Amendolara Mayor Salvatore Antonio Ciminelli, left, standing next to JTA's Ruth Ellen Gruber, after presenting award certificates to some of the 100 schoolchildren who attended a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in the town hall, Jan. 27, 2012. The children received awards for art or writing projects about the Shoah. (Photo courtesy Amendolara Town Hall)

AMENDOLARA, Italy (JTA) — It was International Holocaust Memorial Day, and when I told my audience that I was a Jew, they burst into applause.

I was speaking at the City Hall in this ancient seacoast town in Calabria, deep in southern Italy on the instep of the Italian boot. My audience consisted of some 100 schoolchildren aged 10-13, along with their teachers, city officials and a few parents.

Italy marks Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27 with an array of commemorative and educational initiatives, and schools all over the country organize special lessons, study units, projects and other programs on the Holocaust.

This year I was invited to Amendolara and Oriolo, another small Calabrian town perched high amid rugged hills, to speak to elementary- and middle-school students as part of municipal events.

In Amendolara and Oriolo, my presentations came at the end of a series of other speeches by local officials and educators. The mayors of both towns denounced the dangers of Holocaust denial.

“Democratic western countries must not forget that these democracies were built on the ashes of Auschwitz,” said Amendolara Mayor Antonello Ciminelli. “We must fight Holocaust denial; denying the Holocaust can lead to denying the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

In Amendolara, the program included a film about the drawings made by children interned in the Terezin ghetto camp near Prague. In Oriolo, a young local woman who had written a novella set during the Holocaust talked to the kids about the book.

For my turn to speak, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. The kids had begun to fidget as the ceremony wore on, and I was concerned about keeping their attention.

So I decided to change gears. I wasn’t going to talk about the Holocaust per se, I told them. They had been studying that and were aware, I think, of the horror.

What they didn’t know anything about was Jews – Jews as living people, and not abstract Holocaust victims in striped pajamas or faceless components of the 6 million.

So, I told them, “I’m a Jew, living and kicking” — and that’s when they applauded.

In a manner of speaking, my message was my very presence.

We are normal people, I said. We come in all shapes and sizes; some of us are rich, some poor; some are smart, some dumb; some are religious and others, like me, are not.

I recited the Shehecheyanu blessing, telling them that I thought it appropriate since I felt so moved and privileged to be able to meet with them.

Then I showed them pictures of the impact of the Holocaust — color pictures, not black and white shots or grainy film. They were pictures that illustrated the work I have done over the years documenting the synagogues, cemeteries and other remains of prewar Jewish life and also chronicling the rebirth of Jewish life in post-Communist Eastern Europe.

There was no time to take questions after the event in Amendolara. But later, a woman told me that tears had come to her eyes when I said I was a Jew.

And a group of girls came up to talk.

“You’re the first Jew we ever met,” they told me.

What did they think of that? I wanted to know.

“You must have lived through a lot,” one said.

The kids had studied the Holocaust in class and, as part of their lessons, had created artworks and writing projects. Some of the pictures they drew were displayed on the walls: There were Stars of David and human faces penned in by barbed wire, prisoners in striped uniforms with the caption “so as not to forget,” images of death-camp barracks.

One picture, I noticed, quoted the lyrics of a famous song about Auschwitz written in the 1960s by the Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini.

“I died when I was a child,” the song begins. “I died with a hundred others. Passed through a chimney, and now I’m in the wind …”

About 30,000 Jews live in Italy today, but none, as far as I can tell, lives in either Amendolara or Oriolo. Calabria was home to a flourishing Jewish community in the Middle Ages, but Jews were expelled from the region 500 years ago.

Ironically, the largest Jewish presence in the region came during World War II, when Italy’s fascist government held more than 3,800 Jews, most of them from other countries, in the Ferramonti internment camp near Cosenza. Schoolchildren often visit Ferramonti as part of Holocaust education programs.

That evening in Oriolo, the program went on longer than anticipated, but the kids were eager to stay on and ask questions afterward.

“Did you lose any family in the Holocaust?” asked a girl who looked to be about 10.

I explained that no, my mother’s parents both had been born in the United States and my father’s parents had emigrated from what is now Romania more than 100 years ago. My relatives in Romania were deported to a labor camp in Ukraine and, as far as I know, survived. I showed pictures of myself visiting the grave of my great-grandmother, who had died in Romania after the war.

Then one boy of about 11 asked a question that I couldn’t even begin to answer. It was the question underlying the entire evening and decades of history.

“What,” he asked, “did the Nazis have against Jews? What made them kill them like that?”

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.” She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at http://jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com.)

Peter Keeda, an Australian retiree, stumbled upon the story of a group of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe who were sent by the British from Cyprus to Palestine and later to East Africa. (Courtesy Peter Keeda)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives.

BALTIMORE (JTA) — A virtually unknown episode in prestate Israel grabbed Peter Keeda last year and won’t let go: the British government’s June 1941 shipment of 384 European Jews from Cyprus to Palestine. They and 39 others were transported six months later to what are now Malawi and Tanzania in East Africa.

The travelers were refugees who had fled the Nazis for Cyprus, which like their next two stops were ruled by the British. The transfers occurred two years after London issued its notorious MacDonald White Paper, an edict severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine and dooming incalculable numbers of people to death in the Holocaust. The 1941 episode drips with irony because during and after World War II, the British captured Jewish refugees aboard ships attempting to reach Palestine and often dispatched them to internment camps in Cyprus.

Keeda — a 68-year-old retiree in Sydney, Australia, who is researching the period for a master’s dissertation — thinks that the 1941 refugees were evacuated from Cyprus for their own protection, with nearby Crete having just fallen to the Germans. The naval odyssey fascinates him politically because it relates to Britain’s colonial policy and to its concern over “enemy aliens,” since most of the Jewish passengers came from Germany and Austria. Keeda has traveled to London to research the matter in state archives, and has located documents online in governmental and Jewish archives around the world.

But he dearly wants to find passengers and hear their personal stories. Keeda hopes that the passengers or their descendants have retained diaries, journals and letters that illuminate the period. He has tracked down an Australian and a New Yorker who were among the travelers, and the children of two others, but their information provided little help.

Keeda’s appeal recently was broadcast on the Israeli radio program “Hamador L’Chipus Krovim” (Searching for Relatives Bureau). He agreed to an interview with “Seeking Kin” despite concerns that other researchers could preempt his work before its publication in late 2012.

Keeda stumbled across the episode when an old friend in his breakfast club mentioned being born to Austrian refugees in the city of Zomba in Nyasaland (Malawi’s name under British rule). She displayed her parents’ photographs of the Jewish encampment there, and Keeda was hooked.

“Outgoing letters from people — that would be a gold mine,” he explained of his search. Valuable correspondence would relate to such questions as “How did they make a living? How did they deal with the weather? This is subtropical Africa, and they came from Europe,” he continued. “Physicians were dumped in the middle of Africa — what did they do? How did they survive?”

Passengers included merchants, physicians, engineers, hoteliers, farmers, musicians and artists. Once in Palestine, the people were not confined; they stayed in hostels and with friends and relatives. In Jerusalem, Keeda found two Jewish Agency documents relating to the refugees’ arrival and care. He’d love to get his hands on the ship manifests, but appeals to Britain’s Maritime Museum in Southampton have been unsuccessful.

Keeda’s research includes fascinating nuggets and detours. Non-Jewish Poles in the group assembled a choir and performed religious music in Israel. In Africa, some of the Hungarian Jewish musicians ran a brothel. Other Jews ended up in nearby Mozambique and became involved in an international spy ring that for Keeda conjures up the film “Casablanca.”

Suzanne Rutland, a University of Sydney professor and Keeda’s dissertation co-adviser, said that his research contributes to scholarship on British colonial policy and on the Holocaust. The group’s removal from Palestine in December 1941 and relocation to Africa “really shows how concerned [the British] were with keeping the Arabs on their side,” Rutland said, emphasizing that she was offering only conjecture.

“The episode obviously [also] has to fit into the broader context of the Shoah. There are lots of stories we don’t know,” she said. “There’s so much we need to learn and understand.”

Please send a message to seekingkin@jta.org if you know people involved in this 1941 episode or if you would like our help in searching for long-lost friends or family. Include the principal facts in a brief e-mail (up to one paragraph) and your contact information.

BALTIMORE (JTA) — Even after seven decades, Peter Nurnberger’s most basic biographical facts remain elusive. The Slovakian doesn’t know his birth date, his natural parents’ fate or whether they had any other children.

Peter’s adoptive parents hid him during the Shoah in their home in Kezmarok, 168 miles east of Bratislava, where he lives today. Now the retired civil engineer hopes that “Seeking Kin” readers can supply leads that help crack a mystery: Who else did they rescue?

Identifying such people and obtaining their testimonies are crucial to Peter’s goal of securing posthumous recognition for his adoptive father, Karl Nurnberger, as a Righteous Among the Nations, an honor that Israel’s Holocaust commemoration institution, Yad Vashem, confers upon gentiles who saved Jews during World War II. Karl’s wife, Paula (nee Blasenstein), was Jewish.

Only upon Karl’s death in 1958 did Peter learn that he had been adopted. Paula refused to discuss the matter; she died in 1964. Years later, Peter discovered that his natural parents were Yosef and Berta Hirschberg, that his first name was Moshe, that he was born in Bochnia, Poland, near Krakow, and that he’d been smuggled to Kežmarok as an infant. The little that Nurnberger knows about his natural parents, and of his being born in Bochnia, came from discussions in the early 1990s with Berta’s brother, Leopold Blasenstein, who had settled in Australia.

Karl’s candidacy for Righteous Among the Nations rests on collected scraps of information, conversations Peter vaguely recalls from childhood and the words of a woman he met more than 30 years ago who has passed away. After returning from visiting Yosef’s cousins in Israel in October, Peter mailed Yad Vashem a two-page document that laid out the relevant facts. One of the cousins broadcast his search on the Israeli radio program “Hamador L’Chipus Krovim” (Searching for Relatives Bureau).

Peter’s letter to Yad Vashem contains serious drawbacks, he believes: They are the words of a son, and they aren’t based on his own remembrances — he was a baby at the time.

Tereza Nurnberger, who translated for her husband during two Skype interviews with JTA in December, acknowledged that “chances are very thin that someone will be found” to attest to Karl’s wartime sheltering of Jews, and said that Peter agrees.

Estee Yaari, Yad Vashem’s foreign media liaison, said the application is being reviewed. Each rescue story, she explained, “is carefully examined to see whether it meets the criteria, the most basic of which is that a person risked his life to save Jews from deportation and murder. The stories must be substantiated with survivor testimony or archival documentation of the period.”

Peter “feels sorry that he doesn’t know if he will succeed in giving Karl this honor that he deserves and that he didn’t find people who know about those times — that it may be too late to find people,” his wife explained.

One person who has been located is Zoltan “Bezalel” Schulcz, who lives in Netanya, Israel. Schulcz told JTA that as a Kežmarok teenager during World War II, he escorted two Jews to the Nurnberger home. Schulcz did so at the request of a neighbor named Rozenzwaig, who he thinks was active in identifying safe houses where escaping Polish Jews briefly stayed before continuing their journey toward Hungary and, they believed, safety.

“I took them to [Nurnberger’s] corridor,” Schulcz, now 80, said by telephone in December. “I was told to take them 20 meters [60 feet], show them the house, then leave.”

Schulcz does not remember meeting Karl Nurnberger, the names of the Jews he brought there or precisely when the escorting occurred. Schulcz thinks that he delivered Jews to Karl’s house three or four times.

Peter Black, a senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, figured that Schulcz’s role likely dates to 1942 or 1943, prior to the Nazi occupation of Hungary and of Slovakia. From Bochnia, those who smuggled Peter very well might have traveled through Slovakia and on to Hungary, Black said.

“It only became dangerous in Slovakia [beginning] in August 1944, when the Germans went in to wipe out the Slovak uprising and used that opportunity to deport the rest of the Slovak Jews who were not deported in 1942,” Black explained. Until 1942, he continued, the Slovakian government of Jozef Tiso cooperated with the Nazis’ deportation orders, but ceased doing so after learning that the trains were traveling to death camps, not labor camps.

The existence of an underground railroad to Hungary is an aspect of the Shoah not widely known or well documented. Black said that numbers for those traversing Slovakia bound for Hungary “would be hard to know,” but figured that it didn’t exceed a few hundred people. Records of Polish Jews briefly hidden en route are even more unlikely because escapees were transient, he said.

“In a given town, I’d be surprised if it would have been more than a few dozen — but that’s just shooting in the dark,” he said of Kežmarok’s role. “There wouldn’t be records because people wouldn’t want to keep records.” He added, “I don’t think it’s been systematically studied.”

Peter Nurnberger said he learned that Karl and Paula sometimes sheltered up to 30 Jews, but usually a few people each night. He’s not sure if people stayed in a secret room built onto or part of the Nurnberger home, or were hidden in, under or near a woodshed in the yard. Investigating the property at 40 Huncovska St. is impossible now because the home was razed and a pediatric hospital stands on the site.

Peter first found out about the Nurnbergers running a safe house from the late Livia Sandorfy, a friend of Karl and Paula. On a visit to Sandorfy while on a business trip to Kosice in the late 1970s, Peter asked about the circumstances of his adoption. Sandorfy revealed that she had been hidden by the Nurnbergers — and dropped the bombshell that he had been hidden, too.

Sandorfy remembered that Peter was dropped off by two men and a woman who likely spent the night with another Jewish family before proceeding to Hungary. The Nurnbergers were urged to transfer the baby to an orphanage but refused, she told him.

From Sandorfy, he also learned that Karl later built a hideaway in the woods near the village of Mengusovce, and moved there with several families in the autumn of 1944.

“He took in everyone who was in need,” Peter said, adding that he obtained a document from the state archives in which Karl said that 113 people were saved there.

Peter also has a handwritten original list of the group’s weapons, all of which Karl transferred after the war to the Czechoslovakian army.

“If some people who were rescued will be found … it will confirm that my quest for recognition for Karl is justified,” Peter said. “I am proud of him. Why he did it, I do not know. He was a man who was able and ready to take that enormous risk and responsibility.”

Peter’s search is “a needle-in-the-haystack” effort, said Black, the museum historian, “but it’s worth a shot.”

Please send a message to seekingkin@jta.org if the Nurnbergers rescued anyone you know or if you would like our help in searching for long-lost friends or family. Include the principal facts in a brief e-mail (up to one paragraph) and your contact information.

Alex Dunai, second from right, has become a leading purveyor of Jewish heritage tourism in Ukraine. (Alex Weisler)

LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) – Alex Dunai is not Jewish. But over 15 years of leading Jewish tourists searching for their roots in Ukraine, he’s built up a serviceable knowledge of Yiddish — though sometimes he has to make things up.

“I make up sayings — you have highway roads, we have ‘oy vey’ roads,” Dunai said. “If it’s something funny and unusual, that’s always Yiddish. It’s an amazing language, one-of-a-kind.”

A burly man with an easy laugh, Dunai lives in Lviv, Ukraine’s fourth largest city. Over the years, the 43-year-old has built a profitable career as a researcher and tour guide, escorting Jews through Ukrainian shtetls in their search for information about departed relatives. He has provided services to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, his reputation was cemented by Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the best-seller “The Lost,” a memoir of his attempts to ascertain the fate of six relatives killed in western Ukraine during the Holocaust. Mendelsohn, who relied extensively on Dunai for research and other assistance, refers to him in the book as his “right-hand man.”

“He has a rigorous historical background; he has the smooth savvy; he knows how to work with archivists, and is especially good at knowing how to avoid time-wasting distractions,” Mendelsohn wrote in an email. “More than anything, perhaps, he’s incredibly canny about how to deal with local people.”

Along with Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated,” Mendelsohn’s book helped put a spotlight on the growing phenomenon of Ukrainian heritage tourism, the lucrative industry of American Jews trekking back to the old country to explore their roots.

For visiting Jews, Dunai has become a sought-after resource. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, he said, the traffic has been staggering.

“The 20th century was an intense period of looking into the future,” he said. “And now, people are saying, ‘OK, we’re looking at the future, we’re flying to the moon, but we don’t know what our grandparents did, what was our background? Let’s look also into the past.’”

He got his start in guiding after graduating from the state university in Lviv with a degree in history. For a time Dunai worked for the government in a capacity he would not specify.

In 1994, an American genealogy group specializing in Galicia contacted him for help with research. Those requests led to shtetl excursions, and soon Dunai was spending much of his time driving foreigners to small villages in his father’s old Lada.

Eventually, he was so busy he had to decide whether to drop the side gig or devote himself full time to his new occupation. In retrospect, it was an easy choice.

“The more I was doing the research for other people in genealogy, the more I was uncovering for myself how much knowledge is missing about all this,” Dunai said. “People here are not aware about how different this world was before the war. It became so fascinating to me that I really decided I will take a risk. I don’t regret it.”

Dunai’s client load fluctuates, though he said he tends to lead more excursions in the summer and to focus more on research in the colder months. The work can sometimes be emotionally taxing.

“Sometimes people tell me stories that they wouldn’t tell others,” he said. “On the first trips, I was drained completely. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t do anything. I would come back and just lay on my bed speechless, and just be drained emotionally.”

It’s an image at odds with the Dunai of today, a gregarious, heavyset man with an easy sense of humor and speech peppered with excited exclamations and bits of wisdom.

“There are more good people than bad,” he explained at one point, “but the bad are better organized.”

Though Dunai enjoys guiding his clients, he said he’s growing too old for such frequent travel and may soon transition his work into a company providing tours of the Lviv area with “really intellectual and really deep” excursions focusing on places connected to literature and famous Ukrainians. But he said he’ll probably never fully give up guiding. He thrives on its spontaneity.

“I couldn’t be a bus driver, going on the same route. I enjoy that every time it’s interesting and unusual and diverse,” he said. “This really became my whole life. This is not just work for me. Even if I could earn a living somehow in a different way, I would do it for free.”

Gustav Zoltay, left, the director of the Federation o Hungarian Jewish communities, and Peter Feldmajor, its president, at the founding of the new Hungarian Jewish Congress. (Szabolcs Panyi)

BUDAPEST (JTA) – A whistle-blowing rabbi and a reform-minded lay leader are at the forefront of new efforts to shake up Hungary’s entrenched Jewish establishment.

Late last year, Rabbi Zoltan Radnoti reportedly alerted authorities to complaints of embezzlement and tax fraud in the operation of Budapest’s main Jewish cemetery on Kozma Street. This led to a police investigation and an unprecedented raid on Dec. 1 on both the cemetery and the Jewish community offices that house the burial society, as well as a public airing of the scandal in the mainstream media.

“Many people in the Jewish community administration attacked me for airing internal affairs to the outside,” Radnoti, 40, told JTA. “I was told that I draw a salary from the Budapest Jewish Community, so I was disloyal to my employers.”

But, he added, “You have to fight for the truth no matter what. I think this could become the beginning of the cleaning-up of Jewish communal affairs.”

Joining Radnoti is Andras Heisler, a former president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, or Mazsihisz, the official umbrella of the Neolog community, a moderate reformist movement to which the vast majority of affiliated Hungarian Jews belong. The Jewish community in Budapest, home to 90 percent of the country’s Jews, is the largest member of Mazsihisz.

Mazsihisz officially represents the interests of Hungarian Jewry to the government and is responsible for the annual distribution of millions of dollars of government grants and Holocaust compensation funds to Jewish organizations. Critics have long called for a reform of its financial and administrative operations, accusing the organization of being undemocratic, unrepresentative, monopolistic and opaque.

Managing director Gusztav Zoltai, 76, has been in office for two decades and has come under particularly sharp criticism for his leadership style and firm grip on power.

“Zoltai manages to hold on to power by switching people in key positions who are somehow dependent on him,” Janos Gado, an editor at the Jewish magazine Szombat, told JTA. Gado and others say that many, if not most, of those who elect communal leaders are financially dependent on Zoltai and the other office-holders they are electing.

Zoltai, who along with current Mazsihisz President Peter Feldmajer declined to be interviewed, was elected managing director in 1991, when the organization was first established to replace the communist-era Jewish body. A child survivor of the Holocaust who lost most of his family in World War II, he had worked previously as the stage manager of a theater.

Last spring, in a case reported in the Hungarian media, Radnoti and Heisler charged that the election of Jewish community officials had been manipulated to prevent changes in the top leadership — and specifically to prevent Heisler from becoming a delegate to the general assembly, the body that elects the top officials, including Zoltai.

Heisler had resigned as Mazsihisz president in 2005 following his attempts to overhaul the organization were thwarted and his calls for Zoltai’s resignation were rebuffed. But in December, with Radnoti’s support, he was elected to the Mazsihisz board, and now he is confident that, with allies like Radnoti, he can make a renewed push for reform.

“If Mazsihisz survives, it will survive in a different form,” Heisler said. “The way it operates now, it can’t continue. Zoltai must go; if he leaves there is a chance.”

Mazsihisz has come under particular criticism for a lack of financial transparency — criticism the cemetery scandal seemed to bear out. Radnoti claims the investigation and police raid were sparked by material he furnished that document transactions without receipts, double-entry bookkeeping, sales of nonexistent grave sites and other abuses.

“It’s the tip of an iceberg,” said Gabor Miklosi, an investigative journalist who saw Radnoti’s documentation and broke the story on the popular Index.hu website.

After the allegations surfaced, Mazsihisz issued a statement saying that in its own internal investigation. the Budapest Jewish community had uncovered one case of abuse several months earlier that had involved a false receipt. The director of the cemetery was fired after repaying the money, the federation said.

“The irregularities that were committed did not involve the invoicing system of the funerary department” of the burial society, said the statement.

Sociologist Andras Kovacs, who co-authored a report last year that called for “urgent” reform of Mazsihisz, said the manner in which communal funds are distributed is “a totally dark area.” The report, issued in September by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, called for structural changes to ensure greater transparency and equitable distribution.

“There are a lot of rumors and gossip,” Kovacs told JTA. “Some former officials of the community suggested several times to launch an independent audit, but it never happened. It is always suggested that to raise questions about this could aid anti-Semites by putting the community in a bad light.”

In recent months, the government has been conducting negotiations that could lead to the withdrawal of some funding from Mazsihisz.

Under a new law, the state recognizes three official streams of Judaism corresponding to the three that existed prior to the Holocaust: Neolog, represented by Mazsihisz; Orthodoxy, whose presence in Hungary is tiny; and the so-called “Status Quo,” now known as the Unified Hungarian Israelite Community, or EMIH. Of the three, only Mazsihisz can currently receive direct government subsidies and collective compensation for unclaimed Jewish assets seized by the communists.

Several Jewish groups are now pressing to obtain direct government funding rather than be obliged to obtain funding doled out by Mazsihisz, which says it will fight any such reallocation.

Like many American Jews, my family history is deeply tangled in the tragedies of Jewish Europe. But I wasn’t going to engage with history on anything but an abstract level, through the detached eyes of a reporter.

That changed when I decided to pay a visit to western Ukraine. My family is from a shtetl called Shatsk, tucked into the far northwest corner of Ukraine’s Volynia province and a stone’s throw from the country’s borders with Belarus and Poland. In 1941, the young men of the village — including my grandfather and great-uncle — fled in the dead of night, convinced that the Germans would treat the village much as they did during World War I, when only men were targeted — for conscription.

This time around, the logic was that if the men were gone, what would the advancing soldiers want with a town full of women, children and the elderly? It was a miscalculation, and more than 1,000 Jews in the Shatsk area were shot into a mass grave by Black Lake, now part of one of Ukraine’s national parks.

For me and my family, Shatsk has always seemed like an impossibly exotic travel destination. I found it hard to believe that, as the Ukrainian census informed me, about 6,000 people lived there. Or that it had a nightclub called Sinatra and several ATMs.

But somehow, you can drive to Shatsk — and you don’t even need a souped-up DeLorean. After just four hours on roads whose quality varied from poor to middling to dear-God-is-this-a-road, my mother, our guide and I had traded the comparatively cosmopolitan Lviv — which was feverishly preparing for the 2012 European soccer championship — for the dusty roads of Shatsk, which lay dormant in the absence of summer’s rush of tourists.

The next day and a half was an emotional whirlwind.

A middle-aged Ukrainian couple — Tatiana and Stepan — let us into their home, which had been built in 1935 by my grandfather’s cousin and left unchanged in the decades since. We got the chance to step inside the tavern — now a branch of the Ukrainian national treasury — that my great-uncle ran and that elderly Shatsk residents assured us had been the social hotspot for the village.

We washed our faces in Black Lake and said the Shema. At the local Jewish cemetery, just four graves were legible and upright — and our family had connections to two of them.

There were the sharp, shooting pains of tragedy. I nearly buckled over and threw up when I realized that the slope the memorial to Shatsk’s murdered Jews sat on was not a landscaping feature but the mass grave itself. As lucky and honored as I was to be able to say the Mourner’s Kaddish and place a few stones on the memorial, there are some truths that even ritual can’t dull.

But there were also moments of triumph, like when we connected with the half-sister of my cousins who came to Brighton Beach in 1991. As we sat down to dinner with her and her family, swapped photographs and compared facial features (we all share the same eyes, it would seem), my mother and I felt blessed.

We had spent two days walking over what felt like hallowed ground — wondering if it was appropriate to take part in the regular rituals of travel, like toasting to our trip at a Shatsk bar, smiling in a photo or even admitting we were having a good time.

For 22 years, I had wondered what Shatsk meant for me. Was it a living, breathing place? Or just the graveyard of my family’s past? Was it some hell my family had escaped from? Or the bucolic paradise they spent decades in America pining after?

I’m aware of the challenges that come with heritage tourism. I spent 36 hours in Shatsk. Who is to say I’ve learned anything substantive about a place to which I parachute in, hunt around for some information and snap a few photos? How can I be sure that my newfound connection to Ukraine and my long-lost relatives is something more than fetishizing the past and longing for an idealized Shatsk that may have never existed?

But if heritage tourism is an imperfect science, it’s an important one. As a Jew in New York, it’s easy to lose sight of history — to view the past as a neat arc that started at Ellis Island, paused on a stoop in Brooklyn and triumphantly culminated in the green pastures of Westchester County or Long Island. If we consider the Old Country at all, it’s of a sanitized variety: Pop “Fiddler on the Roof” in the DVD player, rinse and repeat.

From visiting Shatsk, I know that my cousin Luba was tall and pretty with a good head for business. My great-uncle Chaim’s tavern was more popular than his competitor’s. For decades, the citizens of Shatsk have debated whether or not there’s some stockpile of gold hidden in the tavern’s basement.

My history has nuance now. Far more meaningful than the hazy memory of my 2002 B

Reporter Alex Weisler, second from right, and his mother, second from left, unite with lost relatives in Ukraine. (Alex Weisler)

ar Mitzvah, my journey to the past, I’m convinced, has made me an adult in the eyes of Judaism and God.

Like Dorothy landing in Oz, my trip to Shatsk allowed me to finally view my family tree in Technicolor. I’m a better man for it.

U Tin Oo, a former commander-in-chief of Myanmar's army, lights a candle at the Chanukah celebration in Yangon, Myanmar, Dec. 27, 2011. (Sammy Samuels)

(JTA) – In almost any other community from Moscow to Washington, it would have been just another public Chanukah menorah-lighting ceremony providing an opportunity for the local government and Jewish community to showcase their strong ties.

But in Myanmar, where the government has been run by a military junta and the Jewish community numbers just a handful of families, the occasion last week of a public Chanukah lighting ceremony involving government officials was remarkable.

On Dec. 27, the last night of Chanukah, Myanmar’s eight Jewish families were joined by government officials, diplomats and former ambassadors at a Chanukah celebration in Yangon, also known as Rangoon. In all, about 100 people were on hand for the party at the Park Royal Hotel.

Earlier, Jewish community leader Moses Samuels visited the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy advocate who until a year ago had been under house arrest for most of the last two decades. At the meeting, Suu Kyi reportedly said that she once had visited the country’s century-old synagogue, Musmeah Yeshua (Hebrew for Instills Hope), which is still open.

Suu Kyi had been invited to the Chanukah event but said she could not attend because it conflicted with a prayer ceremony she was holding at her home for her late mother.

The visits to Suu Kyi and the Yangon Chanukah party were signs of the changes taking place in Myanmar, also known as Burma, where the last year has seen significant economic and political reforms and new openness to the West. Last month, in an affirmation of those changes, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the country, the first such visit by a U.S. secretary of state in more than half a century.

“The United States is prepared to walk the path of reform with you if you keep moving in the right direction,” Clinton told Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, during her visit.

Samuels, whose Burmese name is Than Lwin, has been instrumental in keeping alive the Jewish presence in Yangon.  Every morning he opens the well-kept blue-and-white synagogue, even though most of the time there is no official prayer service — unless there is a yahrzeit anniversary for the deceased or a visiting Jewish tourist group. Samuels and his son Sammy, who lives in New York, run a tour company in the country called Myanmar Shalom Travel and Tours.

Until this year the community’s Chanukah ceremonies were quiet affairs in the synagogue, according to Samuels. But with Myanmar opening up to the West, the community decided to make the event bigger this year, holding the rite at a hotel and including a photo exhibit of Israeli-Burmese relations.

Among the Burmese officials present were Daw Yin Yin Myint, the director general of the Foreign Ministry; U Tin Oo, a former commander in chief of the armed forces who is the vice chairman of the opposition National League for Democracy party; Maung Maung Swe, chair of the Myanmar Travel Association; and U Hein Latt, vice chairman of the newspaper Popular Journal.

Diplomats from the United States, France, Russia, India, Singapore, Britain, Italy and Israel came, and the celebration involved not just Jews but also Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Baha’i.

Several thousand Jews once lived in Burma. The first known Jew to live in the country was Solomon Gabirol, who served as a commissar to the army of King Alaungpaya, who ruled from 1752 to 1760.

Growing numbers of Jewish merchants came to Burma over the years, and in the mid-19th century a group of Baghdadi Jews led by David Sassoon settled in Burma, India and other lands in the Far East. Burma’s synagogue was built in 1854 and rebuilt in 1896. The community supports a cemetery; its oldest grave is dated 1876.

After the Japanese invasion in 1941, many Burmese Jews fled to India.

Both Burma and Israel achieved independence in 1948, and the two countries enjoyed cordial relations for the first two decades of their existence. That included a warm friendship between prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and U Nu, who was the first head of state to visit Israel. A daughter of U Nu, Than Than Nu, attended last week’s Chanukah party.

When a military junta took over Burma in 1962, installing a repressive regime and nationalizing businesses, most Jews left.

In a recent interview, Israel’s ambassador to Myanmar, Yaron Mayer, told JTA that relations between the two countries had “remained good over the years.” He noted that in 2011 a Myanmar delegation attended an energy conference in Israel.

Some of the few Jews left in Myanmar said they hope that with time and a continual opening of Myanmar’s political system, the Jewish community here will grow.

“No matter what religion we practice or what beliefs we value,” Sammy Samuels said at the Chanukah party, “when we light the candles tonight it reminds all of us to rededicate ourselves to improving the lives of those around us, to spread the light of freedom and to believe that miracles are possible even in times of darkness.”

(Ben G. Frank is the author of the newly published “The Scattered Tribe: Traveling the Diaspora from Cuba to India to Tahiti & Beyond” from Globe Pequot Press.)

For Samoans, this solves a practical question: Why remain 18 to 23 hours behind chief trade partners Australia and New Zealand?

For Jews, it poses a question of a different sort: When does Shabbat start in Samoa?

And are there really any Jews in Samoa?

A country adopting a new stance vis-a-vis the international dateline is nothing new. In 1995, the island nation of Kiribati also shifted westward. Even in Samoa, this isn’t the first time they have dateline-hopped: In 1892, the country jumped east to better align itself with American trade interests. That year, Samoa made the adjustment by repeating July 4. Alaska also adopted an extra day when it switched from Russian to American hands in 1867.

Rabbi Dovid Heber, an adviser to the Baltimore-based Star-K kosher certification agency and a lecturer on halachah and astronomy at the Ner Israel Rabbinical College, said he fielded two questions this week about when one should observe Shabbat in Samoa and neighboring Tokelau, which is also participating in the change.

“Neither were traveling there,” Heber noted of the questioners. While the Star-K does send kosher supervisers to the Pacific to inspect fish and food oil factories, he said none have been to Samoa or American Samoa, which is not adopting the time change.

Nevertheless, Heber formulated a two-page halachic opinion on the issue. The upshot: Sabbath-observant Jews should avoid traveling to these areas. If they must travel to New Zealand, Japan or other areas in the Pacific over the weekend, they should consult their local rabbis.

“In Samoa it is ‘safek Shabbos’ (questionable as to when Shabbos begins) every week,” Heber’s opinion said. “Shabbos would begin every Thursday night at sunset and end when it gets dark on Saturday night — or 49 hours of Shabbos.”

With this week’s clock change, the 49-hour period would commence Thursday at sunset and end Sunday night.

“No wonder nobody comes here!” joked resident Samoan Jew Max Lapushin in response to the notion of a 49-hour Shabbos in Apia, the Samoan capital.

Lapushin, a 25-year-old American citizen, lives in Apia and has called the Pacific island nation home for nearly four years. A Jewish day school graduate from Atlanta, Lapushin first arrived in Samoa as a Peace Corps volunteer in October 2007 to teach computer classes. He was on the ground when the devastating 2009 earthquake and tsunami hit, killing more that 180 people. Lapushin recently returned to Samoa after a few months overseas to work as a computer consultant.

“This place is so disconnected,” Lapushin said. ”Judaism without a sense of community — it’s something, but there’s no community.”

“I don’t think there’s any island in the world that has no Jews,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Goldstein, a Chabad emissary in New Zealand, told JTA. ”We have had an inquiry from Samoa, but every indication was that there’s basically no Jewish community of any kind whatsoever,” he said, noting that the inquiry was an email from a group of curious Protestants a year ago.

Previously stationed in Christchurch, Goldstein was reassigned to Auckland after the Christchurch Chabad house was damaged beyond repair in a massive earthquake in February. Although Goldstein recalls sending emissaries to Fiji and French Polynesia, he said he had never heard of Chabad emissaries traveling to Samoa.

In 1951, JTA dubbed Arno Max Gurau, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Samoa, “the only Jew in Western Samoa.” According to infomation from the cemetery in Apia, Gurau married two Samoans and one half-Samoan and passed away in 1961.

“[The clock change] would certainly be relevant for any Jewish tourists or humanitarian volunteer personnel — who obviously now I am aware exist in Samoa,” Goldstein said.

At present, Lapushin only knows of two other Samoan Jews — both Peace Corps volunteers — who were on vacation this week. If he’s correct, it would make him the only Jew present on the Samoan mainland when the island nation turned the clock forward.

While The Associated Press reported that the Seventh Day Adventist parish in Samatau village will continue to observe Saturday as the Sabbath, Radio New Zealand International indicated that most Seventh Day Adventist churches will adopt Sunday as the new day of rest.

“I will follow their lead and light Shabbos candles on Saturday night,” Lapushin told JTA.

In a way, Lapushin’s decision seems fitting.

“When you talk about being Jewish,” Lapushin explained, “people say, ‘Oh, you’re Seventh Day Adventist!’”

Jack Rosen, second from left, the chairman of the American Council for World Jewry, in Pyongyang with a top North Korean official and other members of an ACWJ delegation in this undated 2009 photo. (Courtesy ACWJ)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – When a delegation from the American Council for World Jewry went to North Korea, its agenda was typical of visits by Jewish organizations to developing nations: promote outreach to Israel, offer to broker assistance and training, gently raise problematic defense relations with Israel’s enemies.

Pyongyang’s agenda was much simpler but just as timeworn: Get to know these powerful Jews.

The two meetings, in 2008 and 2009, offered a window into the operation of the most cloistered country in the world — and, many believe, the most dangerous – and how communist North Korea may engage as it gently teases apart the curtains.

The death this week of longtime isolationist leader Kim Jong Il and the apparent succession of his 20-something son, Kim Jong Un, has led to abundant speculation about whether the son will expand or squelch the ginger openness launched by his father.

Jack Rosen, the founder of the American Council for World Jewry who took the trips to Pyongyang, said his group first made overtures to the North Korean delegation at the United Nations. It took considerable time and bureaucracy, but the invitation from North Korea eventually came through.

Rosen, a top New York lawyer who has been a fundraiser for presidential candidates of both parties, described North Korea as a country both remote and surreal.

“The discipline and fear permeated every element of society we came across,” Rosen told JTA. “Everything was a fine-tuned machine. Children would line up in a large public square several times a day. At a certain time of evening, there were long lines at the bus stations — and then just as suddenly you didn’t see anyone, there were no people in the street.”

One factor that Rosen said motivated his outreach to Pyongyang was North Korea’s increasing openness at the time to outside assistance. His group cleared the visit with the U.S. State Department.

Yet when they arrived in North Korea, much of the initial talk from the country’s officials nonplussed the Jewish delegation, as it focused not on the Middle East or appeals for assistance but on nuclear diplomacy.

“The first time we went,” Rosen recalled, “they were engaged in long discussions about the six-party talks and America’s intentions” — talks aimed at exchanging assistance for North Korea’s agreement to dial back its nuclear weapons program that had been suspended in 2007.

It quickly became evident that the North Koreans were interested in the visit because they viewed American Jews as critical to influencing the U.S. power establishment.

This was typical for Asian nations exposed to cliches about Jews but not to actual Jews, observed Norm Levin, a Koreas expert who has published a number of studies of the peninsula.

“They, like many Asians, have all kinds of stereotyped images of the Jews,” Levin said. “Many of them are quite favorable, although as biased as any stereotype of the Jews. Because everybody else sees the Jews as an important group — smart, successful, creative and powerful, and what do they know, they’ve never seen a Jew – they say if they’re that important, we should pay attention to them because maybe at one point they could be helpful to us on issues related to the U.S.”

Rosen recalled that when he gently pressed the Koreans on Middle East issues they seemed surprised – but hastened to organize a meeting with a top Foreign Ministry official.

“They were surprised we highlighted the issue to them; it wasn’t part of the official program,” he said.

Much of the talk focused on the country’s arms sales to Iran and Syria. North Koreans reportedly designed the nascent Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007, although North Korea denies the accusation. In their conversations, Rosen said, the North Koreans said they had no choice but to sell arms to such rogue states, as others were cut off to them.

Rosen, in an account of the trips he published in 2010 on the American Council website, said the expectation was not that North Korea would cease such activities but instead would be more sensitive to Western sensibilities about relationships with rogue states.

“We are hardly in a position to broker a nuclear agreement with North Korea, but the Council’s outreach has sensitized North Korean officials to U.S. and Jewish concerns over exporting materiel and technology to third countries,” he wrote.

That outreach makes sense, Levin said.

“If and when leadership changes in North Korea, they’re being able to go to the Rolodex” and reinitiate contact with Jewish interlocutors “could have potential value,” Levin said.

The North Koreans, Rosen said, were interested in the potential Israel had for educating its professionals, particularly in agricultural techniques. Outside experts say most North Koreans live at subsistence level.

“We found it interesting to see how openly they wanted to discuss more engagement with Americans, and took the time to talk about Israel to learn more about agricultural techniques,” he said. They also were interested in investment.

Rosen relayed the North Koreans’ interest in such engagement to Israeli and American officials, but nothing came of it.

Levin said Israel’s expertise in agriculture, water conservation and economic development would be a natural for North Korea to seek.

“It’s no secret their economy is a disaster,” he said. “They need help from A to Z and don’t have a lot of places they can turn to.”

The uncertainty in this transition period has made the need for outreach sharper, Rosen said.

“The big question here is, do we understand the risk in the days ahead after the death of Kim Jong Il of destabilization?” he said. “We ought to understand there are opportunities here we need to take a close look at.”

Memorial candles in Prague for Vaclav Havel, who died this week. Jewish groups and leaders said the former Czech president was a symbol of freedom, Dec. 18, 2011. (David Short via Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Vaclav Havel was a friend of the Jews and of Israel, but prominent Jews who mourned his passing this week said the Czech leader’s greatest legacy was his universal message of freedom.

“Vaclav Havel was one of the few islands of intellectual freedom in the sea of totalitarian rule,” Natan Sharansky told JTA, speaking of the late 1960s and the 1970s, when both he and Havel were struggling against communist rule — Havel in the former Czechoslovakia and Sharansky in the former Soviet Union.

Havel, a dissident playwright and human rights champion, helped lead Prague’s 1989 Velvet Revolution and was a hero in the Cold War struggle for democracy in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. In 1977 he was a co-author of the human rights manifesto Charter 77, which became the catalyst for the Czech dissident cause.

Just weeks after the collapse of communism, Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia, on Dec. 29, 1989.

After the Czech Republic and Slovakia separated into two countries in 1993, he was elected president of the Czech Republic and served until 2003.

Sharansky learned of — and said he was not surprised by — Havel’s Jewish connections later in life. But in 1977, when Sharansky was sent to Siberia, what gave him succor was the universalist message of Charter 77.

“He played an important role in keeping the spark alive,” said Sharansky, who is now the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. “He launched a counter attack which liberated people intellectually, and then physically.”

Havel demonstrated his commitment to Jewish causes by making one of his first foreign trips after becoming Czechoslovak president a three-day visit to Israel in April 1990. He was accompanied by 180 Czech Jews. In 2010 he was one of the founding members of the Friends of Israel group of international political figures.

Havel’s last public appearance was on Dec. 10, when he met with the Dalai Lama and signed an appeal in support of dissidents around the world. He died Sunday at 75, apparently from respiratory ailments.

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust memorialist and Nobel peace laureate who met frequently with Havel after he became president of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, said Havel was proud of his nation’s Jewish heritage.

“He spoke a lot of Jewish philosophy and study,” Wiesel said Tuesday in a phone interview with JTA.

The European Jewish Congress called Havel a “great friend of the Jews” who “did much to confront anti-Semitism and teach the lessons of the dark chapter of the Holocaust during his two terms in office.”

The American Jewish Committee in a statement recalled how Havel in 1991 expressed of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism his “metaphysical feeling of shame of the human race, of mankind, of man. I feel that this is his crime, his disgrace.”

A statement from the Federation of Czech Jewish Communities said that Jews had respected Havel as a statesman and a world-renowned writer, and felt close to him “as a friend who had an understanding of human concerns and joys.”

Wiesel said he often wondered how a fellow writer dared enter the political sphere.

“I asked him once, why did he want to become president, you are already a great writer and a great playwright,” Wiesel recalled. “As president you have adversaries, as playwright no one was your enemy.”

Havel responded, according to Wiesel, that he was the only one capable of overseeing the peaceful split of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

“My nation had to split,” Wiesel recalled Havel as saying. “Only I could do that, to split a nation in peace.”

Sharansky said Havel’s courage as a dissident long outlasted Czechoslovakia’s emergence from communism. It was Havel’s reputation that led Sharansky to convene the 2007 Democracy and Security International Conference in Prague in 2007.

Havel, along with Sharansky and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, was a co-chairman of the conference, although Havel was mostly absent — his illness already had hobbled him. But his message pervaded the proceedings.

“His moral clarity, his courage, his charm, his sense of humor really influenced many people at the conference,” Sharansky said. “His experience was their experience whether they came from Egypt, from Iran, from Iraq, from Sudan.”

Havel and Aznar were co-founders of Friends of Israel, a grouping of European leaders who sought to counter the burgeoning anti-Israel rhetoric on the continent.

That’s where his appreciation for Jews and Israel and his deep commitment to human rights converged, said Josh Block, the group’s U.S. director.

“People who have the experience of fighting intolerance and repression understand how important it is to stand for those countries that stand for democracy and freedom,” Block said.

It was a stance that the pro-Israel community appreciated, said Daniel Mariaschin, the executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International.

“At a time when many European leaders find the opportunity to upbraid Israel, he would stand his ground, seeing Israel as a strong democracy in the place of nations,” he said.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber contributed to this report from Prague.)