An Exploration of History, Memory and Connections Past and Present
A few years back, at a meeting of the membership of the United Zembrover Society, I volunteered to take over the job of editing the translation of Sefer Zambrow, the memorial book to the murdered community of the Jews of Zambrow. The project involved working with the translator, Dr. Jakob Berger, and making sure that …
Zambrow had a beautiful synagogue. I’m sure that my Zaidy and his father and his mother from the upstairs balcony davened (prayed) there. I’m sure its walls echoed the voices of prayer and the cries and “shries” on Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidrei prayer began the service and the women would wail when the the …
One goal of my journey to Zambrow was to see if I could find the home in which my grandfather, whom I called Zaidy (Yiddish for grandfather), grew up. My Zaidy was born in 1900 and left Zambrow in 1920. As far as I know, his parents continued to live in the same home until …
“Zambrow” (pronounced Zembrov) was part of my childhood. The town was mentioned whenever the topic of family history came up. It was where my Zaidy (grandfather) was born and, in 1920, at the age of 20, left. Other than Warsaw and, maybe, Krakow, it was the one place in Poland I had heard of. But …
Our visit to Zambrow included sites near Zambrow that related to the history–actually the end of the the history–of Zambrow’s Jews. I had done a lot of research before leaving for Poland about how the last Jews of Zambrow died. I was aided by my work as editor of the English translation of Sefer Zambrow–the …
I need to take a break from describing mass murder sites, so here’s a more uplifting story from my travels in Poland. To be sure, for a Jew, a visit to Poland is going to focus a lot on loss. Each place you visit has its Holocaust story. (I never liked the word “story” to …
So far I have described various places where we encountered Jews who had died, either of natural causes or by Nazi murder. The state of these cemeteries varied, to being mostly intact to being completely desecrated and destroyed. But there are other places were murdered Jews rest, mass murder sites and death camps. The differences …
How can an act of kindness be measured against the gas and thousands of bullets that stole the lives of the Jews of Poland? Yet among the ruins of the Jews of Poland, we came across rays of light that shone from the past into our hearts. My wife and I showed up with our …
In a previous post, I tried to categorize the types of Jewish burial places I encountered in Poland. I attempted to list them in order from intact cemeteries, an identifiable marker for an named individual most of whom died of natural causes, to death camps, where hundreds of thousands of people, or, in the case …
Among our stops in my grandfather’s ancestral home town of Zambrow was the Jewish cemetery. I knew I would not find any graves of my ancestors as the cemetery has already been digitized, and no names of my ancestors appeared. I learned from my aunt, the last living connection I have between my generation and …