I watched the latest WDYTYA? episode about Lisa Kudrow as it aired on Friday night. I have a lot to say about this from many different aspects. As usual, my thought may be a bit scattered but I hope you can follow along.
1. I watched the show with my wife, who I have to say has been a trooper and has willingly watched the first two episodes with me. But I think this may be the last one she watches. I think it was just the expectation that this was going to be a family history and discovery show and not a grueling reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I think the graphic descriptions of what happened to Lisa's family and the Jews of Ilya were a bit too much and may have missed the target audience. I can see this kind of discussion coming up in a Holocaust documentary, as it should. But on an 8pm, Friday night, national TV show? A bit much.
2. My first point does not in any way mean that reminding people what happened during the Holocaust is not important. It certainly is. And the best example of why it is important is Lisa herself. How can a descendant of Holocaust victims have absolutely no idea what went on? It could be the suburban, southern California upbringing. But in a Jewish family? I find that hard to believe. I hope for her sake her discussion with her father was staged for the show because otherwise she should be ashamed.
3. 6 of my 8 great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust. My father grew up without ever meeting or knowing his grandparents. My mother only knew her maternal grandparents because they fled from Beltsy, Romania (now Moldova) to Tashkent, Russia. You grow up knowing these things, even though none of my grandparents ever talked about their parents. Not once that I can recall. You could see how painful it was for Lisa's father to bring up these memories and he had never met his grandparents either. But my grandparents said where they were from and did discuss a little about their families. I remember that my grandmother had an Yizkor book about her town, Dolhinov (Dolginovo). I remember reading it as a teenager. I guess growing up in Israel makes the Holocaust a lot more real than it does anywhere else.
4. Speaking of Yizkor books, the New York Public Library has the Ilya book. If you go to image 316 which is page 312 you can find the names of Lisa's Mordechevitz family:
Mordechovitz Mera
____"____ Liba
____"____ Avraham
If you go a few pages further to image 321 which is page 317 you can read the article that Lisa read in the market square. It's the testimony of David Rubin and it's in Hebrew (it was translated on the screen by Eilat Gordin Levitan who is a very active member of JewishGen, managed several of the shtetl pages and has many websites with wonderful photographs and other information). I couldn't find this specific translation on the Yizkor pages on JewishGen, but there are several others.
UPDATE: Miriam Robbins Midkiff, from the excellent Ancestories blog, left a comment with the link to the translated page that Lisa read. It's after the list of martyrs (which also lists the Mordechovitz family). Thanks Miriam!
4a. I am going to email Eilat and see if I can get a copy of the article she translated so I can share it with my readers or at least point you to a link.
4b. I am in touch with another Rubin from Dolhinov and I sent him an email to see if he is related to the David Rubin who wrote the chapter in the Ilya Yizkor book.
5. I wonder why Ancestry did not play up it's relationship with JewishGen for this episode. Strange. I think that would have been a huge win for all involved.
6. Now just to show how much this episode hit home for me, if you look at Eilat's website and check out the map, you will see that my grandmother's shtetl, Dolhinov (number 1 on the map), is right next to Ilya (number 19 on the map):
7. Doing the kind of research that Lisa did during this show in the Polish and other state archives is not as easy as it seems. From what I know, nothing is online and most records of anything less than 100 years old is not accessible to the general public. You would either need to go there in person and hire someone who's got the right connections or you may be able to do it remotely by hiring a local person, which is probably not something regular family historians can do.
8. I loved how the Polish archivist just plopped down a phone book in front of Lisa. There's no easier way to look for living relatives right?
9. I would have liked to see how Yuri/Boleslaw was related to Kudrow. They kept referring to him as a cousin, but only at the end did they say that Lisa's grandmother was his Aunt.
10. Another important part of the show was when Boleslaw said he wasn't there in Ilya to see the massacre. He only heard about it. But the family had lived for 60 years thinking that he witnessed it. This is a recurring theme with oral histories that are handed down through generations.
11. So how did Boleslaw escape the fate of the rest of his family in Ilya? He escaped to Russia and joined the army. This is pretty much what my own grandfather did. But my grandfather lived in Warsaw, not Belarus. So "escaping" from Warsaw was not going to be as easy. I will need to get to the bottom of this story on my next visit to Israel. I am not sure how much my grandmother will be able to tell me, but I have to ask.
12. I had more thoughts during the show, but I can't remember them now. Overall, I thought that while the subject matter was extremely dark (yet extremely important), the show itself was fairly lacking when it came to actual research. Why had they not talked more about Ilya's history? What about the generation of Jews who lived there for centuries before the Nazis ended it all? I also felt that the constant recaps and previews were too much. There was very little actual footage that wasn't reused several times.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the season of WDYTYA? but I have to admit that this format is starting to get a little tiresome. Maybe they can tweak the format if they get a second season going.
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.
When my parents came to visit last month, I asked my mother to bring as much family history material as she could fit in her luggage. At first she said it wasn't a problem but when she saw the amount of photos and albums she started to get worried. Eventually we agreed that she would bring the best of the best, including my sister's entire roots project.
So it's been some time since I scanned everything and I am finally starting to get around to sorting everything and getting organized. I thought I would share some of these treasures with my readers.
First is probably the oldest photograph I have from my mother's side of the family. The photo below is in very bad shape. It was printed on cardboard and is severely deteriorating. It is the picture of my great grandfather, Moshe Zinberg, probably in his 20's, which would date the photo back to around 1920:
On the back of the photo is something that I believe to be a Russian newspaper. I am not sure how the cardboard photograph ended up glued to a piece of newspaper. You can also see my grandmother's handwriting, where she wrote her father's name in Hebrew:
Next up is my father side of the family and once again, a very old photo. In this photo of the Smorgonski family you can see my great grandfather Avraham Smorgonski and his second wife, Henia Segalchik. Henia was the sister of Avraham's first wife, Esther Segalchik, who died between 1917-1918. You can also see 6 of Avraham's 7 children:
Top row (left to right): Zipora (my grandmother), Shlomo and Pesia
Bottom row (left to right): Ida (Ita), Joseph Haim and Haya
Everyone in the picture except for the top row of older siblings perished in the holocaust. They were murdered by the Polish villagers in their town of Dolhinov by being herded into a barn that was then set on fire.
Staying a while longer with my grandmother, Zipora, we have some truly incredible identity cards for her and her husband, my grandfather, Avraham Kilchevsky, from Israel in 1939-1940:
But who issued identity cards in Israel nine years prior to it gaining Independence? See below:
The Government of Palestine? But hold on one second before you jump to conclusions and we start another 5000 year war. Palestine at the time was not an independent country. It was a British Colony. Like half the world at the time.
Now back to my mother's parents. I have never seen these photos from their wedding before. These were taken in Beltz, USSR (now Beltsy, Moldova) on October 6th 1945:
Aren't they a beautiful couple? Here's a close-up:
I loved my grandfather very much. He was a cool guy and always fun to hang out with. He was always taking things apart, fixing them and putting them back together. He had a tool shed inside his apartment. He once made a guy sell him a toy that he bought for his son so that he could give it to me. It was an elliptical race track and had these little cars that had rechargeable batteries. They were always breaking down and we would take them apart and fix them.
I know this has been a long post full of big images, but I will leave you with two more. The first is a typical pose for my grandfather. I call it the "What's the Problem?" pose:
That's him on the beach at the Dead Sea in Israel where he and my grandmother used to vacation often with their friends. I remember going out there with them several times.
And here's how you relax on your Dead Sea vacation. You just get in the water and float your troubles away:
I have not posted anything new for a while not because I had nothing new to report but rather because there was too much going on. My parents arrived for a visit and we had a great time together. One of the things I had asked my mother to do was to bring as many old photos as she could. She did not disappoint!
I started scanning and cataloging all these terrific pictures and it's going to take a long time to get through everything. The method I've been using is to place as many photos as I can on the scanner and scan them as an entire page:
I scan them at a high DPI on the A4 paper setting so that I can use the entire scanner. Then I flip them over and scan the backs:
The next step in the process is to start cropping and aligning the images correctly and then saving them in the proper directories in my photo filing system. That's a lot of work, but I really look forward to it.
Last week I received Maureen Taylor's (the photo detective) book "Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photograph" from Amazon (where's my second book Bezos?) and started reading through that. Even though my photos are not very old I have been learning some research methodology and a few helpful tips about how to catalog and record what is on them.
Here's one of my favorite photos so far:
It's a photo of my great-grandfather Moshe Zinberg's grave site in Beltsy, Moldova (previously Romania and also Russia). I don't know who took it. I don't know when it was taken. I don't know how it ended up in my hands (I will have to ask my grandmother but my guess is her mother brought it with her on her visit to Israel many years ago). I don't know who the two men in the picture are but my best guess is that they are cemetery workers. I don't even know if the grave is still there!
What I do know is the following:
1) The plot is very large and fenced, which is not common.
2) The name in Hebrew would be pronounced "Tzimbarg". What does it say in Russian?
3) From what I could tell he was a VIP (Ish Ha'Tov) and a Cohen. It says he is Moshe, son of Aaron the Cohen.
4) There is a small picture of Moshe at the top of the tombstone.
5) There is a bunch of stuff in Russian which I couldn't read.
6) I couldn't figure out his date of death either (too fuzzy when I zoom in - I will try with a magnifying glass on the original).
I also scanned the back and sent it to two of Moshe's grandchildren to see if they could read it and translate it for me:.jpg)
Does anyone know what it says?
I can't wait to get into all the other photos. Some are complete mysteries...
