A family reunites outside the New Jersey home of Elise and Hal Hirshberg, parents of Tucsonan Amy Lederman. Front row: (L-R) Sylvia Boris, Lederman, Lynn Pollan, Carol Lewis, Farida Deske, Elise Hirshberg, Myriam Nahmani. Back: Shelley Hirshberg, Bella Bernard, Jeff Hirshberg (Robert D. DeCuir)

Since the beginning of time, in every culture, across every continent, one thing connects us all: the deeply human need to convey what is important to us from one generation to the next.

The telling and retelling of the stories of our lives is essential to the creation of our identities. Stories are the bedrock from which our lives are built, the source of our sense of belonging and the vessel that preserves our values and traditions.

But stories, like water, are fluid. Each time one is told or repeated, something is changed. Memory fades; emotions color the retelling, affecting not just the details but the soul of the story itself.

Does the fact that our stories change over time diminish their value? Does it matter that they might not be “true?” Perhaps not, for even when we are telling our “truest” stories, at best they can only reflect our perceptions of what the truth might be.

When I began researching my family history more than a decade ago, I wanted to know the facts — the who, what, when and where of the generations that came before me. But there were so many gaps and questions that I quickly found myself digging beneath the surface for answers to the bigger question of why.

As I slowly unraveled my family’s story, I found that what mattered most were not the historical facts themselves but the deeper emotional truths that the stories revealed. In the end, I find myself wondering, why has this experience or relationship in my family history been preserved and what is it meant to teach me today?

My story begins with my great- grandmother, D’Jamila Danino. (D’Jamila is pronounced Jamilla, which means “beautiful” in Arabic.) Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1883, D’Jamila was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 12 to a man three times her age. Abram Danino was a Syrian Jew who lived in Palestine with his first wife. In 1895, D’Jamila sailed from Egypt for Haifa and became Abram’s second wife, the one who would hopefully give him the son he so desperately wanted. She never saw any of her family again.

At the age of 13 and still a child herself, D’Jamila gave birth to a baby boy, Albert Danino. Albert was my mother’s father, my grandfather. When­ever baby Albert cried, so did D’Jamila — so young and unequipped was she for mothering. But mother and son grew up together and for the first few years of Albert’s life, D’Jamila was safe and protected under Abram’s care.

When D’Jamila’s was 16, Abram suddenly died and she was left with Albert and a small inheritance. Within a year or so, she married a man named Chalom Nahmani, with whom she had a second child, a son named Felix.

Things did not go well for D’Jamila with Chalom and at 18, she did the unthinkable: She sought a divorce in the rabbinical court in Palestine. But Chalom refused to give D’Jamila a get (the Jewish divorce decree that a husband must give his wife for her to obtain a divorce) unless she gave him her second son, Felix. Without the get, she was a prisoner, trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage. But with the get, she would have her freedom in exchange for her second-born son.

And so, the story goes, D’Jamila gave up Felix and fled with my mother’s father, Albert, to Smyrna, Turkey, where they lived while Albert grew up. There, Albert met and fell in love with Jeanette Franco, a beautiful girl from a prestigious Turkish family. Because Albert came from a poor family, Jeanette’s parents disapproved. D’Jamila helped them keep their love a secret and in 1920, Albert and Jeanette eloped to America. Several years later, they brought D’Jamila to live with them in their small apartment in Long Beach, N.Y. Jeanette gave birth to two daughters: Emily in 1923 and my mother, Elise, in 1925.

One summer, when my mother was two years old, her family rented a cottage on the beach for a family vacation. On July 1, 1928, Albert went into the sea for a swim after lunch. His wife, Jeanette, stayed indoors with the children that afternoon because she was eight months pregnant and not feeling well. D’Jamila was busy cooking dinner in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. She opened it to find two policemen in uniform outside.

In her broken English, D’Jamila asked “What is it that happen?” She knew without them telling her — her son Albert was dead.

Although a tremendous swimmer, Albert had drowned. D’Jamila collapsed on the floor and Jeanette, unable to recover from the shock, died one month later in childbirth, as did her baby. That was the day my mother and her sister became orphans.

There was no other family that could take the girls except D’Jamila. At the age of 43 with an old-world, Sephardic background and no education, she became mother, father and grandmamma to her little granddaughters.

D’Jamila loved my mother and her sister with all her heart. But she suffered terribly, because she had lost Albert and Jeanette so tragically and had given up her second son Felix, whom she never saw again.

D’Jamila died in 1944 when my mother was 18 years old. Once again, my mother was orphaned, with only a few relatives left that she could call family. Or so she thought until six months ago, when I received something that changed all of our lives, forever.

On a warm April day in 2012, I opened my e-mail and found this note from a woman I did not know:

“I am the 7th daughter of Felix Nahmani, believed to have been born in Smyrna, Turkey in 1905, whose mother was D’Jamila. I found you looking on our family tree. Are we searching for the same family? My father Felix never talked about his family, we could not ask about it at all. I am looking to find who he was. I live in Canada and await your reply. Daughter #7”

My fingers trembled as I punched in my mother’s telephone number. “Mom, are you sitting down? Because you need to be when you hear what I am about to tell you.”

Through my research on Ancestry.com for relatives in Egypt, Palestine and Turkey and the creation of a family tree, the seventh daughter of Felix Nahmani, D’Jamila’s son whom she’d relinquished, had found me! Felix, the half-brother of my mother’s father, Albert. Felix, the uncle my mother had never met. Felix, the father of 10 children — all of whom were my mother’s first cousins and lived in Canada, France and Corsica!

I called the seventh daughter and a beautiful voice with a French accent answered the phone. Yes, Farida assured me, Felix was her father. And yes, she knew she had a grandmother named D’Jamila but her father never permitted them to ask any questions about her. There had been 10 children and none of them had known anything about their background or family.

My mother didn’t sleep that night, or the next. She couldn’t believe that after all these years of feeling so alone, so abandoned, that she had so much family. And they all wanted to meet her!

Over the next several months, tears were shed, photos and letters exchanged, and phone calls carried family history across the continents as we arranged a reunion at my parents’ home in New Jersey. The warmth and love of this newly discovered family toward my mother, their only link to their father’s family, was overwhelming.

The October day we all met was brilliant with fall colors. My mother had spent weeks getting the house ready, making sure that everything was “just so” for her family. They flew in from Toronto, Paris and Corsica, with gifts, pictures, and family letters. We spent a magical afternoon at my mother’s elegantly set table. My brother and cousins, from California to New York, also joined us, so that our group totaled 16 in all. It was a day that we will all remember forever.

But some of the stories that were shared were not easy to hear and my mother had a very difficult time, at first, believing them. D’Jamila had told her a story that most probably was not true, even though it is understandable, coming from a proper grandmother raising her two grandchildren in the 1920s.

It seems that D’Jamila was never married to Chalom Nahmani but had his child out of wedlock. Was it a terrible family secret? A torrid love affair? A night of indiscretion? A rape? We will never know. But what Farida and her family supplied were details that suggested D’Jamila had been sent to Turkey to give birth to Felix, where she stayed with Albert after baby Felix was born. And Felix told his own family that Chalom gave him away to a sister to raise him because his mother, D’Jamila, had abandoned him.

It was a terrible secret that D’Jamila took to her grave, one that must have plagued her every day of her life, especially after Albert died.

And so I ask myself: Why was this story preserved and what is it meant to teach me today?

When I was growing up, whenever we heard something shocking or out-of-character with what we knew about a person, especially when that person was a family member, my mother would nod her head and comment judiciously: “Everyone has a public life, a private life and a secret life.”

I wonder now if perhaps somewhere deep inside, my mother knew there were secrets in her own family that she had yet to discover. And that someday, these words would comfort her, knowing that we all have places deep within us that harbor the darkest moments and choices of our lives.

Perhaps too, we can learn that secrets are as much a part of our family stories as those tales that we tell proudly and publicly. In our lives, we may be called upon to open our hearts and minds to forgive the secrets that for reasons varied and untold, were withheld from us. For in the end, even secrets can lead to great things. Anyone who experienced the love that enveloped my mother on that October afternoon bore witness to this truth.

Amy Hirshberg Lederman is an author, Jewish educator, public speaker and attorney who lives in Tucson. Her columns in the AJP have won awards from the American Jewish Press Association, the Arizona Newspapers Association and the Arizona Press Club for excellence in commentary. Visit her website at amyhirshberglederman.com.

I dislike all stereotypes whether based on gender or religion so I prefer to ignore the bad jokes (Boy to mother: “I got the part of the Jewish father in the school play.” Mother to boy: “Too bad. Maybe next year you’ll get a speaking part.”) and concentrate on the importance of Jewish fathers to their children.

I’ll start with my own father and grandfather, both secular Jews. My father encouraged me, opened horizons for me, and always had high expectations for my future. He would say, for example, the day after my sixth birthday, “You’re a big girl now, almost seven years old! Of course you can do it!” Valuable words, especially for a girl growing up when there were few female role models in professions or careers. He imparted his love of science, his curiosity about the world and the cosmos, his excitement about the future of technology. He taught me how to use a slide rule, play chess and find the constellations in the sky. When I started college he suggested I offer to report on college news for a Boston newspaper. The Globe hired me and paid a dollar an inch for the copy they printed, which gave me confidence in my writing.

My grandfather was an educated man who revered learning. I still have books he inscribed to me. I can tell from the dates that they were “stretch” books given to me before I was ready but that was another encouraging message: reach high.

A friend who is the daughter of a restless mother had a father and three stepfathers, two of whom were Jewish. One of these was her favorite. Why? Because he valued education. He was a kind man from a cultured family and not only assumed responsibility for my friend, but generously passed on his love of art and literature. He was a loving, encouraging mentor.

Fathers are critically important to their children. A father provides half of the genetic makeup of the child, is the primary support person for the mother during her pregnancy and the birth, and supports the mother as she enters her new parenting role. He plays a crucial role in the socialization of his children, daughters as well as sons, because there are gender differences in how men and women parent and every child needs both at every stage of development. And he is half of the family team that passes on values to the children, which develops their character and helps determine what kind of person they will become.

Although levels of observance vary, in my experience Jewish families in America hold similar values stressing the importance of education, family, tradition, hard work and helping others.

All families today struggle to parent in our rapidly changing world. As more women entered the work force a new and healthy phenomenon emerged: participatory fatherhood. The number of Dick and Jane families (a father who went off to work and a mother who stayed at home in her apron) has markedly dwindled.

More recently, dads are doing more than helping mom care for the children. Fathers are opting to stay at home with the children. New acronyms reflect this: WAHD (work-at-home dad) and SAHD (stay-at-home dad). One survey of over 350 fathers reported reasons fathers stay at home: they did not want to use child care, the wife made more money or wanted to work more or the father had the greater desire to stay at home. Fathers as well as mothers now report work-family conflict.

As I see it, the biggest problem for parents today is that they are losing control over what their children are exposed to. The “castle” that was once our home has been invaded by multiple screens that reflect values we do not share and do not want our children to see or hear.

My special advice for Jewish fathers?

• Stand united with your wife against what has been called the “toxic culture” and limit screen time.

• Be an encouraging father and remember to express the high expectations you hold for your children.

• Share your passions and interests. Teach your children what you know how to do and what you love to do while also observing them to figure out what they are good at and interested in.

• Try to spend some time alone with each child every day. This is special time for both the father and child.

• Be a role model to your sons and spend time with your daughters. Girls need their fathers and children of both genders must learn how to deal with adults of both genders. Teach both your son and daughter how to use a hammer and nails.

• Help around the house. Do chores together so your children learn the value of cooperation.

• Share stories with your children about your life growing up and your family.

• Enjoy your children!

Dr. Marilyn Heins is a pediatrician, parent, grandparent and the founder of ParentKidsRight.com. E-mail her at info@ParentKidsRight.com for a private answer to your parenting questions.

Kayla Tilicki at her Bat Mitzvah with her grandparents Joe and Sandra Bolze

Their daughter, Tucsonan Niki Tilicki, is in a similarly successful interfaith marriage. But Bolze is quick to point out that she and Joe do not promote interfaith marriage.

“It takes a lot of giving and forgiving to have a good marriage no matter what your faith is, and if you have an interfaith marriage you really have to be extremely giving,” says Bolze. Snowbirds from Sayville, N.Y., she and Joe arrived in Tucson early this year to attend the Bat Mitzvah of their granddaughter, Kayla Tilicki, on Nov. 19.

“I have been very, very lucky because my in-laws and my parents were both very supportive of our marriage,” says Bolze, the daughter of a kosher butcher.

“Niki is also very fortunate,” says Bolze, who was thrilled at how many of her son-in-law’s relatives came from far and wide to Tucson for Kayla’s Bat Mitzvah.

As it was a second marriage for both her and Joe, says Bolze, deciding how to raise their children was simple. “Joey had three children and I had one. Our children were 3, 4, 5 and 6,” and all had already started going to their respective Catholic and Jewish Sunday schools. “So we just told our children that they would be the religion of their mother,” she says, adding that Joe agreed if they had any more children together, they’d be Jewish. “Niki and Danny are our children, and they’re both raised Jewish,” she adds.

Joe was so eager to make her feel comfortable when she moved into his home, she says, that on their first married Shabbat he set up the Shabbat candles for her — a courtesy he’s repeated every week now for more than four decades. “Every Friday night I know how much he loves me,” she says.

While a two-faith household can be complicated, it is worse, says Bolze, that so many interfaith couples choose to “do nothing. It is so sad, to me, not to give your children a faith. It’s so easy to do everything if you do it well, if you’re giving. Joey and I always feel that we should come before God as a couple.” But she acknowledges that they are unusual — and admits that if something during a church service makes her uncomfortable as a Jew, “I just plan my grocery list.”

For Niki Tilicki, growing up with Jewish and Catholic siblings and parents “was the only world I knew, so I didn’t know there was anything different. And it was awesome,” she says, getting to celebrate Chanukah and Christmas, Passover and Easter.

As for her own marriage, she says she is “without a doubt a product of my environment.” Before she and Phil Tilicki were married, they went to pre-marital counseling with both a priest and a rabbi, who warned that raising kids in more than one religion might not work, but that one parent always suffered “if they didn’t get their religion.”

“It was the priest, Father Phil — we still send him a card every year at the holidays — who said, ‘you [each] identify with your religion, why don’t you raise your girls Jewish and your boys Catholic,’” Tilicki explains. They agreed, she said, knowing that they could end up having two boys or two girls or no children at all.

Their first child, Easton, was a boy, and Tilicki says when he was baptized it was hard for her, “realizing how much I was letting go of for my love for my husband. And when we named our daughter I’m sure that was hard for him,” she says. The naming ceremony for Kayla took place in her grandmother’s Jewish retirement home, with pictures of old, bearded rabbis on the walls. “My son was almost two and he’s screaming, ‘Santa, Santa,’ and my husband’s trying to hush him,” she remembers, laughing.

Although she and Phil are not as dedicated about attending religious services as her parents, she says, they go to church or synagogue, separately, at least two times a month. “I attend church with my husband when he asks me to, and [he attends] temple with me when I ask him to,” she says.

Kayla’s Bat Mitzvah, says Niki, “was perfect. People cried during her ceremony and laughed during her ceremony. And we really made sure everything was explained” for the non-Jewish attendees.

The ceremony and party also showcased several family traditions, including handing out chocolate bars to the kids, something Bolze’s Uncle Benny had done over the years at family B’nai Mitzvah, “because learning the Torah is supposed to be sweet and delicious,” says Bolze. The candy bar wrappers at Kayla’s event were printed with an explanation of the tradition.

In her Bat Mitzvah speech, Kayla drew attention to an empty chair on the bima behind her, “adorned with a tallit symbolic of my ancestors who did not have this opportunity that I have today because they were women” — a reference to Bolze’s mother and aunts, who were not allowed to have Bat Mitzvah ceremonies. Kayla told the congregants she hoped the empty chair would help them remember to “look beyond the rules.”

Bolze herself celebrated a belated Bat Mitzvah at age 50, while Tilicki, now 42, had a Friday night ceremony 30 years ago where she was not allowed to read from the Torah — a slight she remedied by reading from the Torah on the Friday night before her wedding.

At Kayla’s Bat Mitzvah party, as at several previous family parties, instead of flowers for centerpieces they used canned goods, which were later donated to the food bank at Interfaith Community Services, where Bolze and her husband volunteer. Bolze notes that ICS is supported both by Congregation Or Chadash, the family’s Tucson congregation, and St. Mark Catholic Church, where Joe is a parish member.

In her speech, Kayla thanked her “Bubbye and Poppy for taking me to Friday night services every week when you’re in Arizona. I love going with you!”

She also thanked her father “for supporting me in my faith from the day I was born,” adding, “It means everything to me that you are here today!”

A postscript to the story: Kayla’s sister Mariah, Phil’s daughter from before he met Niki, who was raised Catholic by her mother, became engaged on Dec. 16 — to a Jewish man.

Her sister Frima died in 1984 before they were able to reconnect, but thanks to Marlene’s son Robert, a Russian television program and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Frima’s daughter Gulnora Jurajeva is due to arrive from her home in Uzbekistan in late December for a long-awaited visit.

“I don’t know how to describe my feelings,” Marlene, now 72 and living in Short Hills, N.J., told NJ Jewish News. “It’s wonderful, but it makes me so sad that my parents and my sisters aren’t here to share the joy with me.”

The saga began in Siberia in 1941 when Marlene, then Malka Lancman, was about 2 years old. Her family, who came from eastern Poland, was being sent by train from one forced labor camp to another.

At one of the stops, seeing his mother’s futile efforts to breast-feed her starving baby, 9-year-old Chaim went in search of scraps of food. When he didn’t come back and the train was about to leave, 16-year-old Frima went to look for him. The train left before either of them came back. Later that day the baby died.

“Can you imagine, losing three of your children in one day?” Marlene asked.

As little as she was, she remembers seeing the candle-lit shadow of a hammer rising and falling as her father made a coffin for the baby.

Her parents, with their five surviving daughters, did everything they could to trace Chaim and Frima. The search continued through the war years and after in the displaced persons’ camp, and then after the family came to the United States in 1948.

In recent years, Marlene’s son Robert, the youngest of her five children, made it his personal mission to track them down.

Robert, who lives in Union County, N.J., and works for a large pharmaceutical company, also is a writer. After trying every channel he knew, he finally made contact with “Wait for Me,” a reality show on Russian television that matches long-separated loved ones.

Last year, five years after he first contacted them, producers told Robert that a viewer in Uzbekistan had come forward with a story that almost exactly matched his mother’s.

As Robert explained in a story that appeared in the New Jersey Jewish News in June 2010, there were a few discrepancies. But when the viewer, a 51-year-old grandmother named Jurajeva, sent photographs from her mother’s later years, there no longer was any doubt.

“She looked just like our father,” Marlene said.

It seems that Frima, Jurajeva’s mother, lost track of Chaim. After the Soviet army put Frima in an orphanage, she was adopted by a Russian Orthodox Christian family and stripped of her Jewish identity. She eventually married a Muslim man. Frima raised her six children as Muslims in a small, remote village, but shortly before she died, she told them that she was Jewish.

Robert, who has spoken almost weekly with his cousin with the help of a friend who speaks Russian, said Jurajeva took the news in stride and told him that she feels Jewish inside.

The first call, he said, was “was full of emotion — lots of tears, excitement, etc.” It was the fulfillment of a promise for Jurajeva, as it was for him. “She said she promised her mother on her deathbed that she would find her family.”

Like Robert, among all her siblings Jurajeva has been the one most committed to re-establishing the family connections.

But locating Jurajeva wasn’t the end of Robert’s struggle.

Jurajeva was turned down twice by the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, trying to get a visa to come for a visit. Robert asked his congressman, Rep. Leonard Lance, to help. Lance’s office tried but eventually told him that the State Department said that too many people have claimed this kind of connection fraudulently to get into the United States, and that Jurajeva did not have sufficient proof.

Robert and his wife, Dara, became parents earlier this year, yet he continued to pursue one avenue after anther. He had his cousin send a DNA sample, and he sent it, along with a sample from his mother, to the DNA Shoah Project, which maintains a database of genetic material from Holocaust survivors and their immediate descendants. To his disappointment, he said, after more than a year, the organization still has not been able to provide the completed analysis of the DNA samples.

Finally he turned to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for help. Mark Hetfield, the senior vice president for policy and programs at HIAS; immigration attorney Kelsey Breckner; and Mark Levin, executive director of the National Council on Soviet Jewry, all worked their contacts, eventually bringing the case to the attention of Hannah Rosenthal, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.

Last month the visa was granted. Robert and his siblings bought the airline ticket for Jurajeva, and she is scheduled to arrive Dec. 24 for a three-week stay.

In an e-mail response to the New Jersey Jewish News, Hetfield said, “This was a very difficult case because consular officers have near-absolute authority and discretion in the issuance of visas. Given Gulnora’s situation in Uzbekistan and her ties to the United States, it is understandable that the consular officer in Tashkent denied the application multiple times before and after HIAS intervened on her behalf.

“However, this is a particularly heart-wrenching humanitarian case and Gulnora has credibly asserted that she intends to return home,” Hetfield said. “HIAS is grateful that in light of these circumstances, and with the encouragement of …Hannah Rosenthal, the consular officer revisited the case and overturned the denial.”

Robert told the newspaper that “giving up was never an option.”

“My parents’ surviving the Holocaust was a result of their internal fortitude to never give up; the same will was instilled in me at an early age,” he said. “I made it so far with the search that I wasn’t going to let frustration or roadblocks deter me from doing this for my mother.

“I am so incredibly happy that I was able to bring a sense of closure to what was, in essence, a 70-year mystery. I am very excited to meet my newfound cousin and participate in this emotional reunion.”

But the process isn’t over. Given how he found his cousin, Robert is hoping word of the reunion might bring about one more miracle — a connection with his uncle Chaim.

“We know Chaim survived the war,” he said. “I received a record from the tracing service of the International Red Cross that in 1946 there was a Chaim Lancman who was searching for family in Argentina and the U.S., but we’ve never been able to find out anything else about him.”

Robert also wants to help other separated families. To that end, he has established a nonprofit networking website, “I am a link,” or www.iamalink.com. The site will enable genealogical searches for survivors and their descendants — and hopefully bring about more joyous reconnections.

It’s difficult to say exactly why I went. While I’m proud of the lineage, it’s mostly a harmless point of family trivia. I find even my immediate family’s mainstream brand of Orthodoxy foreign to me, never mind my extended family’s extreme observance. But my mother, who is always (but lovingly) on my religious case, has recently begun to invoke the Makove Rav in remarking upon my relative non-observance. (She went to the yahrzeit the year before I did and returned inspired.) I am, she tells me, letting him down. These exhortations are hard to take seriously. Who is this rabbi, and why should I care? Does it matter that I’m his descendant? When my mother offered to pay for a trip to Hungary, I agreed to go, if only to understand what I’m supposed to feel guilty about. This would be spiritually invested voyeurism.

Mako is in Hungary’s southeast corner, close to the Romanian border. It’s known, if at all, for its onions — some of the most arable land in the country is here — and as the birthplace of Joseph Pulitzer. Size-wise, it’s somewhere between a shtetl and a village: small enough that Reb Mechel, my cousin and the closest thing the yahrzeit weekend had to a host, didn’t feel the need to give directions or an address beyond “Mako.” I arrived on a Friday from Budapest, via a train and two buses, and stood clueless in the town square until I spotted a Chasid, whom I followed.

Only a block away, just past the refurbished synagogue, was an off-white, no-nonsense-looking building. Chasidim were scattered about, walking in little circles, talking on cell phones and smoking in the small parking lot, where a banner overhead referred to my forebear, in Yiddish, as “a great tzaddik … the miracle-worker of his generation.” This building was where everybody stayed — a Chasidic hostel. About 10 years ago, Reb Mechel had bought and thoroughly renovated a former egg factory so it could comfortably accommodate those making the annual pilgrimage to Mako. The building included two industrial kosher kitchens; a few dozen guestrooms, each with a bathroom offering a negel vasser kit (for ritual washing); a large main dining room, as well as a smaller women’s one; and at least one mikveh.

The men who arrived for the weekend (and a handful of their accompanying wives) were from all over — Austria, Israel, England, Belgium, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto — so the lingua franca was Yiddish. For me that meant halting conversation; the little Yiddish I know was learned in a college classroom, from a non-Jew. My pronunciation is hopeless. Many of the other attendees were related to me, though I couldn’t keep straight exactly how, and everybody I met wanted to know what I was doing there. I’d quickly mention my connection to the Makove Rav — aside from Reb Mechel, who’s a generation closer and has no mothers in the way of his connection to him, I had the most direct line, which garnered me instant credibility, even celebrity. People called me “der zun!” or “der ainekel!” (the son! or the grandson!) and when they did I suddenly felt very underdressed. At least I’d had the foresight to bring a white shirt.)

***

The yahrzeit proper, when we were to visit the gravesite, was on Sunday, so Shabbat should have been a gentle spiritual warm-up.

Except that the current and very much living Makove Rav was also in Mako. Background, quickly: When my great-great-grandfather died in 1943, the vacant rebbe position went to his son-in-law, because his son could not travel from Nitra, in modern-day Slovakia, to Mako to take up the post. The current rebbe is that son-in-law’s son — my first cousin twice-removed, if I calculate correctly — and he lives in Kiryat Ata, Israel, near Haifa, and has hundreds of followers in his congregation there. This rebbe set the tone for the entire weekend. Our meals, in particular, were rebbe-dictated. We sang when he sang, we ate when he ate (and took a piece of his leftovers), and we hushed (or shushed others) when he held forth. He spoke in a low, mumbly Yiddish; the second his mouth opened, he was surrounded by a huddled mass, heads angled and ears cocked, competing to hear him.

The Chasid to my left, who seemed much too young to have the five children he claimed, whispered that this rebbe doesn’t sleep. He only micronaps occasionally, and he owns no bed.

Toward the end of the Friday night meal, the rebbe, in shirtsleeves and woolen tzitzit, poured two beers and motioned that I take one. He raised his cup and, after briefly inquiring about my life, delivered a 10-minute blessing. This was awkward. He spoke to me, and only me, the only guy in the room not in uniform, about repentance and renewal, about the constant opportunity to start fresh, to not be weighed down by sin. He told me that my ancestors are ready and willing to help me redeem myself. I didn’t catch everything he said, but I got the general drift.

I nodded and blushed, and wanted to down my beer. Afterward, Reb Mechel came up behind me and put his shtreimel on my head. “Next year, it’s mandatory,” he said. “And this hair up here” — he mussed my crown — “belongs on your face.”

Eventually, the rebbe left, and things relaxed. One Chasid passed around solvent-grade schnapps. I asked for stories of the (original) Rav, of which there are many, almost all implausible, like how he assured the Mako community that they would survive the war. (Or, as a less-audacious variant has it, that they’d be OK as long as he was alive.) And how the cars holding Makovians got detached from an Auschwitz-bound train. Twice. How the more progressive members of the community sought to build near the graveyard, inevitably desecrating graves, and went ahead and broke ground despite the rebbe’s warning, only to then die within the year. I understand these as myths, not stories; in their retellings, these ever more fantastical legends overtake and obscure the personality they’re meant to valorize. They transform a real, multifaceted person into a one-dimensional miracle-worker, which makes it that much harder to gain any realistic understanding of who my great-great-grandfather was. But for the Chasids I met in Mako, the stories may be less important than the story-telling. Maybe this is how they ascribe greatness to their rebbe. And maybe that is how I’m supposed to know my great-great-grandfather — as someone about whom people tell miracle stories.

On Sunday morning, we headed to the gravesite, in a cemetery outside the city that was difficult to get to, even in the Jeep we had hired for the day. Its inaccessibility is a preservative — there were no signs of destruction. The Rav’s grave, along with that of his wife, is in a humble mausoleum. Weak daylight snuck in through the windows, barely supplementing the dozens of candles clustered on top of the tomb. A few people were reading the Rebbe’s writings (collected, edited, and published posthumously by Reb Mechel). The current rebbe was writing names on slips of paper — names of those who required prayers for healing or livelihood or some other blessing — that he would then place on top the tomb. There was an ongoing, unorganized effort to recite the Tehillim, the Psalms. I hadn’t brought a prayerbook of my own and know maybe one psalm by heart, which I started repeating. Then I stood idly for a while, feeling conspicuous and useless, until an old woman approached me. I don’t know who she was, but she knew my name. She carried a yellowed Tehillim, full of loose and uneven pages that looked like they might crack. She opened the book and showed me what was inscribed: “From the library of Moshe Vorhand.”

I prayed from my great-great-grandfather’s Psalms, and for a brief moment I felt what everyone else had been feeling the entire time. For a brief moment I understood — even if I can’t fully articulate — why veneration traverses generations, why family is something to take pride in, why it matters that my great-great grandfather was a rebbe.

(Menachem Kaiser is a writer living in Brooklyn. This article originally appeared on Tablet Magazine, tabletmag.com.)

Yes, my mother isn’t Jewish. And yes, I grew up with the tree, and the presents, and the stockings bulging with goodies from Santa. There were no creches, no midnight Masses, no religious ritual of any kind — Christmas was family time. My memories are of crackling fires and falling snow and a twinkling tree and, above all, that gorgeous, excessive dinner where all the relatives got together to eat, drink, laugh and reminisce.

Well, not all the relatives — just my mother’s side of the family. My dad’s parents hosted our Passover seders, which were what gave me the Jewish identity that eventually, at age 19, took me to the mikvah.

Let’s be clear: I am totally, unequivocally Jewish. I always have been, even before I got that official certificate signed by the three rabbis from Brooklyn (one didn’t speak English, I swear). Going to my mom’s for Christmas takes nothing away from that.

So why does the Jewish community make things so difficult for me and the hundreds of thousands of other American Jews who have non-Jewish relatives? In this country, one out of every two Jews marries a non-Jew, and those non-Jews have parents and siblings and uncles and aunts. That’s a lot of Christmas trees.

As intermarriage increases, so will those blended families. Six years ago, a Hillel survey found that 47 percent of college students who identify as Jewish come from intermarried homes.

Look carefully at that number: It means that for today’s young Jews, intermarriage isn’t a problem, it’s who they are. Many young Jews may be committed to marrying Jewish, but plenty of their friends don’t feel the same way, even if they want to build Jewish homes. As they say, it’s complicated.

I’ve been working in the Jewish media for 20 years, and many’s the time I’ve been called upon to cover events on Dec. 25. There I am on the phone with this or that prominent Jewish organization, telling them why I can’t attend, and the reaction is always the same. The sharp intake of breath. The careful pause. The unspoken question.

Why can’t we openly acknowledge what we all know is going on?

And don’t get me started on the shame. The Jewish professional who was asked at a Hadassah lunch where she got her sweater and was too embarrassed to say it was a Christmas present. The college student who mentioned his grandparents’ Christmas tree at a Hillel dinner and heard the room go silent. Like me, these are Jews. Like me, they love their families.

Sometimes we hide the truth to avoid embarrassing a well-intentioned questioner. I’ve done that, usually when older Jews ask me how I’ll be celebrating the holidays. Why make them uncomfortable?

Maybe that shame is generational. Paul Cohen, who facilitates the Journey to Judaism course at San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, says the times are changing.

“I see less of it among younger people,” he told me. “It’s almost like having an LGBT relative — in our generation, it wasn’t talked about as much.”

Karen Kushner, the chief education officer at InterfaithFamily.com, spoke to a blogger in Dallas who said she was fed up.

“There are many people in her congregation who put up trees, and they’re tired of being criticized,” Kushner related. “It’s a symptom of ‘old’ thinking. There are so many people with non-Jews in their extended families who just want to celebrate with them.”

Now I would never put up a tree in my own house. To me, a Christmas tree marks a home as non-Jewish. You can put a Star of David on top of it, you can call it a Chanukah bush, but in my book it’s still a Christmas tree. And my home is Jewish.

But my mother’s home is not. And are we not commanded to honor our father and mother?
So enjoy your chow mein. Me, I’m having turkey. With all the trimmings. And afterward my mother, my sisters and their families will watch me light the Chanukah candles. And we’ll celebrate — together.

(Sue Fishkoff is the editor of j. and can be reached at sue@jweekly.com.)

Tucsonan Ed Loebl with a document passed down from generation to generation showing that his forebears owned a home — including a “synagogue or prayer chamber”— in 18th-century Germany. [Sheila Wilensky)

Loebl’s wife, Mary Ellen, attended a Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona Shalom Tucson activity this summer where she met Sonja L. Mekel, who moved to Tucson with her husband in July and holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mekel speaks fluent German and will teach courses on German-Jewish history, specializing in German-Jewish American history, at the University of Arizona’s Center for Judaic Studies in the spring. She agreed to translate the Loebl family document, and Mary Ellen presented the translation to her husband for his 65th birthday.

Loebl had received the laminated document — dated July 30, 1792 — from his father, Julius Loebl, when Julius was in his late 70s. The document refers to Loebl’s great-great-great- great-grandfather Marcus’ home ownership as “a protected Jew of the estate Litschkau, purchased for himself, his heirs, and those entitled to the inheritance of the house…” and stipulates an annual house and protection fee. It also mentions the “synagogue or prayer chamber located in this domicile,” which Loebl says was “very rare” at the time. He also discovered from the translation that his ancestors were farmers who grew hops, another unusual bit of Jewish family history.

In addition, the 1792 document states how the homeowners were to behave: “The buyer and those belonging to him should conduct himself quietly at all times, lead an honest, irreproachable life, not accommodate any disruptive and suspicious persons, and not do anything that would be in the least detrimental to the high master, under pain of the harshest applicable penalty.”

A few years ago, Loebl and his son, David, traveled to Germany; they determined that the family “estate” was located not far from Dresden in what is probably now German-speaking Slovakia.

“It’s ironic,” says Loebl, that his 29-year-old son is named David, when unknown to Loebl and Mary Ellen, the Jewish judge who signed the official document more than two hundred years ago was David Loebl.

By the early 20th century, German Jews had been assimilated. “Many Jews considered themselves Germans first,” says Loebl. Then came World War II and the Holocaust. Loebl’s father emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1937, and Loebl has his German passport with the Nazi insignia among the family artifacts.

Loebl’s grandparents, Ernst and Henny Loebl, and their daughter, emigrated to the United States in 1941, having flown to Moscow, traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Japan, then boarded a ship to Seattle. It took them six weeks to get there. On his grandfather’s German passport the middle name “Israel” was inserted as it evidently was for all Jewish males, and the middle name “Sara” for Jewish females. On the upper left-hand corner of the inside page, his grandparents’ and aunt’s passports had a large red “J” for Jew stamped on it. His father’s passport had no such inclusions.

The possession of the passports and the 1792 document, with its translation, has clearly been significant to Loebl: “Isn’t it wonderful,” he asks, “that this Jewish community [finally] made the translation possible through the Jewish Federation?”

In this 1920s family portrait, Tucsonan Al Paley is the boy in the second row, second from left, sitting on his father Max Paley’s lap. (Courtesy of Howard Paley)

It was a miracle that inspired the Paley clan to gather in 1946. Eight cousins had fought in World War II and all returned home safely. It was a reason to rejoice and ever since, the Paleys have been meeting annually to celebrate their family and tell the stories to the younger generations.

This year was no different but it was special —Tucsonan Al (Alfred) Paley, 83, recently returned from this year’s reunion in Washington, D.C., which marked the 100th anniversary of his family’s presence in America. The family story is the quintessential early 20th century American immigration tale. One hundred years ago, family patriarch Morris Paley managed to escape the poverty and Jewish persecution of czarist Russia. He and eventually all of his eight children arrived in New York to make new lives. Al’s father and uncles worked in the garment industry, investing long hours and sweat equity to improve themselves and their children’s futures.

Al’s father, Max Paley, in conjunction with his factory work, created a system to resize clothing. He applied for a U.S. patent in 1916. In time, his hard work and ingenuity paid off and he moved the family from Coney Island to Monticello, in the Catskill Mountains. “It’s because we lived up in the Catskills that we became a really tight-knit family,” Paley says. “Our cousins came up to summer with us and we enjoyed many happy times together.” When the depression years struck there were fewer happy times

Al Paley looks at family photos at the 2009 Paley family reunion in Louisville, Ky. (Howard Paley)

and like many Americans, Al’s father Max suffered financial and real estate losses. With a wry grin, Paley relates a Depression-era story about his father who, sleepless over his inability to pay the mortgage, got up at 3 a.m. and went over to the lienholder’s house, knocked on the door and reported, “I can’t pay the mortgage and I can’t sleep; now you can’t sleep either!”

Paley’s family rebounded from Depression hardship. They returned to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Al eventually went on to college at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. But he insists that what influenced him most were the stories his family shared. Hearing about his father’s patent, which was finally awarded in 1927, the same year Al was born, led him to become an engineer and eventually earn two patents himself.

Paley married his wife, Sylvia, in 1949 in Brooklyn. They raised their three children, Maureen, Howard and Doreen in Levittown on Long Island. In 1994, the retired Paleys moved to Tucson, where Howard, a University of Arizona graduate, had established his career and family. But every fall they travel to wherever it is that the family is gathering, not only keeping the old stories alive, but generating new ones as well.

“These gatherings are wonderful because they allow us to tell stories about the old days that the younger generation likes to hear; then we spend a lot of time arguing about where the next year’s reunion will be held,” says Paley. This year, though, there was little argument about who was going to organize the 2011 reunion. After many years of declined invitations, the family finally convinced a long-estranged cousin, Paul Paley, to come to the 100th anniversary clan celebration. Overwhelmed and inspired by the acceptance of his loving family, he volunteered to join forces with his cousin, Barry Paley, to organize the 2011 Paley reunion in New York. It’s a story that will certainly be retold at future Paley family gatherings.

Renee Claire is a freelance writer in Tucson.

Rachel Goodman and Zakhary Khazanovich (Sheila Wilensky)

Before she left on Mayanot Israel’s 2010 Friendship Trip, a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip for young adults with special needs in late July, 20-year-old Tucsonan Rachel Goodman was satisfied with her professional life but not her personal life. “I was fretting about not having a future that I wanted,” she told the AJP, “until I met Zak.” She and Zakhary Khazanovich started sending each other instant messages on the Mayanot Facebook page a month before the trip.

Goodman, who has Asperger’s disorder, which she describes as “high-functioning autism,” didn’t know until three days before she flew to New York to meet up with the other participants that Khazanovich lived in Phoenix.

“My mother diagnosed me with cerebral palsy,” says Khazanovich, whose fine and gross motor skills are impaired. He uses a walker. But the medical community has had difficulty categorizing him, he says. “My neurological exams come back completely normal.”

Goodman notes that “Zak talks more slowly when he gets nervous or excited.” Before meeting him, she says, “I never asked him if he used a wheelchair or a walker. It didn’t matter.”

Two days prior to departing, “Zak asked if I had a crush on him. I wanted to be honest and told him that I did,” says Goodman. When she asked if he had a crush on her, “Zak replied, ‘I have to meet you first.’” They hit if off immediately. Having communicated online, they say they already knew a lot about each other. During the interview with the AJP, Khazanovich often deferred to Goodman and she affectionately touched his knee to offer additional comments.

Khazanovich is a student at Paradise Valley Community College and intends to pursue graduate study in counseling. “I want to help bring families together because I’ve had my challenges,” he says, adding, “I like to be on the cutting edge of absolutely everything I do and all that happens in my life.”

Goodman is majoring in early childhood studies at Pima Community College, but is only able to take two classes per semester, she says. Before leaving for Israel, Goodman passed a test to become a substitute teaching assistant.

Goodman’s previous travel included visiting Spain and Portugal with her grandparents. “I wanted to visit Israel because I’ve never been very religious but I wanted to know more about my culture and its traditions,” she says. Khazanovich was born in Toronto, but this was his first trip out of the United States. He comes from a more observant family; his parents are members of a Chabad Friendship Circle and the Chabad congregation in Phoenix. Both of his grandmothers were Holocaust survivors.

“I wanted to learn more about who I am as a person through a cultural perspective, through a Jewish lens,” says Khazanovich.

Mayanot Israel has been coordinating a friendship trip to Israel for the past three years, catering to high-functioning 18- to 26-year-olds from across the United States with a range of disabilities, including autism, Asperger’s and Down syndrome. This year’s program took place from July 26 to Aug. 6 with 19 participants, six staff members and eight volunteers.

Visiting Yad Vashem was one of the highlights of the trip for Goodman and Khazanovich. “I was there for myself but I was also watching him,” says Goodman. “There was so much beauty there even though it was a sad place. I cried.”

Being accepted with his disabilities and for being Jewish, “not having to deal with any anti-Semitism among a group of young people” was paramount for Khazanovich.

“There were only a handful of Jewish kids at Tucson High. I had to explain what kugel was,” says Goodman. “On the trip I could say, ‘I love lokshen kugel’and I didn’t have to explain.”

Another trip highlight for the couple occurred at the Kotel: “Both of us were touching history, the thousands and thousands of Jews who had come before us,” says Khazanovich. Goodman was one of three young women who became a Bat Mitzvah there, which “was very important to me,” she says. “When I was 13 my disabilities interfered too much. And being there with Zak made it more of a coming-of-age experience.”

But clearly the supreme highlight came on Aug. 3 after dinner in one of the Bedouin tents at Chan Hashayarot. “Zak proposed to me under the stars,” says Goodman. “We exchanged promise rings that we had picked out in Sfat.”

Back in Tucson, Khazanovich is living with Goodman and her parents. “I’ve always wanted to get married and have a family,” says Goodman, who adds that “social interaction with people my own age has been difficult.”

Their wedding will take place at the Reid Park Zoo — under a chuppah, with a ketubah — on April 17, 2011, the night before Passover, making it a good time for relatives to come from New York, Toronto and Edmunton, Alberta.

“We both have been struggling with how it would be to be more observant after our marriage,” says Goodman. “We can’t walk to services and it’s not easy for us to follow certain traditions. But Zak wants to get called to the Torah before the wedding.”

On their wedding day, says Goodman, “I’m pretty sure I don’t want an Orthodox ceremony. I want to dance with my husband.”