Tattered and Torn - Days Three & Four : Rajec, Domaniza and the Bytca Archives

Rajec
Wednesday we were on our own. First stop Rajec (pronounced Ra-yetz), about ten miles from Zilina. Not only were we on our own but we had no contact information for the person with the key. We did, however, have the precise location of the cemetery so off we went, hoping to find some Rosenzweigs and who knows what else.

We were able to identify the cemetery from the road with no trouble. The door was locked and it was surrounded by a wall on three sides and a chain-linked fence topped with barbed wire at the top end.

Standing on a tree stump, I was able to see over the wall in a few places.

The cemetery seems to be in excellent condition and many tombstones appear, at a distance, to be legible. But we coudn't get inside.

In a group project of this sort, each person brings certain strengths. I am the one who reads Hebrew. Cyndi will pick a conversation with anyone, even though all she speaks is English. Linda? Linda is tall and climbs over walls.

And off she went, the non-genealogist, photographing all the graves in the cemetery from top to bottom.

There were probably eight or ten Rosenzweigs, three of them Jakob. A few others I don't recognize off hand. The non-matching Jewish and secular names doesn't help.

There is a Rozalie (Rachel) Rosenzweig who died in the summer of 1926. She could be my great-grandfather's sister-in-law, but her grave calls her the wife of Yaakov, while my g-gf's brother was Simon. He still may be the same person. The staones are very hard to read and I'll have to work on them later.

Dominiza
Next stop was Dominiza, a very small town not far away. That is where my great-grandfather was actually born in 1858. It was closer to the dusty village image I had from east Galicia, but even it showed some modernity.

Cyndi's directions sent us up to an empty field behind a row of houses - obviously the wrong place. So we followed Plan B, find city hall and ask.

Finding city hall was itself a project and we asked asked a woman named Melania for directions. She is a chemist in a lab in Povazska Bystrica and her English was quite good. She got into our car with her six year old Matthew and took us to city hall where we found someone who said she would search her records for Rosenzweigs and get back to me by email.

Our friends Josef, Melania and Matthew

Then Melania found us a local historian named Josef, who speaks no English, but eventually he found us the remnants of the Jewish cemetery fenced in the back yard of locked house. On the way up, Josef told us that there were basically three Jewish families in town - the Rosenzweigs, the Zelinkas and the Spitzers. As we know, they married each other. As one might expect.

We got a look through the fence by going through the field where our search had started. The cemetery is right behind where the synagogue once stood and has very few stones. But the one we could see was Joseph Spitzer, the husband of Nathan Zelinka's daughter Jeanette, whose grave we had seen Monday in Kotesova.

Josef said he would contact Pavel Frankel in Zilina about fixing it up and would try to get in and send us some photographs.

The house on the site of the synagogue, perhaps where
my great-grandfather and his brothers were circumsized.

Every person we met in Slovakia was helpful and friendly. More of both than we had any right to expect. As we prepared to wrap up that phase of our trip, we could only speak well of our Slovakian experience.

We were tattered and torn not so much physically (though I must replace my shoes when I get home), but by the experience of seeing these places where the various branches of our families lived for generations.

The Bytca Archives
We had one more stop Thursday morning, at the state archives in Bytca. It was across the street from the synagogue, which is undergoing some sort of renovation, or at least fund raising for that renovation.

The archives are upstairs in a grand old courtyard that one could easily mistake for abandoned. Here again, a nice local woman led us to the place after we passed it by a couple of times.

When we went in, we found a working archives with a few microfilm machines, some functioning. A couple of genealogists from Hungary were working with the actual documents, bare-handed. There were a few other researchers there as well. It was all in one small room, with the microfilms stored in other rooms.

We spoke with one of the Hungarian genealogists and their translator Stephan, learning that they had done the genealogy work for former French president Sarkozy. We exchanged contact information and Cyndi will probably follow up with Stephan later on.

Cyndi worked her magic with the archivist and she permitted us to photograph their paper index showing all their microfilm holdings. We will make a list of the Jewish records and perhaps put together a funding project to get them transcribed. As we left, I thought about Marla and Jay Osborne who actually live in places like this in order to get the work done.

Next stop Budapest.

BUDAPEST

My father's mother is not from Budapest. She was born in the United States. In fact, none of my ancestors were born in Budapest. But my great-grandparents lived there for the first ten years of their marriage and my great-grandfather and his first wife had lived there as well. In fact, of his six children, the first five were born there and only Nana was born after their 1900 emigration.

But somehow things Hungarian (including pre-WWI Slovakia) always seem to lead to Budapest sooner or later.

I wrote abit about Nana's mother's family a couple of weeks ago and today's story begins with her father's family.

Moritz (Moshe) Rosenzweig was born in a town called Domanis, in Trencin County Slovakia in 1858. His parents were Ignac (Yitzhak Yehudah) Rosenzweig and Mali (Miriam) Zelinka.

Trencin County is in northwest Slovakia, bordering on Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.

We knew that he had two brothers - Arnold and Simon. Each had a couple of children. Arnold had a daughter Charlotte who spent some time in the US, but eventually returned to Europe. That's what we knew and my research efforts were going in different directions. There quite a few Hungarian records that were microfilmed by the Mormons, but here in Israel, we have no access to any of that.

About eight years ago, a researcher in the US named Bob Hanscom wrote telling me that he was doing research on his Wilhelm family from Trencin County and since he had a Fani Wilhelm (1785-1864) who had married Nathan Joseph Rosenzweig and a Julianna (b. ~1813) who had married Moritz Zelinka, he offered to send me extracts of any Rosenzweig and Zelinka records he came across in his own Trencin County research.

I accepted gratefully and eventually I was able to add quite a bit of information on these two families during the 1800s.

This is what I was able to put together for the Rosenzweigs, down to my great-grandfather (in red). The Zelinka information is about three times that.

So that gave me two more generations of Rosenzweig ancestors and three of Zelinkas. Further, I learned that my great-grandfather had another older brother - Schandor (Salomon) - who had a family - as well as a sister Sali who had died in childhood.

I put both the Rosenzweig information and the Zelinka information online and sat back waiting to see if anything would happen. Nothing did.

As you can see, the family appears in more than just Domanis, so here is a small map of the immediate area, with our towns of interest in red.

And here is the general area within the context of Slovakia and it's near neighbors.

Eight years later...

About five months ago, I get an email from a fellow in Budapest. (I have blanked out some of the names, for reasons of privacy.)

I write you as unknown, but I'm sure you will understand why.

However some decades ago my mother and her father made number of searches

to find their relatives their always failed to find anyone. So you can

imagine the excitement of all the family when my sister found our

grandfathers name on your site.... Since date, ort [sic] and name is the same, I think it should be my grandfather.

I'm sure you worked really lot to collect and arrange all the information

published on your website, I admire your enthusiastic work.

My grandfather is Alfred Rosenzweig b. 3 Jan 1891, Vágbesztercze SLOVAKIA

(on that date the area belonged to Hungary). He is my mother's father.

Alfred moved to Budapest in the 1920s, married M____ (my grandmother) and

died in Budapest in 1958. He had one daughter, my mother E_____, born in 1933. As difficult times came Alfred altered his surname (Rozenzweig) to R_____ that sound more Hungarian.

I don't know how much information do you know about Alfred and his family,

but happy to share with you if interested. Even more I made a very amateur
family tree as well.

As you can see, this Alfred is the son of my great-grandfather's brother Schandor and a first cousin of my American-born grandmother. That makes the writer my third cousin, really a rather close relative.

Turns out he is an architect, about fifty years old, living in Budapest. His mother is still living and he has a sister. He and the sister each has two children. We exchanged a few emails and photographs, but I have not heard from him since that first burst.

But his last message included this:

My grandfather was deported to working camp during the war, he managed to

escape, first went to Kunszentmiklos, where a family hid him until the war

ended, and than he could come back safe to his family in safe. Interesting

to see on your list, that some of his cousins maybe lived Kunszentmiklos,

even in that time. My mother do not remember of those relatives, but she

thought it strange why Alfred went there from Kápolnásnyék lager, which is

in another part of the country. So possibly those relatives helped him to

survived the war, or someone else who was known trough those cousins.

If you have been following this blog over the weeks, you will recall that my grandmother's mother - that is Alfred's uncle's wife - was Regina Bauer from Kunszentmiklos. So it is entirely possible that it was the Bauers who were behind Alfred's Kunszentmiklos period.

As it happens, Regina Bauer's brother Sigmund died in Budapest in 1938 and his children had been born there. I would not be surprised if the two families knew each other, either in Budapest or in Kunszentmiklos.

As it happens, Sigmund's older son Istvan came to Israel after the war with his wife and three Budapest-born children. Istvan's elder son - who lives quite near me - was born in 1933, the same year as Alfred's daughter. This cousin has not been interested in contact from me since our original contact, but I suggested to my newfound third cousin that perhaps he would respond to someone whose family seems to have a shared Holocaust-era experience.

My grandmother would find all this highly implausible. All she knew was that "everyone is gone."

CANDLES OF ADAR

MORRIS PICKHOLTZ - Chaim Menahem ben Zvi and Itta Leah
My father's father was fifty-one when I was born and was in the hospital with a heart attack. It was serious enough that my parents thought I might be named for him and he had already been given the additional name "Chaim." As it turned out, he lived another nine years and died of something else, on the ninth day of First Adar 5717, fifty-five years ago.

My grandfather was born in Zalosce, in east Galicia. He was named for his mother's uncle Mendel Kwoczka who had died seven months earlier. When he was six, his father and second brother went to America, following the eldest brother and the first two sisters who had gone earlier. The next year, his mother took the three youngest on a ship from Liverpool to Montreal and from there to join the others in Pittsburgh via St. Albans Vermont.

At age twenty-four, he married his brother's sister-in-law and they had three children. My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his three brothers and much of that time the business was sufficient to support the three families. When Uncle Joe turned sixty-five, they closed down Pickholtz Brothers (which I remember visiting a few times) and my grandfather worked his last years selling for a company called Tak-A-Toy, that placed small toys on racks near checkout counters in grocery stores and supermarkets.

All those years, he was an active member of the Poale Zedeck synagogue, serving a number of years as vice-president of the men's club, while my grandmother was president of the sisterhood.



I have a replica of this gene

 He went into the hospital on a Shabbat morning, soon after my ninth birthday. No one had to tell me that evening that he had died - I knew on my own. They didn't let me go to the funeral. I was mad about that for probably thirty years.

My grandparents lived in Squirrel Hill - first on Phillips Avenue and later on Northumberland Street, across from the police and fire stations, not two blocks from our house. So we saw them often, but I cannot say that I had much of a one-on-one relationship with him. My loss. I'd like to think that I talk to my own grandchildren more than my grandfather spoke to me. But I always sat on his right at the seder table. And he was the one who noticed that my toes pointed out when I walked.

There is a Sunday when I was seven-and-a-half that I will always remember and appreciate. My father and grandfather, together with Uncle Bob, took me to Forbes Field. It was my first game and the last of the season. We sat in the bleachers in left field. Going to a game was a really big deal, as we didn't have much baseball on television and certainly none in color, with real green grass. The Pirates lost 4-0. Johnny Podres started for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The next week he pitched in the World Series and won two games.

I learned how to keep a scorecard that day.

And I learned the word "generations."

Four Other Ancestors
Simon (Shimshon ben Shelomo?) Rosenzweig, born Rajec Slovakia 1787-1790, died Puchov Slovakia 3/4 Adar 5620, 26 February 1860. He was my father's mother's father's father's father.

Golde Buchalter died in Obertyn east Galicia 2 Second Adar (11 March 1881) at age sixty. She was my wife's father's mother's paternal grandmother.

Betsy (Beile Gittel bat Moshe Aharon) Diamond, died in London, 8 Adar 5697 (19 February 1937) at age ninety-three. She was my wife's father's mother's maternal grandmother.

Binyamin Yitzhak ben Mordecai Aharon Mostek (aka Lindenberg), born 1866 probably in Prznasnyz Poland, died 24 First Adar 5708 (5 March 1948) in New York. He was my wife's mother's maternal grandfather.

Uncle George

My mother's brother, Gershon ben Yerahmiel and Sarah Gordon, born 5 April 1920 in Vandergrift Pennsylvania, died 15 Second Adar 5760 (22 March 2000) in Pittsburgh.

Uncle George and Mother

Uncle George was the younger of Mother's two older brothers and they were particularly close. They lived not far from us while we were growing up, though he went back to Vandergrift every day to work in his father's furniture store, "R. Gordon & Son.". Eventually it became his.

He served as a lieutenant in the US Army during WWII and together with his wife raised three children. He was a good man and a fine uncle.

One more that I want to mention, who is not a family member

The fifteenth of Adar is the yahrzeit of Uri Megidish, may G-d avenge his blood. In fact, I think He did, in rather spectacular fashion.

When I served in a reserve artillery unit, one of the two communications sergeants in our battery was Uri Megidish. He had big bright teeth and smiled all the time. I knew him in another context, as he was vice-principal of the religious high school in Yeroham when I lived there.

Our paths diverged and Uri moved to Gan Or, a moshav in Gush Katif, where he became a farmer. He worked in his own greenhouse and he enabled a few local Arabs to make a living as well. Until the day that one of them stabbed him to death. It was the fifteenth of Adar 5753, nineteen years ago.  Uri was thirty-nine and he left a wife and four children. His first son had celebrated his bar mitzvah two months earlier.

The years went by and one fine day - oh what a fine day it was - eleven summers later, Uri's daughter had given birth to his first grandson. The day of the brit, an IDF helicopter took out a car carrying two terrorists in Gaza, killing them both. One of them was Uri's murderer.

Thirteen months later, Gan Or and the rest of the Gush Katif communities were destroyed and turned over to the Gazans. Uri's was not one of the bodies that had to be disinterred, as he had been buried in his parents' moshav, Segullah, near Kiryat Gat.

Uri and I were not close friends or anything, but you know how sometimes something silly revives a particular memory of a particular person? This will always be linked in my mind to Uri Megidish. That and the big Hines Ward smile.