Moshe Zinberg was my maternal great-grandfather and pretty much the only grandfather either of my parents had. My father's grandparents perished in the Holocaust as were my mother's paternal grandparents. So Moshe and Elka Zinberg were pretty much it. My mother remembers how after the war nobody really knew what grandparents were and whenever they came to visit, people would come by just to get a glimpse of them.
Moshe and Elka lived in Beltsi (Balti in today's Moldova), had 6 children and were planning to immigrate to Israel around 1933. Moshe sold everything they had, including their house and all their possessions to purchase tickets and travel documents only to find out he'd been scammed and left with nothing. The family went thorough a very hard time but eventually managed to rebuild and prosper. Then when WW2 started their house was destroyed in a Nazi air raid and they fled over the Russian border. Traveling hundreds of kilometers on foot, the family eventually settled in Tashkent, in what today is Uzbekistan:
After the war, because of his deteriorating health, Moshe moved the family back to Beltsi, where he died in 1960.
The truth is, I haven't done much research on Moshe yet. Most of what I know is from my sister's roots project and family conversations. But one of my favorite photographs is of Moshe, probably around 20 years old, in Red Army uniform during his service in WW1. It's a small photo that is badly deteriorated, that I have shared here before.
And this is where Landailyn comes in. Janine Smith, who writes the terrific Janinealogy blog has taken this photograph:
and restored it to this:
Can you believe it? And she did it in no time at all.
My mother showed the restored version to her mother and she confirmed that this is in fact her father in uniform. Now, before all this we didn't even know that he served in the Red Army during WW1, so now I get to talk to my grandmother about this new revelation and find out much more.
My grandmother became very emotional when she saw the restored image. So thank you, Janine, you made my grandma cry.
