The Vatican. Its incredible art collection. The Raphael rooms. His famous fresco, the School of Athens. Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. If you’re Catholic, the center of your faith, the home of your spiritual leader, the locus of papal history for over a millennium. Either way, a must do when in Rome. When a Jew …
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Hinde: Child of Life, Child of Death
In their later years, my great grandparents, Chone and Sheindl Wierzbowicz, were blessed with a daughter. Her name was Hinde. She was born sometime in the mid 1920s. She spent her short life with her parents and family in Zambrow, Poland, and shared the fate of Zambrow’s Jews. I don’t know with certainty Hinde’s birth …
The Search for my Grandfather’s Home
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 …
My visit to Zambrow
“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 …
“Pardon me, can you tell me the way to the mass grave?”
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 …
Mass murder sites: Kazamierz Biskupi
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 …
Friendships through the generations
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 …
Barest Remnents: The Cemeteries of Konin and Slupca
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 …
Remnant of a cemetery: Lomza
Lomza (pronounced in Polish Womsza) was our first stop on the day that we visited Zambrow. Lomza is located about 15 miles north of Zambrow in the northwest section of Poland, about 30 miles west of Bialystok. Lomza was an important Jewish town in Poland before the war. Jews constituted about half of the population of about …
Somewhat and minimally intact cemeteries: Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny
In a previous post, I began to describe the various types of places where Jews are buried in Poland, since, unfortunately, there are millions of Jews in the ground in Poland and very few walking the streets. As a result, much of my trip in Poland centered around the visiting of Jewish burial places of …