It's Time To Go Home

I was in high school when I decided (maybe "realized" is a better word) that I wanted to live in Israel. I came for a year on kibbutz when I was nineteen and stayed most of a second year, in Jerusalem. Then went back to the US to prepare myself for aliyah. I felt it was the right thing - the only thing - to do.

I arrived back in Israel on the eleventh of Tammuz, forty-six years ago.

During those four years in Chicago, I became a member of a gar'in, a group who were planning to live on kibbutz together. Most of those were people I knew.  We were assigned to Kibbutz Alumim, in the south, abutting the Gaza fence.

Things were different then. Of course Gaza was hostile and the army checked the fence daily, but during the watermelon harvest, we drove into Gaza on tractors, pulling loads of watermelons to the packing facility on the other side.

Those days are long gone, of course, as are my own days on kibbutz. I was there two years, which included six months of army service (artillery) to prepare me for reserve service which didn't fully end until I was fifty-six, by which time my service was driving a jeep for combat troops in the Judean Hills. The last years, I served as a volunteer because I thought it was the right thing to do.


Back in my artillery days, we generally did - in addition to training - about three weeks each year patrolling in Gaza, including in Gaza City itself. We could walk freely, with our guard up, in most parts of Gaza. It was rare indeed when we encountered hostile activity. They knew better than to try.

My next stop was Yeroham, a development town deeper in the south. Where the promise of tomorrow was always just out of reach.

I was there for five years, working mostly in the Beer Sheva offices of a company whose chemical plants were at the Dead Sea and nearer Beer Sheva in the middle of nowhere. "Nowhere" being the desert, but it was becoming home.

That was followed by eleven and a half years in Arad, a much larger town - now a city - east of Beer Sheva. And I spent more time in the desert and on its roads. The paved and the unpaved.

Occasionally I would pick up hitchhiking elderly Beduin men and a couple of times Beduin stopped to help when I had car trouble.

After eighteen and a half years living and working in the south, I moved to Elazar, in Gush Etzion, a bloc of communities about fifteen minutes south of Jerusalem. It is a community where you have to be accepted for membership. I declined.

For sixteen years I lived there while working in Yeroham. Most of the time, I would leave at 4:15 in the morning, drive to Beer Sheva, go to a 5:40 minyan and ride the 6:35 company bus to Yeroham, where work began at seven. There were a few years when I did that only three days a week - the other two days I'd work late and sleep over in Yeroham.

Often I would drive all the way to the office. The road through Susya had all of two stop signs from start to finish.

I felt as though I owned those roads of the Southern Hevron Hills. At first, there was no by-pass road and I would drive through the city of Hevron itself, especially when I'd stop to see my mother in Arad on the way home. The early morning fog was mine. The view of the fog from the mountaintop into the valley made Arad look like Teverya on the edge of Lake Kinneret.

During the run-up to Ariel Sharon's infamous expulsion of the Jews from Gush Katif fourteen years ago, I spent some nights and days among the protestors.

I participated in the human chain from Gaza to Jerusalem to protest Sharon's refusal to accept the results of the referendum which had rejected his plan.

I was one of the tens of thousands spending nights and days at the Kefar Maimon protests - and generally I am not someone who attends protests. It was not just that we all knew that Gaza would end badly nor it was simply the government's trampling of democracy; it was also the very fact that our government was surrendering our patrimony.

A few of the Kefar Maimon protestors

And I drove in the procession escorting Yochanan Hilberg to his new grave after the expulsion. 

Since then, Gaza became what we knew it would become - and worse. Hamas took over, launching rockets and missiles into Israeli communities - most notably Sderot, but also at the smaller communities and at cities like Ashkelon, Ashdod and even Beer Sheva. They used their own civilians - including children - for cover. And they dug tunnels under the border. And we went to war - "Cast Lead," "Pillar of Defense" and "Protective Edge."

In the meantime, I had taken early retirement and no longer drove south every day. On the eleventh of Tammuz, the thirty-fifth anniversary of my aliyah, I became a resident of our eternal capital Jerusalem. I became deeply involved in genealogy and later DNA. Wrote a book. Lectured. Got on with my life.

In the past year, the Gazans have discovered a new weapon, in addition to the rockets and missiles. Balloons and kites, booby-trapped with explosives, intended to kill and maim children as well as adults. And intended to start fires.

It leaves us wondering what can we do. We as a government and we  as individuals.

After a brief respite, it started again a few weeks ago. A few people were killed in Israel, including in Ashkelon, a city of about 140,000 people - which for me was always a place to take the kids to the beach.

And Alumim's wheat fields burned. The view from Gaza, where the terrorists and their supporting civilian population celebrates.

So I decided it's time to go home. South. Ashkelon seemed like a good idea. Considering the decision was making it.

I saw two apartments for rent. Signed on one of them last night. Joined the English Speakers of Ashkelon. Devir gets married in forty days. The mover is confirmed for the following Monday. The twelfth of Tammuz, forty-six years and one day later. Eleven years after arriving in Jerusalem.

This Sunday we celebrate the fifty-second anniversary of the liberation and reunification of Jerusalem. In Psalm 137 we say:

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, If I do not remember thee, if I do not raise Jerusalem above my highest joy.

All that is true and valid. But I am going home. It's the right thing to do.


Housekeeping notes
Register here.

Leading into the month of Sivan

• Wednesday we celebrate the reunification of Jerusalem, forty-seven years ago.

• Thursday we say the Shelah's prayer for the spiritual and physical welfare of our children and grandchildren.

• Friday we bring in the month of Sivan. I shall be in Hevron.

Something about each.

The reunification of Jerusalem - 28 Iyyar
During the lifetimes of many of us, we were blessed to see the reunification of Jerusalem. During the nineteen year occupation of the Old City, the Mount of Olives and other significant places of Jewish heritage, the Jordanian Arabs destroyed synagogues, other buildings and grave sites, in addition to preventing Jews from approaching these places. (My apologies for the quality of these photos, particularly the ink that bled through.)

And the Kotel Plaza was not the great open space we recognize from the last forty-five years.  There was work to be done.

The archealogy on the southern end of the Temple Mount didn't appear ex-nihilo either.

 
There were the places where residents of the Old City has been murdered and buried in mass graves - in what was then and is now "the Jewish Quarter." As though there can be any other quarter.

 I have been using the word "reunification," not "liberation," for as long as we cannot go up to the Temple Mount, neither it nor we are liberated.

Above the Kotel on the right, the Chief Rabbinate says that it is forbidden to tread on the holy ground, even in the areas that clearly should not be forbidden. (We are reminded from time to time why the Law of Unintended Consequences is sometimes a good thing.)











But back then, we could get close enough to take pictures through windows that open onto the Temple Mount itself.

 

Whenever I took people into the Old City back then, we would stop and see how it had looked before the Six Day War. We could not get a better view than this.

A word about united Jerusalem vs what they write in the papers. We waited Thursday night at a stoplight up near French Hill. On the island waiting for the light to change, there were two hareidi boys, maybe ten years old, with their backpacks, no doubt on the way home from school. On the same island were three Arab men, forty-ish, probably also on their way home. Sharing the same small traffic island. No one thought a thing of it.

I heard a long interview last week with Steven Pressfield on his new book The Lion's Gate, about the Six Day War, with a great deal about the reunification of Jerusalem. Some lucky family member is going to get a copy from me.

I have written here and here about two non-family members who were buried on the Mount of Olives and whose graves were desecrated during the Jordanian occupation.

We also have a family member buried there - but not from that period. My wife's second cousin Sheila (Sarah Fruma) Goldson Weiner, born in Cincinnati, made aliyah with her husband and four children, had a fifth here in Jerusalem and died on Yom Yerushalayim thirty-four years ago. She was forty-one. I have lost count of her grandchildren, but there have been over thirty for some time. (Her husband is from Memphis and is related to a third cousin of mine who, last I knew, lived in Tuscaloosa.)

We pray for our children - 29 Iyyar
Rabbi Yeshayahu HaLevi Horowitz, born 1558 in Prague, served as a rabbi in a number of communities in Europe, eventually returning to Prague. After his wife died in 1620, he made aliyah to Jerusalem, where he wrote his seminal work "Shnei Luhot HaBerit" and he became known as the Shelah, the acronym of his book. This particular work - which was meant as instructions to his children - was published by his son some years after his 1630 death. The Shelah left Jerusalem after he and other community leaders were jailed for ransom, and lived in Zefat befiore moving to Teverya, where he died. He is buried in the same compound as the Rambam.

His prayer, which he instructed should be said on 29 Iyyar, the day before the beginning of Sivan, the month we receive the Torah, can be found (with translation) here.

Rosh Hodesh Sivan
We have three Pikholz yahrzeits on the first of Sivan, all buried here in Israel. Two are in Holon - one from Skalat and one, a Pikholz spouse, from Rozdol and this one on the right who lived in Efrat and is buried in Kefar Etzion.

I discussed Hevron here a couple of years ago, including its capture in the Six Day War by the Chief IDF Chaplain, Rav Shlomo Goren.

For a few years, before we moved to Jerusalem, Devir and I used to go to Hevron for a sunrise minyan every time Rosh Hodesh would fall on a Friday. Then for awhile we went every Rosh Hodesh.

Devir has been after me to go, as we have not been there is quite awhile and we plan to do so this week.

It will give me an opportunity to update my Hevron Cemetery website..

Houskeeping notes
The panel discussion I am participating in at the Conference in Salt Lake City has been moved to Monday at 4:45 PM.

My own talk is at 9 AM Wednesday and I have just learned that I have been assigned a room with a seating capacity of 480. Methinks someone is being optimistic. My good friend Renee Steinig has agreed to introduce me, as she did three years ago in Washington DC.

The Conference website has a link for a live stream of "Over 50 of the best conference programs," but they haven't announce which those would be. I don't know if being assigned a room for 480 people qualifies as "of the best." We'll find out. Registration for this is $149.

BARUCH, OF THE ROZDOL GRANIWITTERS

This Wednesday, we celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem forty-six years ago, after nineteen years of occupation by the Jordanians. It seems like a good time to tell the story of Baruch, a freshly-retired superviser for Gihon, the Jerusalem water company.

I have been going to this particular shul fairly regularly for maybe two years and that's where I met Baruch. He has an Israeli surname which was obviously something else beforehand and one day I asked him about it. He told me that his name was originally Graniwitter and that his father had changed it after coming to Israel from Europe.

Right: Golda bat Zvi Aryeh, died 18 Kislev 5719
Left: Israel ben Nachman, died 22 Teveth 5748

I asked him where his father was from (Baruch himself was born here) and he said "Galicia." I asked him where and he said "a small town you have never heard of Roz..-something." "Rozdol?" I asked. Yes it was Rozdol. It's a town I know well, because the "other" Pikholz families are from there. He wasn't sure exactly when his father - Israel ben Nachman - was born.

Baruch's mother had died when he was young and he didn't know much about her family. Her name was Golda bat Zvi Aryeh and he knew she was born in Stryj in 1902. But no surname.

Later, at home, I went to work, beginning with JRI-Poland. Rozdol birth records are indexed only through 1900, so I was not surprised that Baruch's father Israel did not appear. I found four other records - three births to (Jakob) Israel and one Nachman Sisze born to Mendel Zaumfus and Taube Granivetter.

The "View Image" links are new and were not  available when I first did this search.


I saw quite a few Graniwitters in other towns in the area and several Nachman Sisze of one spelling or  another, so it appeared likely that the one born in 1878 was Baruch's grandfather. It would not be the first time that a middle name was lost along the way.

I turned my attention to Baruch's mother. Golda bat Zvi Aryeh, born 1902 in Stryj, without a clue to her surname. Clearly Zvi Aryeh would appear in Galician records as Leib Hersch so I searched for the given names Golda, Leib and Hersch in Stryj and limited the search to the 1898 and on.  (We only have indexed births for Stryj through 1903.)



Here too, we did not have the benefit of the "View Image" link at the time.



The third one here looked good. I presented it to Baruch and he said that his older sister Hencha is named for their maternal grandmother, so it makes sense. He later spoke to his sister and she recognized the surname Messinger.

I ordered the records for Baruch's mother and paternal grandfather, learned their mother's parents' names and ordered a few more records. In the end, I put together a nice picture of Baruch's ancestors, complete with documents - including for some of those ancestors' siblings.

But it wasn't the end.

As I said, we have a large number of Pikholz records from Rozdol and in the course of scanning some of them, I came across this:

Click to see a larger version

The record before the 7 April 1875  birth of Jakob Pikholz was the birth - on the same day - of Nachmen Granenweter. His parents are Israel Jakob and Golde. That's the other Rozdol family that had shown up earlier. This made way more sense to be Baruch's grandfather. Nachman without Sisze. The father Israel Jakob, where Baruch's father (Nachman's son) is Israel.

Now I can go to the birth records of Nachman's younger brother and sister and get the mother's parents' names.

Why didn't this birth show up before? Well, the "sounds like" function does not catch everything that we might think sounds like what we want. In this case, the second "n" in Granenweter was enough to keep it out of the results. And of course, since there was another reasonable-looking result, I fell into the trap of thinking it is correct. I should know better, of course.

I have since done some additional searches, including "starts with Gran," but this was the only result that I really missed. I gave Baruch this newfound record and he was pleased.

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Housekeeping note

I am speaking (in Hebrew) at the Israel Genealogical Society's Petah Tikva branch on Wednesday evening 29 May.  The subject is

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT: WHAT YOU KNOW vs WHAT YOU CAN PROVE