Skip to main content

A circle of sorts

One of the fun benefits of having a blog is keeping track of the stats. No, I’m not the NSA, but I’m able to see what countries my readers are from.  Usually most of my readers are from the US and Canada. Because I have sewing buddies that I know through some internet sewing discussion groups who live all over the world, when I see that I have a reader from New Zealand or from England I can guess who it is ( Hi Anne! Hi Sandy!)

Sometimes though, a post takes on a life of it’s own.  This post seems to have struck a nerve in the sewing world and it has been reposted in a variety of places including on a Swedish sewing board. That post seems to have created interest in both Romania and the Ukraine. I now have a steady stream of readers who come from the land of my ancestors. My mother’s family comes from either side of the border, my grandfather’s family from what is now Kosogorka, but was known in those days as Frampol, in the Podolia province of the Ukraine, just outside of Kamenetz- Podolsk.
My grandmother came from outside of Czernowitz in the Bukovina. In 1903 when she came with her family to the US, it was under Austrian rule.

This was my grandmother’s relative, Siegmund Weisglass. I haven’t quite figured out exactly how he was related but he is definitely my relative.
siegmund weissglass
He was actually an important guy. If you look at page 3 of the program for the 1909 Zionist Congress , you will see his name listed as the delegate from Zastavna.Program from the 1909 Zionist Congress. Siegmund and his family were big land owners.
an admission ticket to the 1909 Zionist Congress

Siegmund was actually elected mayor of Zastavna in 1904.  His roots in Zastavna were deep. The chaos after WWI caused him to move to Vienna with his family. Here is the death notice for  his father Hersch death notice. Heresch buried in Vienna and then disinterred and reburied in Zastavna.
Siegmund was also part of a small group of men who drafted a letter after WWI demanding that Jews retain the civil rights they had while under Austrian rule, even though Czernowitz and it’s surrounding area was ten under Romanian rule. That and the death notice are the last bits of information I have  about Siegmund.
My mother’s father, Yaakov Yisrael came from the town of Frampol, now, Kosogorska in the Ukraine.
This tombstone is from the Jewish cemetery in Frampol. I don’t know if the woman buried under this tombstone is my relative. I do love the heavy lettering style.
Well, if any of you know any more about Frampol, or Zastavna, the illustrious Weisglass family or the lovely but far less illustrious Frater/Levak family, please let me know.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...