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 …
Category: Explorations: family history
Explorations into the history of my Zambrow family, their journeys from Poland to Palestine, America and Auschwitz.
My Great Uncle Shmulke: Mysteries Revealed and Remaining
Everyone it seems has an ancestor whose life is a mystery. Someone who lived on the margins of family, whose behavior was both excused and inexplicable. The black sheep, part of the family yet seldom spoken of. Perhaps a loner. Perhaps inflicted with a disability about which no one dared speak. These qualities describe my …
Sketching a lost life: my great aunt Paiche
Everyone deserves to be remembered, to have their story told. But how to tell the story of someone I never met, who lived so far away, left no survivors, and for whom not a scrap of genealogical information exists? No birth document. No marriage record. No physical trace of a life lived. Not even a …
The List
People create lists for all kinds of reasons. Projects to complete. Things to do. Shopping. As the owner of a paper goods store on the Lower East Side, my grandfather, whom I knew as Zaide, must have created all kinds of lists. Inventory. Expenses. Receipts. These lists, like the store itself, no longer exist. All …
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 organizations that mattered (part 1): HIAS
It’s difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of my Zaide’s (grandfather’s) generation. Their lives were uncertain, preoccupied with the issue of migration. For one central feature characterized the lives of so many Jews before World War II: dislocation, and the attendant struggles to leave Europe and redefine themselves in a new land. Having experienced …
Immigration strategies: the New World option
Half of my grandfather’s family made it out of Poland before World War II. The other half didn’t and were killed. My grandfather’s brother was one who did leave Poland. He was known as Shmulke (Shmuel or Sam) Wierzbowicz, and in this post I explore his journey from Poland to America. As with most Eastern …
Poland-Palestine-America: A journey to U.S. citizenship
My relatives didn’t arrive in the U.S. during the period of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1880-1920, when over 20 million people, including two and a half million Eastern European Jews, arrived on these shores. As the doors of immigration to the U.S. began closing after 1920, my grandfather’s entire family–his parents, …
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 …
From Germany to Palestine: 1920-1922
I begin with a photograph. It’s the first photo I have of my grandfather, Yosef Weirzbowicz (Waxman). It was taken in 1922, in Berlin. Next to him sits his mother, Sheindl. Standing alone, a photograph is lifeless, unreal, imprisoned, as Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. To bring it to life, a story needs to be told, …