Free Webinar

 

Lessons in Jewish DNA - free webinar by Israel Pickholtz now online for limited time

June 05, 2019

The recording of today's webinar, "Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man's Successes and What He Learned On the Journey” by Israel Pickholtz is now available to view at www.FamilyTreeWebinars.com for free for a limited time.

Webinar Description

The hottest topic in genealogy in recent years has been genetics and many thousands of genealogists have ordered DNA tests. Most of those haven't a clue what to do with their results. The situation is more complicated among Jews, who have married "within the tribe" for hundreds of years, thus ensuring that everyone is related to everyone else, multiple times. Marrying within a closed community - "endogamy" – has barely been addressed by the non-Jewish genetic genealogy community. This presentation – as in the speaker's book" ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" – does not bring a "how to" approach, as every family is different. The speaker prefers a "how I did it" approach, demonstrating the successes he has had in his own families and the general lessons which are applicable to all genetic genealogy research. His goal is to inspire his listeners and readers to say "I can do this!"

 

 

Redemption of a Fifth-Generation First-Born Son

והעברת כל-פטר-רחם לה', וכל פטר שגר בהמה אשר יהיה לך הזכרים לה'. וכל-פטר חמר תפדה בשה ואם-לא תפדה וערפתו, וכל בכור אדם בבניך תפדה. והיה כי-ישאלך בנך מחר לאמר מה-זאת, ואמרת אליו בחזק יד הוציאנו ה' ממצרים מבית עבדים.  ויהי כי-הקשה פרעה לשלחנו, ויהרג ה' כל-בכור בארץ מצרים מבכר אדם ועד-בכר בהמה, על-כן אני זבח לה' כל-פטר רחם הזכרים וכל-בכור בני אפדה.

                                                                                                             שמות י"ג יב-טו

And you shall set aside for G-d the first of all wombs, and every first-born of your animals, the males shall be for G-d. And you shall redeem every first-born donkey with a lamb, and if you do not redeem it, you shall break its neck, and your first-born sons, you shall redeem. And when it comes to pass that your son asks you “What is this?” and you shall say to him “By the strength of His hand, G-d brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. And it came to pass that when Pharaoh would not send us out, G-d slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of man to the first-born of beast. Therefore I sacrifice the first-born male animals and my first-born sons I redeem." 

                                                                                                   Shemot 13, 12-15

So commands the Torah. We redeem our first-born (to the mother) sons, whom we "owe" to G-d because he did not kill them in Egypt. In Bamidbar 18, 15 the Torah tells us that this is to be done when the child is one month old and that the price of redemption is five silver sheqalim. The rabbis later clarify that this mitzvah is only relevant if neither parent is a Kohen or a Levi, so the chances of a redemption ceremony in any Jewish family is probably not much more than forty percent.

The ceremony (called pidyon haben) is highlighted by the kohen asking the father if he wants his son or the five sheqalim and the father says that he wants to redeem the child. This is followed by two blessings by the father, several verses by the kohen and wine. Then everyone eats. And perhaps someone speaks.

The first-borns are in red.

My late father was a first-born, as am I. So when my first-born son's first born son became a father last month, the baby is a fifth-generation first-born to be worthy of a redemption ceremony. The kohen was one of my grandsons rabbis in his Lakewood yeshiva. There were about forty people in attendance. I made last minute plans to be there - unannounced - but it didn't happen. (See my next blog for that story.)

The kohen for both my father and me was my grandfather's brother-in-law, Uncle Harry Katz. I didn't really know him, my only memory was from going to his shiv'a when I was ten. As it happens, one of Uncle Harry's two granddaughters lives about an hour drive from Lakewood, so I asked her to join us. She was planning to but when my plans were aborted, she decided to skip it. (Rhoda is named for her grandmother, Uncle Harry's wife, who was named for our second-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz.)

The baby is named for his mother's paternal grandfather whose first yahrzeit was the day of the pidyon.

My trip was aborted, but I told them that I fully intend to attend the pidyon of first-born number six in twenty-five years.

Erzsebet Kornberg(er) in Budapest

The inimitable Lara Diamond gave me a heads-up just before her most recent blogpost, telling me that she had seen some of my Pikholz (assorted spellings) in a Hungarian archival database she was writing about. She also sent me a Budapest death record which she had happened across.

The 9 December 1938 report of the death three days previous of Erzsebet Kornberger, wife of Jozsef Pikholz. She was seventy-two and her parents were Abraham Kornberger and Roza Korberg.

This looked familiar, but not quite as I remembered this person.

I have a Budapest birth record for Sara Rebekka Stefania born 24 August 1898 to Mozes Pikholz (mentioned in the notes on the record) and Erzsebet Kornberg, age 31 of Tarnopol Galicia. Close but no cigar.

We have additional information on this couple from their 1908 (late) Budapest marriage registration. We see Mozes' mother and birthdate, both of which we know from the Rozdol birth records. Erzsebet is called by a Jewish name "Lifsche" and she was born 30 May 1867 to Chaim Kornberg and Sara Rivka Stein.

Lifsche's birthdate and parents' names (plus her maternal grandfather Eisig) appear in the Tarnopol birth records.

So are these two women the same person?

The ages look right. The surname Kornberg vs. Kornberger are within the norm of clerical error. (Mozes is dead by then, and he would have been the best source of information when his wife died.)

On the other hand, the husbands - Mozes and Jozsef - are different. We have no evidence of any Jozsef either in that part of the family or in any other Pikholz Budapest family. And the parents of Erzsebet/Lifsche are completely different - Chaim vs Abraham and Sara Rivka vs. Roza.

(I suppose it is possible that after Mozes Pikholz died, Erzsebet married Jozsef Pikholz, but I find that highly unlikely. And it only solves part of the contradiction.)

I really find it hard to believe that these are two different women, but the errors look too great to be clerical.

There is one other bit of information which seems to seal the deal. The address 36 Nyar Street appears for both. It appears on the 1938 death record, on the 1908 marriage record and on several birth records for the children.

As it happens, Mozes and Lifsche have a granddaughter living in Belgium. She has done DNA for our project and I am Facebook friends with her daughter. I do not assume that the granddaughter - who was born after the Holocaust - will be able to clarify this, but we shall ask.

In the meantime, I shall hold off on recording Erzsebet's death record in my database. And hope for the best.

Wolf Pickholz

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Wolf and Ryfka Pickholz: Voters for the Polish Senate

The name "Pikholz" in its various forms, is both uncommon and unusual, so when people see it, they notice. Since I have been in contact with so many researchers over the years, I hear from people from time to time that they have run across a Pikholz reference that I had not previously seen. I received one of these about two weeks ago from a fellow named Oded Vardi, with whom I had a brief correspondence eighteen months ago.

1928 Polish Senate Elections

Oded has Skalat and Grzmaylow interests and was looking at records of voters in the 1928 Polish Senate elections, for people registered in Skalat. He passed on this listing for Wolf and Ryfka Pickholz, both age 52. Wolf is not a common Pikholz name. It appears in my Given Name Analysis only thirty-two times, seventeen in Skalat families and fifteen in Rozdol families. One of the seventeen from Skalat is married to Rivka Reisel with known children born 1896-1907 - so the age fits. I do not consider it jumping to conclusions to say that the couple in the elections list is the one we already know.

Wolf and Rifka Reisel's first child married a man named Izak Bergman in 1923 and we know nothing further about her. The second died at seven months. The third was killed in the Holocaust, with a wife and children. The fourth died in Israel, just short of her fortieth birthday, leaving a young son and a fifteen-month old daughter. I have been in contact with the daughter over the years. She is always polite, always answers my letters, knows nothing about her mother's family and has no real interest in the family history. She has declined my suggestions to do DNA.

The issue with this family is that we have no parents for Wolf, though we do for his wife Rifka Reisel. Wolf, who was born about 1875-6 could be a descendant of any of the Skalat Pikholz ancestors from the period 1780-1805.

From my Given Name Analysis

Horodnica

But this new document has one bit of new information. The voters are Skalaters, but did not necessarily live there at the time. The towns of residence are listed in the left-hand column and Wolf and Ryfka are listed as living in Horodnica.

Horodnica, on the road from Skalat to Husiatyn

Horodnica is 18 miles (29 km) SSE of Skalat towards Husiatyn, in the Kopicienice District and according to the JewishGen Communities Database had 21 Jews in 1920. I have discussed our connection to Husiatyn several times, including here and here but I have not mentioned Horodnica until now - yet it is a town I have seen in our records.

David Samuel Pikholz, who lived in Skalat and died 30 October 1920 at age 68 was married to Freude Linczycz of Horodnica. Freude died 12 November 1930 at age 75. They had three children that we know of - Golde (1878), Marjem (1879) and Chanzie (1880). I am thinking that Wolf may be a child of this couple and wonder if perhaps he and his wife moved to Horodnica after David Samuel died, to help look after his widow Freude.

Keep in mind that in 1877, there was a major change in record-keeping in Galicia and it doesn't surprise me that we find no record for Wolf in 1875-6. Wolf's missing birth record is a problem regardless of who his parents are, not specific to the David Samuel - Freude hypothesis.

I am not yet recording Wolf as the son of David Samuel and Freude. My own rule says that absent clear documentation, even once I am certain, I must find at least one more piece of supporting evidence. But it feels like I am on the right track.

David Samuel  

Even if this hypothesis is correct, I remain stuck at David Samuel, whose parents are unknown, or at least not identified. (As a side note, David Samuel is a name which appears multiple times in the Rozdol Pikholz branch, but only twice in Skalat. You can see a brief summary of those here.)

Gesher Galicia has recently made available some new birth indecies, including Skalat for 1827-1858. They are available to members only and are very difficult to work with, though the writing is clear. And since they are only indecies, they do not show parents' names or other critical information. I see no David Samuel (or David or Samuel) on any of the "P" pages, though I would expect to see this one in about 1852.

Perhaps he is listed under a different name (his mother's, for instance) but I would have to comb through the forty-six pages of scans to find even a candidate for ours. It is now on my to-do list.

Linczycz

Let me mention that David Samuel and Freude are not the only Pikholz-Linczycz couple. Ester Linczycz (also from Horodnica) and Israel Pikholz had a daughter who died at birth in 1901. I have no idea how these two couple are related, on either the Linczycz side or the Pikholz side.

My friend Jill Chozen is a Linczycz descendant from Horodnica and I have begun a bit of inquiry into that rabbit hole, in case there is more than meets the eye. Ester is definitely a sister of one of Jill's ancestors.

Dr. Egon Riss, My Father's Half Second Cousin

On the seventy-third anniversary of the founding of our modern state, let me introduce you to a family hero.

The following is my translation of a Hebrew-language Facebook post by Eviatar Lichtman. Dr. Egon Riss is a Pikholz descendant, my father's half second cousin. I have been in contact with his widow Jona for twenty years and even visited with her once, and am Facebook friends with two of their three children, but I never heard any of this before. Nor did I know that he had a wife who was killed during the War of Independence. (More about her in a separate post.)

The 1989 grave of Egon Riss in Haifa. His Jewish name is Noah.

Eviatar is not a family member, but a tour guide to whom Israel's history is important. Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidence), I met him in shul last week!

How many of you have heard the name Egon Riss? Dr. Egon Riss. And how many of you knew of this hero?

Seventy-two years ago today, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem fell. The State had already been established. But its heart was detached. The Old City and the holy places. No longer in our hands. Curiously, it is a cardiologist who, to me, symbolizes not only the loss of the city and its heart, but the victory of the people.

Dr. Egon Riss, who married Hava Jezmer-Riss.

Egon and Hava, who worked together as doctor and nurse as part of the Haganah militia, Egon who was wounded by a bullet on his way to the hospital on Mt. Scopus, the same Egon who nonetheless resumed going up to the mountaintop hospital several weeks later. In the same convoy where seventy-eight of his colleagues were murdered and burned alive.

Dr. Egon Riss, who was not a Jerusalem resident himself, but his heart could not accept that his brethren were there alone, a Jewish minority, against an Arab throng hungry for their blood and their homes. So he went. There.

Dr. Riss who said "I knew that no one would relieve our shift because the Arab attacks were intensifying and we were the last ones to enter the [Jewish] Quarter," he said, understanding the significance of his words for his own life.

Egon, whose wife remained outside [the city walls], continuing to work on behalf of the Haganah, until she was struck by a shell. And Egon, who tried to raise a Red Cross flag above the hospital so it wouldn't be shelled. Which of course drew increased fire.

Egon and his colleagues, the doctors and nurses, kept apologizing for being relatively secure while the Quarter's defenders had to fight. (They said this as the hospital absorbed constant shelling.)

And when the Jewish Quarter fell, Egon volunteered again. The Red Cross called on him over and over to evacuate to the western part of the City. And Dr. Riss said "How can I leave the wounded to remain alone in captivity?" And he went with them. This was after everyone knew what had happened in Kefar Etzion, and what "going into captivity" might well mean.

Fortunately, he returned alive from captivity and was involved in developing cardiology in Israel, becoming a pioneer in his field in the north. He married again, to Jona Itzkowitz, with whom he had a family.

During this period [the corona virus], when we are so grateful to all the medical personnel and in this period between Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Yerushalayim, it is an appropriate time to remember the modest Dr. Egon Riss, who rarely granted interviews so few of us know of his actions.

Everyone should remember him and the defenders of the Jewish Quarter, where the few stood against the many, in defense of the heart of the City.

Incidentally, there are three Riss cousins named Egon, all born within a sixteen-year period.  You can see their places in the family here, about a quarter of the way down the page.

Two GEDmatch Tools Plus More About Testing Siblings

Some weeks ago, a woman named Sherri contacted me via Ancestry.com. Ancestry said we were a very small match - 25 cM across six segments - and Sherri wanted to see if we could follow it up. She was already on GEDmatch, so I had a look.

GEDmatch showed a slightly larger match - nearly 32 cM over four segments, but still not much. Her mother's sister is also on GEDmatch, but she matched me even less, but with only a single segment of 11.8 cM on chromosome 12, where Sherri does not match me even at 3 cM.

I ran Sherri's kit against my families on the GEDmatch Multiple Kit Analysis, using a program called Short Keys to fill in my own kits.

The GEDmatch Tier1 tools

 

Sherri matches a few of my family members on my mother's side on three <12 cM segments, but all of these are matches with various cousins, none with me or my siblings. Sherri's aunt shares one of those three matching segments.

Then there was this, on my father's side. A nice segment of ~25 cM on chromosome 19, with eight of my family, not including me.

We have my brother and three of my sisters, my father's sister, two double second cousins (brothers) and my second cousin Susan. Susan nails this onto my grandmother's side, the one from Slovakia and Hungary. This is geography that Sherri didn't recognize from her own family. It is definitely Sherri's mother's side, as her aunt has this segment as well, although only ~11 cM.

And our match with Sherri is recent enough that a 25 cM segment has been preserved, despite that my Hungarian and Slovakian ancestors were in place at least since the mid-1700s.

(My guess is that Sherri matches my Hungarian great-grandmother rather than my Slovakian great-grandfather due to some other smallish matches she has with one specific cousin on each side, but I am way too conservative to jump to any conclusions here.)

Sherri's match with *G

So I asked Sherri about other family members who have tested and she mentioned a man we shall call *G, whom she has determined is her second cousin once removed. The relevant surname is Feldman from Belarus. Sherri's match with *G includes 37.4 cM on the segment we share on chromosome 19. That match is larger than even what Sherri shares with her aunt (31.4 cM).

My next step was to look at the Segment Search tool on GEDmatch. Like the Multiple Kit Analysis, this is a Tier1 tool, which requires a small payment. (I use GEDmatch enough that I generally pay for Tier1 12-18 months in advance.)

After removing the matches that are (or appear to be) from Sherri's father's side, these are Sherri's other matches on this segment. I removed the emails and kit numbers for privacy and coded the names for the same reason.

The four marked in red match Sherri's family members, but not my family - but they might if they were a bit longer. The seven marked in purple match Sherri's family and mine. The email for *G in the top row is one I recognized. It belongs to Leonid, whom I have mentioned here before. Our great-grandmothers have essentially the same given name and our maternal haplogroups are a perfect match. But that is a different part of our two families.

I wrote to the four people in Group 1 and the seven in Group 2, on the off chance that one of them may know something that can help connect the Belarus Feldmans to my Hungarian (or Slovakian) family. And of course I touched base with Leonid. 

Thus far (after a week) I have heard back from the first two people in Group 1 and the first two in Group 2. None of them has been able to shed much light, but I see that they are more Sherri's Belarus/Lithuania, rather than my Hungary/Slovakia. It looks like my family is the outlier.

Besides telling the story, I am writing about this for two reasons. One is to give a bit more detail on the use of the GEDmatch tools Multiple Kit Analysis and Segment Search. The other is to bang the drum yet again for testing siblings. This inquiry began with a match between Sherri and me. But I do not share the interesting segment on chromosome 19. For that we needed my brother and some of my sisters. Without them, we don't find this.

Furthermore, although we usually place an emphasis on the older generations, had we only had Sherri's aunt and not Sherri herself, this segment would have been only 11 cM and I probably wouldn't have paid it any attention. But clearly Sherri's mother got a larger segment here than did her sister (Sherri's aunt). So once again, testing first and second cousins is of primary importance, but test the siblings too. Why? Who knows! There might be a difference in some segments that matter.

BENZION - A Wild Wild Ancestral Theory

Benzion. בֶּן צִיוֹן or בֶּנְצִיוֹן. Son of Zion.

Could there possibly be a better name?

One of my regrets is not giving it to Devir as a middle name.

 

With his second son, Phil

My maternal grandmother's brother, was named Chaim Benzion. Hymen Benjamin in the United States. He was born in Borisov Belarus in 1894 and had four older sisters, born about 1879, 1886, 1887, 1889. The spacing is odd, with long breaks after the first and the last of the girls.

I knew Uncle Hymen and the way he told the story, his parents had other sons who either died young or were stillborn. (I don't recall how specific his knowledge was.) So when he was born, the rabbi said to use the name Chaim (=life) for good luck.There is a Jewish tradition of playing with names to fool the Angel of Death. At least, that's the way Uncle Hymen told me the story.

So I have always assumed that Benzion was one of Uncle Hymen's ancestral names, hence one of mine. And I was pleased as punch to have a Benzion among my ancestors.

Uncle Hymen's parents - my great-grandparents - are my namesake Israel David (aka Srul) Rosenbloom, the son of Yaakov and Shayna Liba, and Etta-Bryna the daughter of Yehudah the Levite, surname and mother's name unknown. So Benzion was not Uncle Hymen's grandfather, but could have been any of his four great-grandfathers. Or perhaps an uncle, though that seems much less likely.

The Belarus database on JewishGen shows a number of Benzian Rosenbloom references, but much younger, so I always thought there was a good chance Uncle Hymen's namesake was his father's paternal grandfather. Not so good a chance as to actually write it that way in my database, but slightly more likely that any of the others.

Yesterday that changed. A woman named Michelle Sandler posted in several Facebook groups:

In the course of signing on to this project, I took another look at the JewishGen Belarus Database, which I'd not seen in some time. It had a surprise for me, in the 1858 revision lists.

There is no doubt in my mind that these are the parents of my great-grandfather Israel David Rosenbloom, together with two sisters I had not seen before. I had never seen any evidence of siblings, though I assume he had some. For both of his parents, the fathers' names were listed. New names for me. Srul's paternal grandfather is Itska (Yitzhak) and his maternal grandfather is Khaim (Chaim). No Benzion.

And the wheels began turning in my mind. Chaim was not just a good luck name to fool the Angel of Death. It was a full-fledged ancestral name. Surely Uncle Hymen hadn't made up the story of his naming from whole cloth. But maybe it was a real story with the details wrong.

There were sons who died young. Even if their names are important, we generally don't reuse them as is. That makes it too easy for the Angel of Death. My father's father's eldest brother was named Mordecai Meir after his grandfather, but he died at thirteen months. For the next son, they kept the Mordecai, but changed the second name to Shemuel and Uncle Max lived to age eighty-six.

It makes sense that the dead sons of Srul and Etta-Bryna were named for their own grandfathers. Perhaps one was Chaim Yitzhak for Srul's grandfathers. And he died young so you don't want to use it again. Maybe change the order of the names? Or maybe something more clever.

The numerical value of the four letters of name Yitzhak is 10 + 90 + 8 + 100. That's two hundred and eight. Maybe thought Srul, or Etta-Bryna, or the local rabbi - we can play with that. How about 2 + 50 + 90 + 10 + 6 + 50 = 208. BENZION! Chaim Yitzhak becomes Chaim Benzion and we fool the Angel of Death.

I love this beyond words. I love the idea that my great-grandfather and namesake might have thought of it himself, or at least adopted the idea. A solution after my own heart. I really really want this to be true. I suppose we shall never be able to prove it, but if we can find Etta-Bryna's  grandfathers' names, we can call it progress.

We cannot record it as fact, but we might accept it as our working assumption.

Rosenbloom cousins, what do you think?? 

Narrowing It Down Using The X

As I have mentioned before, every few months I review the newest autosomal matches on my many Family Tree DNA kits to see which are the best candidates to investigate further with GEDmatch. Maybe a third of those respond to my inquiries and of those perhaps one or two, maybe three, will show anything useful. On this last round, I sent out about eighty-five inquiries and was surprised how many people got back to me in the first forty-eight hours. This is the story of one of these.

The match is a woman named Donna who was adopted and is looking for information that might lead her to her birth parents. One of her two matches with my families was this, a quite ordinary segment of 16 cM with seven Pikholz descendants.

Jean, Sarajoy, Judith and Amy are my sisters. Uncle Bob is my father's brother. Roz is my second cousin on my grandfather's side. Marshal is my double second cousin - our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters. The seven matches triangulate; they all match one another. So this looks to be pretty straightforward. This segment comes from either my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz or my great-grandmother Jutte Lea Kwoczka.

But this segment is from chromosome 23, the X.The chromosome that never passes from father to son.

Roz gets to our great-grandparents through her mother and grandmother, so both Kwoczka and Pikholz are viable sources for her segment. But the others are all from sons of our great-grandparents, so they would have no X from Hersch Pikholz. Which means this is a Kwoczka segment.

But that cannot be right either. Uncle Bob would have to have received the segment from his father, which is clearly impossible. Uncle Bob received this segment from his mother. That option works for my sisters and for Marshal, but Roz has nothing to do with my grandmother's Hungarians and Slovakians. The Pikholz and Kwoczka families lived in the Tarnopol area of east Galicia.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Three and a half years ago, I discovered a segment shared by two supposedly unconnected parts of my families, one being my grandmother's Hungarians and the other the Galicianers on the non-Pikholz/Kwoczka side of the family of my cousins Rhoda, Roz and Pinchas. 

I have since found about forty strangers who share this segment with matches of anywhere between twelve and twenty centiMorgans. I wrote all of them, but have not gotten any firm leads on how, when and where my two families connect. It is a good ways back, as the families have been in the same places since the mid or late 1700s, but it's recent enough to preserve this 20+ cM segment intact.

Wendy and Carolyn, at JGS Maryland, 2016,

my earliest cousins on this segment

I have also written about this segment of chromosome 21 here, here and most recently here.

My guess is that the same ancestor who gave us the segment on chromosome 21, gave us the newfound X segment, though I cannot prove it. Until now, I have had seven surnames to work with, five from the Hungarians and two from the Galicianers. Of course there was no reason to assume that the common ancestor actually used one of those seven names - if he (or she) used any at all. But they were starting points. 

Now, we know that two of those lines are completely irrelevant. The X cannot be from my third-great-grandfather Lasar Bauer or his wife Rosa Lowinger, because it could not have been passed to Cousin Shabtai Bauer. One of the forty "strangers" has a Bauer ancestor, so that was a candidate for chromosome 21. But it cannot be for the X.

The others are still possibilities simply because we do not have other known descendants of those families who might share the segments in question. We can neither confirm nor eliminate them. Here are the earliest known ancestors in each family.

On the Hungarian side:

Salomon/Yehoshua Selig STERN ~ 1805-1862, son of Izak Leib of Paks could have received this segment from his unknown mother.

Jakob GRUNWALD of Perkata whose daughter was born about 1806 could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Fani/Feige HERCZ, Jakob Grunwald's wife, could have received the segment from either parent.

On the east Galician side:

Shimon Leib ZWIEBEL, ~1825-1910, son of Isak, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Ester Chava LEWINTER, ~1831-1907, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from either parent. She is Shimon Leib Zwiebel's wife.

I would love to see some tests from any of these families. Zwiebel is probably the easiest place to start.

It feels like progress. I'll certainly notify the forty-odd strangers.

Playing The Role Of My Grandfather, With Stops Along The Way

(~8 years later)

My bar mitzvah
Sixty years ago yesterday, I celebrated my bar mitzvah. As was customary in that time and place, I did the Torah reading, the Haftarah (from the prophets), gave a speech in both Hebrew and English and conducted the musaf. The first two people who were called to the Torah - the Kohen and the Levi - would not have been members of my family. The other five surely were and would have included my father. But the only one I remember specifically is my maternal grandfather Raymond (Yerachmiel ben Zvi) Gordon, who was called up third. (My other grandfather died when I was nine.)

My grandfather was a very old man at the time. Nearly seventy-five. Well maybe not so "very old."

I wore a tallit (prayer shawl) bought for me by Aunt Ethel and Uncle Kenny, whose story appears here. It has long been lost.

I was taught by an Israeli teacher from my school and it was several years before I realized how substandard the teaching was.

The tape 

A few days later, Wednesday or Thursday, my father sat me down at his desk and recorded me doing the readings and the speech. I had hoped that the tape was lost years ago, during one of my parents' moves, like the tallit. It would have been really bad according to my present standards and I surely would have found it embarrassing.

No such luck. It turned up three years ago. During this very week! As a genealogist who could never throw out such a thing, much as I didn't want anything to do with it, I had someone make it into an mp3. Only one person has heard it - my son Eliezer. He said "It wasn't as bad as I expected."

Devorah

Thirty-four years ago in Arad, my sister Devorah walked over - maybe twenty minutes - to hear me read my bar mitzvah. That would have been typical for her. We spoke very briefly on that occasion. I never saw her alive again. She was killed three days later. Today is her yahrzeit. Her story is here.


Snow in Hevron
Then there was the Shabbat twenty-one years ago that my mother and I paid a surprise visit to my friend and one-time roommate Zvi Ofer (who died this past summer) and his wife Celia, in Kiryat Arba, near Hevron. It was my bar mitzvah week and I prevailed on Levi, who ran the service in Kiryat Arba and whom I have known for years, to let me read, which he did. I have seen him maybe fifteen times since and he always says 'You remember the last time I saw you, when it snowed and you read your bar mitzvah?

The story of that adventure is here.

There may be a few more memorable Shabbat Bar Mitzvah stories, but those are the ones that come to mind.

Shloimie
Yesterday was the bar mitzvah of my daughter Merav's third son Shelomo (aka Shloimie) Brand. My

With Yudi & Naomi

Torah reading. As is customary in his shul, he read only the Haftarah. He will be speaking at a small week-night affair this week.

(Before anyone asks, let me say that the masking was adequate.)

I quite like their shul, though I rather stick out in the crowd of black or round fur hats and big beards (mine is on hiatus). They always treat me respectfully and the rabbi makes a point of mentioning me by name when he has his mishebayrach. Some of them also know that I can teach them a thing or two about proper Torah reading.

I, the maternal grandfather, was called up third. And it was only at that moment that I realized that my own maternal grandfather was called up third for the exact same reading at my bar mitzvah sixty years ago.

Hasdei Ovos Synagogue, Upper Modiin

After the service there was a kiddush and just before the rabbi spoke, he told me that he would introduce me to say something. (I really dislike being put on the spot like that.)

So I spoke about the coincidence with the two maternal grandfathers doing the same thing sixty years apart and the significance of carrying on traditions, even unintentionally. We read the Ten Commandments yesterday and I referred to the first chapter in Ethics of the Fathers where it tells us that Moshe received Torah at Sinai, and passed it to Yehoshua, Yehoshua to the Elders and so on down the generations. But I pointed out that there are less formal traditions. It doesn't say anywhere that we are supposed to name our kids after our ancestors, but that has been a traditional Jewish practice for ages. etc etc. (Or - as an afterthought - like my sister walking across town to hear me read.)

Afterwards, the rabbi, the Torah reader and a few others hung around and we mixed it up discussing some intracacies of Torah reading. A great day all in all.