. I apologized for never having visited him. I sensed his appreciation for my visit, probably his first visitor in years. For, sadly, other than myself, there is no one left to visit him–his daughter having passed away without children, his son having left the country. Before bidding him farewell, I left two stones on the grave, one for him and one for his wife.

My mission to visit Shmulke was complete. Twin feelings of sadness and satisfaction fell over me as the car pulled out of the cemetery.

Before heading back, we stopped at a Bean and Leaf cafe to use a bathroom, always a good idea before battling afternoon Los Angeles traffic. I ordered coffee and asked where the bathroom was. The barista told me and provided the code to unlock the door. It was as if providence had chosen it: 36361 for the men’s room, 36362 for the women’s. The number 36. Eighteen doubled. Eighteen, the numerical value of the Hebrew letters חי, chai, which means life. Two times chai. 18 for Shmulke and 18 for his wife. As we say, beshert (meant to be).