I’m a few hours away from setting out on an Air France flight via Paris to Warsaw. I’m an anxious traveller, an even more anxious flier. Yet as I prepare to embark on this journey of discovery, perhaps self-discovery, I am more nervous than usual. In my mind I know I will be seeing things …

I have not written anything for a while.  For the past few months, I’ve been working on my plan to visit Poland. The tickets for my wife and I have been purchased, and we leave in eight days. We will be arriving and staying in Warsaw, then traveling to Krakow for Shabbat, then moving on …

As I mentioned in a previous post, I now serve as a board member of the Zambrow Landsmanschaft. Once a year we have a membership meeting. A few years back, the president asked for someone to volunteer to assume responsibility for overseeing the translation of the Zambrow Yizkor Book into English. I’d worked as an …

Exploring the past, especially one’s European Jewish past, necessarily means trying to reach across generation and continents to connect with the pain they must have felt. And here I’m not even attempting to imagine the last days of my great grandmother and my great aunts, whose lives were taken in the most horrific manner possible, …

I would like to try to clarify how my exploration of family roots relates to my Jewish identity. Before the massive emigration of Jews from Europe in the latter half of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries, Jews identified themselves not only as Jews, but as Jews from a particular location. Of …