Sometimes the connection between past and present is crystalized in a moment of space and time. You stand before a place where your ancestors lived. You contemplate its history and how the present resonates with the past.

I experienced that connection during my recent visit to Israel. I stood before a place, the exact place, where my mother and her family lived nearly 100 years ago.

The location was Neve Tzedek, today a trendy neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. How did my mother, born in New York, come to live there?

Her family, unlike most immigrants to the United States, did not come directly from Europe. Her parents came first to the beaches of Palestine. Her mother, Chaya Golomborsky, arrived in Palestine as a young girl in 1906. I know that because its written on the gravestone of her father, Tzvi Dov Golomborsky. His gravestone, in the Trumpeldor Cemetery (also called the Old Cemetery) of Tel Aviv, is inscribed with these words: “made aliyah (moved to the land of Israel) from Sheroshev (a small town in what is today Belarus) in 1906.”

Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire when the Golomborskys arrived, as it had been since 1516. Tzvi Dov worked as a contractor building roads and residences in and around Tel Aviv. The family moved into a house in Neve Tzedek, just north of the port city of Jaffa.

Here’s a diagram of Neve Tzedek’s original streets.

The Golomborksy’s home was located on Rechov Chelouche (שלוש) (Chelouche Street, pronounced Shlush). The street is shown on the left of the above diagram.

Chelouche was the name of a prominent Jewish family that moved to Jaffa in the mid 19th Century. They were “Maghrebi Jews,” Jews from Arab lands whose presence predated the arrival of Sephardim, Jewish exiles from the Spanish expulsion. The patriarch, Aaron Chelouche, worked as a jeweler, financier and landowner. In 1887, finding Jaffa too crowded for his taste, he purchased and developed land outside the city, land that became Neve Tzedek, the first Jewish neighborhood established outside of Jaffa. Jews began more than twenty years before the founding of Tel Aviv (1909). His son, Yosef Eliyahu, helped to expand Neve Tzedek and was one of the original founders of Tel Aviv. He built the first girls school in Neve Tzedek, which my grandmother probably attended, and it’s likely he helped Tzvi Dov start his contracting business. (A biography of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche was recently published.)

To settle in Neve Tzedek, the Golomborskys needed Chelouche’s help. They were barred from buying property because the Ottoman authorities, as a way of discouraging Jews from moving to Palestine, banned so-called “foreign” Jews from owning property. Ottoman law made an exception, however, for Jews such as Chelouche, who, having come from Arab lands and been long-time residents of Palestine, were considered “Ottoman subjects.” Technically, Chelouche wasn’t allowed to help the Golomborsky family, as Ottoman subjects were not supposed to use their privileges to assist Jews who were otherwise prohibited from owing property. No matter. The Golomborksys and Chelouche made a deal: Chelouche would buy the property and then sublet it to the Golomborskys. The house, it turns out, was on a street named for the elder Chelouche, 13 Chelouche Street.

My grandmother was raised in that house and was living there when my grandfather arrived in Palestine in 1922. He grew up in Zambrow, Poland (part of the Russian Empire prior to 1920), was drafted into and then escaped from the Polish army, lived for about a year in Germany as an undocumented refugee, and then made his way (we are not sure exactly how) to Palestine. As fate would have it, he found work with Tzvi Dov Golomborsky as a laborer.

They married in Tel Aviv in 1925.

When, unexpectedly, my grandfather was granted an American visa, he left Palestine and his pregnant wife for the Lower East Side.

In December, 1928, about a year after their first daughter–my aunt Sarah–was born, the family was reunited in the U.S. As many of their co-religionists, they settled in New York City’s Lower East Side. My aunt Tzviya and my mother were born in 1930 and 1932 respectively.

Having obtained U.S. citizenship, the family returned to Palestine in 1935 to fulfill their dream of living in the nascent Jewish homeland. Their decision was eased by the knowledge they had a place to live: the house on Chelouche Street. The house stood empty, Tzvi Dov and his wife both having passed away while the family was living in New York, and my grandmother’s sisters having married and moved into homes of their own.

The house, however, was not in good condition. It consisted, as my aunt describes in her memoir, of just two rooms and a kitchen. “There was no toilet or bath. Papa [my grandfather] remembered his years as builder and started to rebuild the house. He added a toilet and bathroom and a balcony. The house had a little yard in the back. There was a large empty lot between our yard that spread all the way to Shabazi St. so that we used the back as our entrance most of the time.”

While I don’t have a picture of the house as it then existed, the area was anything but prosperous, as this photo illustrates:

Soon after the family moved in, they faced unforeseen hardships. My grandfather had taken his truck from New York, hoping to set up a business with it, but the British authorities refused to give him a license to drive it. And then, in 1936, the Arab riots began. On April 19, nine Jews and two Arabs were killed near Jaffa, with another 60 Jews wounded. British troops began patrolling the streets. They imposed a curfew. But the violence continued unabated. In June, Arabs killed nine Jews and British forces, in an attempting to quell the violence, killed 22 Arabs. Within six months, some eighty Jews, 28 British soldiers and several hundred Arabs were dead (Kessler, Palestine 1936, p. 73.)

The effect of the violence on my mother and her family was profound. Their home in Neve Tzedek was next to Jaffa, where the violence was centered. My mother’s eldest sister’s school was fire bombed. The three sisters stayed home, fearing to venture outside.

And then the violence came to their home. My aunt recounts:

“Papa was home in the late afternoon. We were playing in the back yard where Mama was washing laundry. That means that there was a “pila” (large gigit or pan) boiling on the “primus” (kerosene cooker) in order to boil the laundry. Suddenly an Arab, wheeling a small wagon came through the yard from Shlush Street, and attacked Mama with some sort of instrument. Papa jumped over the balcony wall and grabbed the stick or whatever it was and beat the Arab and lifted him up and threw him onto the wagon. Meanwhile, Mama pulled Papa’s shirt off which was covered in blood and threw it into the boiling water and Papa pushed the wagon with the Arab on it through the Shabazi entrance running and then dumping the wagon I don’t know where. He returned home and Mama was holding a fresh shirt for Papa to put on. Not a word was said. Papa, one of the gentlest men in the world was forced into such a horrible situation. Papa was always a great storyteller. That story he never told us.”

Within two months of the outbreak of violence, my grandfather had had enough. He decided to return to New York. The decision must have been heartbreaking. It meant abandoning his dream of living in the Jewish homeland and returning to the grime and poverty of the Lower East Side.

Another factor complicated the decision: there wasn’t enough money for all of them to travel together. So in July, 1936, my grandfather sailed to New York by way of Naples, taking with him his eldest daughter, who was already of school age.

Family history had repeated itself. Husband and wife separated, this time including two children, as my grandfather waited in New York to be reunited with his family.

For my mother, the separation from her father was traumatic. In her later years, she recalled: “I could accept anything but the loss of my Abba (father). I had been deserted. For a week I refused to speak. I withdrew into myself. For the next nine months I lived in terror. My mother’s frequent need to leave us with others added to my anxiety. As an adult I came to appreciate the enormous pressure and suffering my mother was also experiencing. As a child I felt unprotected, lost, and very angry at her.”

Family reunification depended on my grandmother’s ability to buy passage to the U.S. for her and her two young daughters. But, she had no money. She did, however, have one asset: the family home on Chelouche Street. She would have to sell it.

Selling the house would not be a straight forward matter. There was a major problem: she didn’t own it! It was owned by the Chelouche family, presumably the heirs of Yosef Eliyahu, who had died in 1934. Moreover, Chelouche had sublet it to grandmother’s parents, who themselves had passed away. To complicate matters, ownership had been registered according to Ottoman law, but now the British administered Palestine.

My grandmother’s first step was to convince her two sisters, Bryna and Rachel, and their husbands, to transfer their interest in the home to her. I don’t know what financial arrangement was made, but she managed to succeed in doing this. She then had to find a buyer for the property. With time of the essence, she didn’t have much negotiating leverage, so I imagine she took the first offer she received.

Then there was one last step: to have the house transferred from the Chelouche name to her own. This entailed going to the Al-Saraya al-‘Atika (Old Saray), an old Ottoman building that now housed the British administrative offices in Jaffa, at the height of the violence gripping the area. But, if the family was to be together again, she had no other choice.

Here’s how my aunt’s memoir describes the event:

“The lands office was in Jaffa and she had to go there to get the authorization of ownership and sale rights. All the family members came to give advice but none were willing to go with Mama to the Seraya, City Hall in Jaffa. One morning she set out on foot herself for Jaffa. It was not far but very dangerous. The Cohen sisters stayed home to watch us. And one by one our relatives started to come to the house.  Mama of course, pulled it off. She said afterwards that her knowledge of English helped her. On the border a young English policeman asked her where she was going and she explained. He thought she was crazy but escorted her to the Seraya and then back to safety.

With the proceeds of the sale, my grandmother bought tickets for the United States. She and her two young daughteres left the port of Haifa on January 17, 1937, on the same ship, the Roma, that had brought them to Palestine just about two years earlier.

“The crossing,” my mother recalls, “was stormy, but for me it was joyous. It represented the termination of an adventure which had started out with excitement and promise and ended as a nightmare. Many of my adult attitudes, values, fears and hopes were born in those 1 1/2 years. (I learned about oppression, poverty, and cruelty, and also about love, caring, and sharing.) I learned about humanity at its best and worst.”

Thirty-one years later, in 1968, just after my Bar Mitzvah, our family travelled for the first time to Israel. My mother hadn’t been back since that ocean crossing in 1937. A few days after we arrived, she visited the place of her childhood trauma.

In the back of the house was the balcony, still unfinished, that my grandfather had built.

I was in Israel last month and paid a visit to the house. I stood in front of this place representing more than 100 years of family history. I had with me the two photos from our 1968 visit. The house looked substantially the same, save for the freshly painted exterior, as befitting this gentrifying neighborhood that now hosts trendy restaurants and art galleries.

I stood before this place of roots stretching back three generations and more than 100 years. Where my great grandparents lived, where my grandparents met, where my mother’s young life was shaped. A place where history, both personal and social, as well as past and present, intersect.