Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts

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.

footnoteMaven has tasked us once again with finding something unique to share with our readers: "It is the holiday season and a time for giving. So give Smile readers the gift of sharing, sharing a family photograph. It can be a gift given or received, it can be the gift of talent, it can be the gift of having the photograph itself. The interpretation of gift is yours. Admission is free with every photograph!"

I decided to focus on family pictures and look for the oldest ones I have. As usual I will have two submissions, one for my ancestors and one for my wife's.

The Smorgonski Family - Dolhinov, Poland (about 1932)



I've written about this picture before, but thought it was worth displaying again. This is my great-grandfather and his family (without the oldest sister, Hanna, who was probably in Israel by this time). 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.

Top row (left to right): Zipora (my grandmother), Shlomo and Pesia
Bottom row (left to right): Ida (Ita), Henia Segalchik, Joseph Haim, Avraham Smorgonski and Haya.

Hanna, Zipora and Pesia were the daughters of Avraham Smorgonski and Ester Segalchik. When Ester died, Avraham married her sister Henia and they had Shlomo, Ida, Haya and Joseph Haim.

I am not sure where this photo was taken or who saved it. Since The three oldest sisters left Poland with the Jewish youth movement before WWII, I suppose one of them brought it with her.

The Rightmire Family - Parsons, West Virginia (about 1906)



This is the the family of Thomas Ward Rightmire and Edith Mae Conley, my wife 2nd-great-grandparents. The family lived in Parson, West Virginia and from census records I suspect the were tobacco farmers. In the 1900 Census the three oldest children are listed as having an occupation of Stogie Rollers.

I believe this photo was taken after 1906 which is the year that Pearl Alta Rightmire was married and left the household to live with her husband Saul Isaac Hytowitz in Pittsburgh. I still need to figure out how the son of Jewish/Russian immigrants who lives in Pittsburgh married a girl from West Virginia, who was definitely not Jewish. But that's a story for another post.

This photo is on a postcard, which probably will give me more clues. In it we see Thomas and Edith, the parents, as well as their three sons, Myron W. Rightmire, Dale Mannington Rightmire and Otto Kent Rightmire. It is the oldest family photo I have on my wife's side of the family.

I have to thank Randy Seaver for his challenging Saturday night fun posts that help me get out of my genea-blogging slumps. This time around he asks us to:

1) List your 16 great-great-grandparents in pedigree chart order. List their birth and death years and places.

2) Figure out the dominant ethnicity or nationality of each of them.

3) Calculate your ancestral ethnicity or nationality by adding them up for the 16 - 6.25% for each (obviously, this is approximate).

4) If you don't know all 16 of your great-great-grandparents, then do it for the last full generation you have.

5) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on Facebook or in this post.

I followed Randy's advice and grabbed my info from a RM4 Ahnentafel list:

1. Avraham Benjamin KIELCZEWSKI: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND

2. Zywa Golda KRUG: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND

3. Haim Shmuel KALMANIEWSKI: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

4. ???: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

5. Shlomo SMORGONSKI: born abt 1836. m.? d.? POLAND

6. Hanna Minka ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

7. Jacob SEGALCHIK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

8. Ita ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

9. Jacob Yitzhak DOMBEK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

10. Sarah Rachel KARPIK: born abt 1861 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. m.? died abt 1941 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. POLAND

11. Avram KREPLAK: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND

12. Dobe JABLONKA: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND

13. Aaron ZINBERG: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

14. Sarah ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

15. Joseph BENDITOVICH: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

16. Miriam ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Hmmm. I have a lot of work to do. For starters, I know I have looked for all of these ancestors on JewishGen, but those databases are far from being complete. My next task should be to get some microfilm from the LDS, but how is that really going to help me? I can't read Russian or Polish or Latin or whatever language any of these records will be in. If they even exist.

At least I can pretty firmly say that I am 75%/25% Polish-Russian, which I have known pretty much all my life. And as I have written here before, the next generation after this one had a 75%/25% split for those who perished in the Holocaust. Yes, the entire Polish side. It's a good thing my grandfather fled to Russia.

So, does anyone have suggestions how I should go about filling in all these question marks?

I am in a bit of a stunned haze. I just confirmed that my grandfather had a twin brother which nobody knew absolutely anything about!

Well, let me elaborate.

I got my hands on some documentation that reveals a lot of information about my paternal grandfather's family. For instance, his birth date. Yes, I know it sounds strange that nobody knew when my grandfather was born, but both he and my grandmother never gave their actual date of birth. They used to say that they were born close to Passover or Hanukkah, but never an actual date. To this day I am not even certain of my grandmother's birth year, let alone an exact date.

Some more information revealed the correct spelling of my great-grandmother's maiden name as well as her full patronymic, Chaja Chaimowna Szmuelowna née Kalmaniewski, which in turn gives me the full name of my great-great-grandfather, Chaim Szmuel Kalmaniewski. There is also a lot of additional information about siblings and collateral lines that I need to dissect and analyze further.

I also found out that they were not originally from the town that we always thought they were from. The documents state that my great-grandfather, Wolf Lejb Abramowicz Beniaminowicz Kielczewski, a shoemaker from Prżytuly, gmina Kubra, was only temporarily in Radziłów. This town is just southwest of Radziłów and there are a number of towns with the name Prżytuly in the general area. For all intents and purposes Przytuly is part of Radzilow. Yes, it's officially 4 miles away and yes, it's a different town, but it's so tiny that it makes Radzilow look like a metropolis. Anyone living in Przytuly surely came to Radzilow, the "big" town, for many things, whether for goods, or the market, etc.



But let's get to the real discovery. While sifting through all this new information I stumbled onto the fact that my grandfather, Abram Beniamin Kielczewski, had the same birthday as his brother, Chaim Szmuel Kielczewski. At first I though I was mistaken, because from a page of testimony that my own grandfather filled out at Yad vashem he stated that this brother was born two years before what we knew was his birth year. Hence I always thought this brother was 2 years older.



I checked back with the family tree that started my research, my sister's roots project and there is no Chaim listed. Instead there is a Szmuel. My sister did this project about 6 years after my grandfather passed away so the information had to have come from my grandmother. Did she know about it? I don't know what to think:



But then several other pieces started falling into place. For example, they both have the same exact registration date and birth dates. They are registered one right after the other. They were both named after both their grandfathers (not necessarily evidence that they are twins, but still a nice touch).

So we went in deeper and found the word twin (двойной in Russian) in the documents!

When I first learned of the possibility that my grandfather had a twin brother, I called my dad and asked him if he had ever heard of anything like this. He said he did not and that he would talk to his younger brothers (still waiting to hear what they know, but I doubt it will be a different story). My father even called his elderly aunt on his mother's side to see if she knew anything about it, which she didn't.

We are all in kind of a shock about this new information. And I am full of questions. Why did my grandfather never mention his twin? Why did he never tell anyone his real birth date? Does anyone in the family have any vital records for my grandfather, like his ID card or death certificate? What happened to all that stuff?

Here's what I know about my grandfather's twin:

Chaim Szmuel Kielczewski was born and lived his whole life in Radzilow. Like his father, he too was a shoemaker. He married Frida Krok and they had two sons, Yitzhak and Benjamin. The entire family was burned alive in a barn with most of the Jews in Radzilow on July 7th, 1941.

My initial thoughts are that the painful memory of his twin brother and his family were too hard for my grandfather to bare. Since they had all perished before any of his own children were born, my guess is that he chose not to speak about them or mention the fact that he had a twin brother. I am not sure if it was just sadness for losing all of them or whether there were feelings of guilt for leaving everyone behind to go live a new life in Israel (back then still Palestine).

I was almost 10 when my grandfather passed away so I never really got the chance to know him very well and I was too young to ask him about his family. I have very good memories of him and of time we spent together, but I don't remember him as a happy person. I can't remember him ever laughing or even smiling. And, of course, I can't put myself in his position or even start to understand what a man goes through when he learns that everyone he knew was burned alive in a barn. But I would think that talking about them and telling stories about them would keep their memory alive. It would help future generation remember them and what happened to them.

I'm not sure why a 2 year difference means so much to me but for some reason it does. I mean, I knew about Chaim and his family before all this came to light. I knew he was my grandfather's brother. So why is it so important that they were twins? I think that perhaps knowing such an intimate fact, something that came from a completely different source, makes him and his family more real somehow. I guess that in the void of information and darkness that exists about my grandfather's past, this is like someone turned on a flood light.

My grandfather had three sons. The oldest, my father, Avshalom, who was born in 1945 was given a name that literally translates to 'Father of Peace' because he was born at the end of the war. The middle brother, my uncle Arieh, was named after their grandfather, Lejb (which means Leo or Lion).

But here's the interesting twist. We always thought that the youngest son, my uncle Chaim, was named after his maternal grandfather, but we now know he shares a name with his uncle, my grandfather's twin brother, Chaim Szmuel Kielczewski. (I just spoke to my uncle Chaim and he confirmed that he has never heard about a twin brother before and was quite shocked as well. He has all the documentation I was looking for and send it with my parents on their upcoming trip here in less than two weeks!)

In a few days, on July 7th, it will be the 68th anniversary of the atrocities that happened in Radzilow. I think that for the first time in my life, this date is going to mean something real to me (other than the fact that my favorite nephew turns five).

There were clues everywhere. But I have been distracted and disorganized lately and could not really focus on the task at hand. But suddenly something clicked and I am happy to say that I have found a couple of missing branches of my tree. And not too distant either. Let me explain.

Yesterday afternoon we were blessed with another beautiful baby girl. We decided to call her Bella Brannon Dekel which is a great combination of her ancestry and a very cool name. My wife's maiden name is Brannon and that lineage can be traced back 11 generations. The Dekel family name is relatively new and was changed from my father's Kilchevsky (Kielczewski) by his father. But the name Bella is a whole other story.

Bella "Beile" Kreplak was my great-grandmother. I have very little information about her and most of it is from oral interviews and a single page of testimony in the Yad Vashem Database. Here is what I know (treat this is unsourced information, but it's as good as I can get right now):

Bella was born in Warsaw about 1884 to Avram Kreplak and Dobe Jablonka. She was one of 8 children in her family (Moshe, Bella, Yossel, Rivka, Haya, Esther, Meir & Noeh). She married Hanoch Meir "Heynoch" Dombek probably in Warsaw before 1905 (when her first child was born). Heynoch and Beile had 9 children and lived at 16 Woloska Street in Warsaw before the Holocaust. Their children were Moshe Mordechai, Zipora "Feige", Tamar "Tana", Hava, Michael Haim "Misha" (my grandfather), Leah, Arieh "Leib", Haya & Rivka.

Bella, her husband and 8 of 9 children perished in the holocaust (the 9th child was my grandfather who escaped east to Russia). I don't know their exact fate, but from bits and pieces of what I remember hearing, they died of Typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto. I am sure that if I dig in the Polish Archives I will be able to find more information, but that will have to wait for now. It is assumed that Bella died in 1943.

The translated page of testimony about Bella from Yad Vashem reads as follows:

Detail text:
Bela Dombek was born in Warsaw in 1884. Prior to WWII she lived in Warsaw, Poland. During the war she was in Warsaw, Poland. Bela perished in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 26-Jun-1955 by Rivka Geiger.

Full Record Details for Dombek Bela

Source Pages of Testimony
Last Name DOMBEK
First Name* BELA
Sex Female
Date of Birth 1884
Place of Birth WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Name of 1st Child LEIB
Date of Birth of 1st Child 1928
Name of 2nd Child* LEA
Date of Birth of 2nd Child 1926
Name of 3rd Child KHAIA
Date of Birth of 3rd Child 1930
Permanent residence WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place during the war WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place of Death WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Date of Death 1943
Type of material Page of Testimony
Submitter's Last Name* GEIGER
Submitter's First Name RIVKA
Registration date 26/06/1955

* Indicates an automatic Translation From Hebrew

Detail comments:
http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_FL/.cmd/acd/.ar/sa.portlet.VictimDetailsSubmitAction/.c/6_0_9D/.ce/7_0_V9/.p/5_0_P1/.d/2?victim_details_id=1604044&victim_details_name=++Bela&q1=53EyGfyZ998%3D&q2=nCb0IKBT2lJyrAw9hs3KZKtWDxcmsb7P&q3=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q4=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q5=5%2BnqSfv9YJY%3D&q6=rFcgqeCcjDU%3D&q7=bxVfqQaN%2Ft%2BRpyXBct1qE2j6IQqmeLWD&frm1_npage=4#7_0_V9

Update: My mother read this post and pointed out that the dates above are incorrect. She is completely right about that, because these birth years do not make much sense. But you have to remember a few things about Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony - Most of them were filled out a decade or two after people left Europe and not always by very close relatives. These sources should be treated carefully because they may contain mistakes. For Example, the same submitter filled out a page (actually two) about my own grandfather, who was alive at the time. Still, for anyone researching Jewish Genealogy, the Yad Vashem database is a must. Thanks for the comment Mom!

Had it not been for my genealogy research and newly found obsession with family history we would probably never have come up with the name Bella. I am honored and proud to be able to name my youngest daughter after my great grandmother. Two Bellas - 5 generations apart.

I guess the one thing that gets me out of a genealogy posting funk is Randy Seaver's "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun."

This time we're on a quest to find my paternal grandmother's patrilineal line. That's not only hard to read and say, but kind of confusing to understand. What we're looking for are male ancestors of my dad's grandma. Boy genealogy would be so much easier if we just used regular 4-year old English, wouldn't it?

The challenge is this:

Provide a list of your paternal grandmother's patrilineal line. Answer these questions:

* What was your father's mother's maiden name?

Answer: Hey I know this! My grandmother's maiden name was Zipora Smorgonski - born between 1913-1916 (whenever we asked her when she was born she would say "in the spring") and I just saw that I have no idea when she passed away. It was around 10 years ago on Yom Kippur. I have to ask my dad/uncles.

* What was your father's mother's father's name?

Answer: I know this one as well! My great-grandfather was Avraham Smorgonski - born about 1881, died (murdered during the holocaust) on 29 April 1942. That date unfortunately shows up several times in my family's history.

* What is your father's mother's father's patrilineal line? That is, his father's father's father's ... back to the most distant male ancestor in that line?

Answer: This is a little harder to answer but I am happy to say I did the research on this with some help from other JewishGen researchers and have a few great-greats:
2nd great-grandfather: Shlomo Smorgonski - born about 1836 (I still have some work to do to understand the 20 year gap between Shlomo's children - I may have missed a generation?)
3rd great-grandfather: Ruvin Smorgonski - born about 1793, died about 1836.
4th great-grandfather: Movsha Smorgonski

* Can you identify male sibling(s) of your father's mother, and any living male descendants from those male sibling(s)? If so, you have a candidate to do a Y-DNA test on that patrilineal line. If not, you may have to find male siblings, and their descendants, of the next generation back, or even further.

Answer: My grandmother had two sisters, Hanna and Pesia. Her mother, Esther Segalchik died after Pesia was born and her father, Avraham, married her sister, Henia Segalchik. This was quite common back then. They had 4 children (2 boys, 2 girls), but only one son, my grand uncle, Sholomo Shamgar (changed from Smorgonski) survived the holocaust. Shlomo passed away in 2005, but he has a son and a grandson to continue the male Y-DNA paterilinial line.

Result: I have candidates! But I don't know what testing them would give me. There are a lot of "other" Smorgonski's out there that we have not been able to connect with my branch, so maybe that would give us the answer. I'll discuss it on my next trip to Israel.

Thanks again Randy, for your terrific genea-challenge!

I've been extremely busy these last few weeks but I decided to try out Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Fun challenge to find out who's number 21 in my Ahnentafel Report and came up with Hanna Minka (Unknown) Smorgonski.

I know absolutely nothing about her other than the fact that she was my 2nd great-grandmother and she was married to Shlomo Smorgonski. I only know this from a Page of Testimony I found on the Yad-Vashem website that was filled out by my grand-uncle Shlomo Shamgar about his father (she is listed as his mother). I'm not even sure where I got her middle name from and have no idea what her surname was. I doubt if I will ever find out much more about her.

I have been reading the book "The Lost" and have been thinking about my Jewish-Polish ancestry a lot lately. I think I will put up a series of posts about what I know and how much is missing. But just to give you a taste, when my parents where here for a short visit at the begining of the month I realized that my father had never known his grandparents. They were all long gone by the time he was born. His parents rarely spoke about them. On my mother's side she had only known her mother's parents. And had only seen them about 2-3 times in her entire life.

75% of my great-grandparents perished in the holocaust. Nobody in my family knows anything about them because their children barely said anything about what happened before or during these terrible times.

I've been working with Jose Gutstein who maintains the excellent Radzilow.com site in the past few weeks to try to find some of my ancestors in the region. I really have very little information to go on as far as my father's paternal side is concerned. Almost no documentation and very few photographs.

One of the things I have uncovered so far is a name of my grandfather's aunt, Leah Kielczewski, born about 1877 as well as the full name of my 2nd-great-grandmother, Zywa Golda Kielczewski (nee Krug). All I knew about her previously was that her name was Golda.

Another interesting thing to notice is the spelling change from Kielczewski to Kilchevsky. According to "Jewish Family Names and Their Origins: An Etymological Dictionary" (By Heinrich Walter Guggenheimer, Eva H. Guggenheimer, Published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1992, ISBN 0881252972, 9780881252972, 882 pages) the name comes from one of the villages Kielczew (Siedlce, Kalisz):



By the way, I highly kind of (see UPDATE below) recommend this book for anyone doing Jewish Genealogy. You can view it on Google Books here.

UPDATE: One of the comments I got about my recommendation lead me to use Alexander Beider's books rather than Guggenheimer's. The only problem is that when I go to Google Books, only 2 of 9 books have a snippet view available and all others are not available. The nearest library holding these books is at UGA which is 65 miles away. So for now I'll just have to make do with what I can.

Jose added a beautiful page to his site with some information about my grandfather. Please go check it out here.

Thanks Jose!

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:

One of the many reasons I started this blog was to get some of the family names out into cyberspace and see who might find their way here. I just got a comment on one of my previous posts from my third cousin once removed who lives in Argentina. He was doing some Google searches on his surname and found the post where I had mapped out the area where our ancestors were from in Poland. He remembers his grandfather was from Ostrow Mazoweicka.

Before I started on this journey I had no idea that I had any relatives in that part of the world but after doing some research on Geni.com we have managed to connect many cousins and create a very big family tree.

So Ernesto Kreplak, if you read this post, please send me an e-mail to adekel (at) bellsouth (dot) net. I will invite you to join the Geni tree and connect to everyone who's on there already.

Thanks,
Amir

Terry Thornton who writes the terrific Hill Country of Monroe County blog has started a new endeavor called The Association of Graveyard Rabbits. It's an association of genealogy bloggers who write specific blogs about cemeteries, grave markers, burial customs and more. I would love to join, but I just don't see having the time right now and my geographical region is not extremely exciting for me and my current research. I haven't even scraped the surface of our family history so this will have to wait for a later date.

Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who writes the excellent Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog, has started up a Jewish Graveyard Rabbit blog as part of the association. I sent her a link to the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the grave of my great-grandfather Moshe Zinberg. But looking through all the photos my mother brought on her last visit I found another interesting aspect of Jewish cemeteries.



In many cemeteries in Israel you will find memorial monuments to holocaust victims. The one above is for the victims from Grajewo, Szczuczyn, Rajgród and Radziłów in Poland. As you may recall my paternal grandfather was born in Radziłów. The inscription on the monument reads:

In memory of the saints from the communities of
Grajewo
Szczuczyn
Rajgród
Radziłów
Saints of Grajewo, Szczuczyn and Rajgród perished in the village of Bogusze near Grajewo
Saints of Radziłów were burned alive in a barn
May the Lord revenge their blood (HY"D)

I put together a map of the area as well:


If you want to learn about honorifics for the dead in Judaism, you can find more on Wikipedia by clicking here.

To learn more about reading Hebrew gravestones, click here. This is a must-have document for anyone trying to understand a Jewish grave.

I've mentioned in the past that I have been in touch with several of my mother's second cousins and that we are trying to piece together our family tree to solidify all the connections. Well last night a big piece of the puzzle fell into place.

My mother's second cousin, Michel, who lives in Paris, updated our Geni.com family tree and with those updates I was able to connect an entire group of people that up until a few weeks ago I only heard about maybe once or twice in the past. Turns out that my great grandmother, Bella Kreplak was part of a very big family. I didn't even know the names of most of her brothers and sisters, only their descendants and usually two generations away. I definitely didn't know the names of her parents, Avram Kreplak and Dobe Jablonka.

Bella was one of eight children in a family that lived in Kosow Lacki, Poland. The children in the family were (in no particular order, because I have yet to verify all the birth dates): Bella, Moshe, Yossel, Rivka, Chaya, Esther, Meir and Noeh. Some of you reading this are scratching your heads and thinking to yourselves, what kinds of names are these? Well they are Jewish names used in Poland about 100 years ago. And because everyone had several names and nicknames, putting it all together is sometimes very frustrating. Here's an example.

I usually rely heavily on the GNDBs page on JewishGen. You plug in the name and the country and try to find a translation. But it's not always so easy. Let's take Yossel, Bella's brother. If you plug in Poland and Yossel, it doesn't find anyone. But I know that Yossel, is a nickname for Yossi or Yossef or actually Joseph. So instead, I looked for Yosiel and got this:

Legal/Hebrew: Yoseyf Manso Gender: M Legal Origin: Genesis 30:24
Yiddish: Yosef / Yoysef / Yoyzep / Yozep / Yusef / Yehosef / / Manso
Yiddish Nickname: Josiela / Osip / Yesl / Yos / Yose / Yosefke / Yosefl / Yosek / Yosh / Yoshe / Yoshk / Yoshke / YOSIEL / Yosk / Yoske / Yoskhen / Yoskhin / Yosl / Yoslin / Yospe / Yosye / Yoyze / Yoyzfe / Yoyzl / Yozep / Yozl / Yozlin / Yozpe / Yusl / Yuzek
Local Secular: Jesef / Jojzyp / Josef / Josif / Josyf / Yosif?
Local Secular Nickname: Ios / Iosko / Iospa / Jojze / Jojzel / Jos / Josek / Josel / Josk / Joska / Jospa / Joszk / Joz / Jozek
European Secular: Iosef / Iosek / Iosif / Iozef / Iozek / Josef / Jozef / Josek / Jusef / Yosef / Yossef? / Yousif? / Yozef
European Secular Nickname: Iosel / Iozel / Joscha? / Josiel / Josjek / Joss / Yosek / Yosel?
US Name: Jack / Josef / Joseph

See what I mean? How many ways can you spell this name? And who knew that Joseph translates to Jack? And if you change the output to Argentina you get Jose. And these aren't even the tough ones. Bella's mother was Dobe Jablonka. Dobe to me sounds like Doba, which sounds like a female bear in Hebrew. So here is what I found in the GNDBs:

How do you get to Dorothy from Dobe?

Anyway, back to the second cousins. I am not done yet. There is an entire branch of Kreplak's in Argentina that I want to link up. I think Michel knows the connection to them. He's visited them a couple of times and has a lot of information. It's tricky again, because all their names have taken on a South American flavor. There are Carlos and Julio and Federico in that branch. But at least it seems that the ancestors are still known by their original Yiddish names of Enoch and Pinjes. Enoch is Hanoch and Pinjes is also Pinkus and I already found a few of those in the JRI Poland database on JewishGen.

When I started to compile and rebuild this family tree I had no idea I would run into so many living relatives. This is truly an amazing experience.

So here's a great big warm welcome to all my new relatives, my second and third cousins I never even knew I had.

It's been a while since my last post, but boy have I been busy. I have been diving into some Polish geography and finding a lot of links to long lost relatives. I have found a lot of these people on Geni.com and it is proving to be a truly valuable resource.

As I have written here before about my grandfather's Dombek family, there are few leads to follow. But then I started to investigate his mother's side of the tree. Bella (Beile) Kreplak was born about 1884 in Poland (according to a page of testimony, she was born in Warsaw). So far I have not found any Kreplak's in Warsaw. So I started looking in other places. I found Bejla Kreplak, born in 1885 in the Kosow Lacki PSA BMD 1863-1904 in the Siedlce Gubernia / Warszawa Province database on JewishGen. You'll see why this is interesting in just a bit.

From speaking with my mother and grandmother, but also from personal acquaintance, I know we have Kreplak relatives in Paris. They are the children and grandchildren of Herschel Kreplak who is (supposed to be) my grandfather's first cousin. I need to verify who his parents were to confirm this, but I would say this is pretty certain. There is also another family in Paris that are descendants of a female Kreplak and they were also considered first cousins. Then there is a Ritz family in Israel.

Today I found out that Chaya Rydz (nee Kreplak) was the mother of Yehuda Rydz of Herzelia, Israel, and perished in Ciechanowiec, Bialystok, Poland, along with Yehuda's wife, Faiga Rydz (nee Plisky). All this is based on the Ciechanowiec Yizkor Book. You can read a chapter written by Yehuda here. So I have some research to do there, but I am pretty certain I can link them all back to the same family as well. I think Yehuda Rydz is the Idel Ritz in my tree?

There are two other Kreplak trees I am working on. They all lead back to families in Kosow Lacki, Poland. I found records of Kreplak families there and I need to see if I can find them at an LDS center and actually see who the parents were. I think I'm on the right track.

And then there are a few Dombek families that track back to Ostrow Mazowiecka.

One of the interesting things I found out is that all these villages are within a 20 mile radius. Check out this map:



By the way, I created this map by looking up the town Sterdyn on this site: http://mapy.eholiday.pl/. I guess you can also go through Google maps but this site actually does have a type-ahead feature that helps you if you have no idea how to spell in Polish, which I don't. Then I used a FireFox plug-in called FireShot that let's you grab either your current browser view or the entire page and add highlights and comments. There's a free version and it is extremely useful.

Last tech-tip for today. If you wind up in a foreign language site, like the one above, right click somewhere on the page and select the bottom option "Page Info". Then choose the "Translate to English" option at the bottom. It runs the entire page through Google Translate and does a pretty good job. This only works in FireFox (because you really should not use Internet Explorer), but doesn't work on Google's new Chrome browser. I'm certain it will be added very soon.

My maternal grandfather was Michael (Misha) Dombek (Domb is an oak tree in Polish). As far as I know, he is the only surviving Jewish Dombek from his family to have made it through the holocaust (There are other Dombek families, but so far I have not been able to find any that are Jewish). When WW2 started he left Warsaw and his disapproving family behind and fled to Russia, where he later met my grandmother. When he returned after the war, there was nobody left alive.

I will have many more posts about my grandfather, as he was one of my role models growing up and one of my favorite people in this world. But for the sake of this post I will focus on one single story. It's a sad story about the complete annihilation of his family in the holocaust and how a misunderstanding and a case of mistaken identity changed the future for many people.

Misha lived with his family in Warsaw in a big apartment at 16 Woloska Street. He was one of 9 children in the family and was about 19 years old when the war started. he felt that things were not going to end well and decided to leave. He tried to convince his father and the rest of the family to leave with him, but they wouldn't listen to his warnings. And so he set out on his own to the Russian border.

He moved around a lot in Russia during the war, joined and left the Red Army (twice) and eventually met my grandmother in Central Asia (near Tashkent, Uzbekistan). After they married in 1945, he made an unsuccessful attempt to find his family in Warsaw. A couple of years later they moved back to Poland, in 1947. At this point, he tried to go back to his family's apartment. Surprisingly, the building was still standing and the old Polish woman who worked there recognized him. She told him that one of his sisters, Tema, had come back after the war and sold the family apartment. Apparently Tema and another sister had survived, according to the old woman, and had moved to Israel.

Misha was encouraged by this new development and had tried to contact his sisters in Israel for several years without success. Eventually Misha and his new family (wife and two children) immigrated to Israel around 1957. One of the reasons was the chance that his sisters could be contacted somehow. At that time there was a radio show on Friday afternoons that tried to reconnect lost family members. Misha was reluctant, but his wife Riva decided to put his name on the show and they were soon contacted by Mrs. Rivka Geiger (Kramarz).

Rivka and her sister, Tema Fruchter (Kramarz), were the only two known survivors. When they finally met, Rivka took Misha to see her sister and that's when things got a little strange. Apparently Tema and her husband were acting in a weird way, avoiding eye-contact and being very distant. After the visit with his two cousins, Misha figured out what must have happened. It seemed that Tema came back to the family apartment in Warsaw, pretended to be Misha's sister (also called Tema) and sold it. Misha later confronted her with this conclusion and she admitted to it and apologized. Her reasoning was that since it seemed like everyone had perished in the holocaust, there was no reason to just let the apartment go to waste. It took some time but eventually all was forgiven.

So the case of the cousin who "stole" the apartment had led to several life changing events. Had she not sold the apartment, Misha would have had no idea that they were alive and living in Israel. Without the (false) hope of seeing his sisters he would not have moved his family to Israel. My parents would have never met and I would not be here to tell the story. I am constantly amazed at how little incidents in our past make a huge impact on our future (or present).

Rivka Geiger has been one of my biggest sources of information about my grandfather's family. She filled out dozens of 'Pages of Testimony' for Yad Vashem about her relatives who had perished in the holocaust. From reading these handwritten documents I have been able to piece together a family tree dating back to the mid 1850's in Poland. Below is a tree of descendants of my 2nd great grandparents:



I marked the only survivors in red, all who perished in black and myself in blue (bottom left). It is astounding how entire families were massacred and wiped from existence. This is just an example of only one branch in the tree. I have similar diagrams for the Kreplak family (my great-grandmother's side, of which a couple of second cousins were later located in Paris) and the Smorgonski family (my paternal grandmother, who were murdered in Dolhinov, Poland). And these were only the adults. Many of these families had children that aren't listed in the 'Pages of Testimony'. All gone.

I will slowly continue to add details and proper citations from this resource. I am currently at around 100 people combining both sides of my Polish ancestry. My next big leap would be to try to find out if there were any family members higher up in the tree that left Europe before the war or survived the holocaust in some other way. The problem there is that both my great grandfather and his father were only sons in families with many sisters. Another problem is getting through to the correct information for 19th century Polish Jews. This is one of the top goals of my research.