On my way back from Israel this summer, I spent three days in Rome. Little did I know how profoundly this part of my trip, designed for pleasure and diversion from the intensity of Israel these days, would affect me. That’s because, when in Rome, you confronted with some basic facts of history. Rome was …
Category: Connections: Past and Present
How exploring my past has led to connections in the present
The Search for Roots: Graves in Israel
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 …
Peeling off layers of the past
I am drawn like a magnet into my family’s past. Not out of nostalgia, but as a way of projecting my own future, a future rooted in deep history. Yet much of that history is clouded and, to my sorrow, mostly unrecoverable. My grandfather’s generation is gone, having died in America or been killed by …
The Lomza Yeshiva: Connections Past and Present
Before I began researching my family history, I had never heard of Lomza. But it turns out that I have connections to this city, connections of the past that stretch into the present, and future. Lomza is located in northeastern Poland. It played an important role in the history of Jews of Poland. Jews first …
Polish citizenship?
I’m looking into applying for Polish citizenship. No, I haven’t lost my mind, though my grandparents, if they could know my mind, would think so. Not only would consider me meshuga (crazy), but they would also recoil at the notion of identifying myself as part of an anti-Semitic nation. For to them, as for many other …
The Yizkor Book Translation: Published!
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 …
Transport to Auschwitz
We have divided our stay in Poland into two parts. The first part my wife and I are traveling on our own, first Warsaw, then Krakow, where we now are, and then Lodz. In the second part, we have hired a guide, who we met briefly in Warsaw, to take us by car to my …
A Yahrzeit observed
Last sunday, the 12th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, I observed the yahrzeit of my Zambrow family. This was that date that, in 1943, 72 years ago, my great grandmother Sheindl, my Zeidy’s mother, and three of his sisters and their families, were murdered by the Nazis. At least I believe this was …
Board meeting
Last Sunday, the board of the Zambrow Landsmanschaft met at a deli in Manhattan. We came together to discuss the various projects in which the organization is involved. Our connection with each other is through our ancestors, parents and grandparents, who lived in Zambrow. We represent different religious outlooks and live in various places in …
Myself as a latter day landsman
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. …