One of the most remarkable and poignant things about the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families in Jerusalem in 1981 was a wall plastered with notes from survivors and their children looking for lost family members and friends.
In those pre-Internet days, what was on that wall was a continuation of a hunt that had begun in the waning days of the Holocaust. For years after the Shoah, the Forward and the Morning Journal would be packed with search ads, and the International Tracing Service was overwhelmed with requests.
As our parents leave us behind as the guardians of their history, the searches continue, some 70 years after World War II began. Astonishingly, people do find each other and are able to bring the distant past into the present.
At the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, I edit Together, the newspaper that contains many search requests received through snail mail and e-mail. The Searches editor is Serena Woolrich of Allgenerations, who also gets numerous search requests every month. We reach 85,000 people quarterly.
Yet the odds of one person making two connections in as many years are statistically astronomical. And so when my own mother found two childhood friends because of Together, two years apart, I was amazed. One came as a result of a story she wrote about her fruitless search for her mother’s resting place in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, and the other from a casual e-mail I received at work.
In the first case, she hadn’t seen her friend Harry Langsam in 73 years. He lived in a town called Strizhev, where my great-grandfather was the chief rabbi, and was in the room when my great-grandmother passed on. Harry lives in Los Angeles. When he read my mom’s story in Together, he called the office in New York to find out how to reach her. On that very day, she was already on a plane headed for L.A., where she was going to spend some time with my younger brother. When she and Harry met, my mother told me, “many tears were shed.”
My mother, the youngest child of a major chassidic dynastic family, turned 89 on Shabbos Teshuvah. She has always made sure my siblings and I knew “from whom we stemmed and what we stand for,” and wrote a book in English – which she just finished translating for publication in Yiddish – called “Going Forward.”
She wrote it because she promised her mother she would, and to make sure her descendants would remember those for whom we were named and who came before.
I am a twin with a brother. We were named for my maternal grandparents, Reb Nosson Dovid, zt”l, the Partzever Rov in Sedlice, Poland, and his wife, Yitta, zt”l. In 1933, three years after my grandfather died of heart disease, his widow and my mother said goodbye to their “royal” existence in Sedlice and moved to Gensia Street in Warsaw, where they opened an equivalent of today’s bed and breakfasts. My mother was sent to Cracow to study at Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov.
When the war began, my mom came back to her mother in Warsaw. In addition to trying to care for the starving and the sick, they collected all the Torah scrolls in Warsaw and stored them in her dining room.
Most of my mother’s nine siblings were married and scattered around Poland. Some survived and some didn’t. One, her oldest sister Devorah, left Poland for British Mandate Palestine in 1934. Her brother Yaakov escaped from Treblinka, joined the resistance and died in the ghetto uprising.
Another brother, the Munkatcher Rov, Reb Burachel, zt”l, saved thousands in Hungary during the war. He was the one who arranged to smuggle my mother out of the ghetto and so she eventually went to Budapest via Munkatch to become a passenger on the Kastner Transport, the group of hostages in the Eichmann/Himmler deal released in Basel, Switzerland in December 1944.
My mother never knew what happened to many of her childhood friends. Yet on September 22, 2009 Munish Morgenstern – now Mike Morgen – came to visit with a bouquet for the Rebbe’s daughter. And 76 years since she last saw him, Pesla Rabinowicz – now Peska Friedman – was reunited with her neighbor, the grandson of her father’s gabbai, his sexton.