A lovely thing caused by Covid-19

Like many people who do genealogical research, I have been poking away at my family history in dribs and drabs over the years. Little bits of family history have gotten uncovered as more and more information has been digitized.

Maybe one of the only nice things about being in the midst of a worldwide pandemic is that one has extra time to do research. The New York Public library has made the library edition of Ancestry.com available to library card holders at home. Before Passover I have been looking up databases that had been unavailable to me before.

This being a word-wide pandemic, I am not alone in using this time of social distancing to research my family. Just before Passover I got a message from Natasza. She had found my blog posts where I had mentioned my searches for my Weisglass family Natasza had asked if I had heard of or was related to either Hersch or Siegmunt Weisglass.

The synagogue in Zastavna, where Siegmunt Weisglass was elected mayor in 1904

Natasza was a direct descendant of my illustrious relatives. What I didn't know was exactly how I was related to Hersch the landowner and adviser to the Kaiser(that was his actual job description) or his son, Siegmunt, who was elected mayor of Zastavna in 1904. Natasza had located records in Polish which made both of us realize that we were indeed related.

On the old days, before 23and me, you could figure out if you were related to someone based on the array of first names. In the Ashkenazi world, a son would name his children after his deceased parents and grandparents. As I looked at the family tree that Natasza sent me names from my family tree kept appearing and in the same order they appear in my family.I am still not certain if my ancestor is the brother of the relative born in 1798 or the brother of

Hersch born in 1837.

I shared the family tree that Natasza had sent me with my cousin Susan. Susan then sent me this photo of her grandfather and our mutual great grandfather.

This photo was probably taken between 1901 and 1904, after young Leizer and his father had arrived in New York and before my great grandmother and the girls came to the States. This photo was probably taken to reassure the family left behind that Leizer and Chaim were doing OK. Leizer is holding a book probably to show that he was studying. Chaim is wearing a kippah to show that he had not forgotten Judaism and his large watch chain is prominently on display to show that he was doing OK. We own studio portraits of family members with pearl necklaces painted in to show non-existent wealth and a painted on kippah to reassure relatives back home that the sitter was still religious. I don't know the reason for Leizer's combination long tie and bow-tie. It seems to be the neck-wear version of wearing both a belt and suspenders.

It is so deeply powerful to have the missing pieces of my family history filled in bit by bit.

Seeing family features appear and reappear

is something that is beyond words.

A threat of violence caused my great grandfather and great uncle to escape to New York. Natasza's family stayed in Czernowitz. Life was good for them there.

Natasza's family,

with the exception of little barefoot Marcin pictured above, perished in the Holocaust.

The violence that threatened my great grandfather saved our family. Somehow, connecting during this crazy, crazy time makes perfect sense.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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