Tagged Seeking Kin

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. (JTA) – The Israeli missile boat Tarshish had just returned home in June 1976 when crew members learned near midnight that they would be heading back to sea two days later for another couple of months. They… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. (JTA) –  Discovering a Jewish past of which she was wholly unaware, Danette Devlin of Little Rock, Arkansas, has also found family. Devlin was raised without any religious affiliation. As an adult she attended Catholic and Episcopalian… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. (JTA) – For over six decades, Chaim Schwimmer has thrown a kiddush every Simchat Torah, but it’s not only to celebrate the joyful holiday. The food and the schnapps also mark the anniversary of Schwimmer’s miraculous rescue… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. JERUSALEM (JTA) – On a pleasant evening in this capital city, through the near darkness, I caught his wave from a half-block away. Soon we were standing together, smiling and clasping hands, two men who hadn’t seen… Read more »

SEEKING KIN The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. NIR GALIM, Israel (JTA) – On a recent afternoon in a museum in this moshav community near the port city of Ashdod, Hodaya Gadba held up a black-and-white photograph of a three-story building and pronounced,… Read more »

SEEKING KIN The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. (JTA) – As a librarian, Oren Kaplan researches obscure facts and utilizes databases to track down information. So when the Haifa resident read a recent “Seeking Kin” column about someone in his city, Menahem Orenstein,… Read more »

Major League Baseball's official historian, John Thorn, pictured holding a royal decree knighting his great-grandfather, says the past enhances the present in sports as well as family matters. (Hillel Kuttler).

CATSKILL, N.Y. (JTA) – The past escorts John Thorn home from the moment he greets a visitor at a 139-year-old railroad station, crosses the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and arrives at his residence, a county historical landmark. Clad in a facsimile jacket of the defunct Negro Leagues’ Kansas City… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Wearing a black jacket and hat with a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, the bearded man sings of poverty and hunger, homelessness and being alone, a family lost. Yet through the pain,… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — For Carla Greenspan, the news was upsetting: A relative by marriage of the man who saved her mother’s life during the Holocaust was spurning an award from Yad Vashem. “It’s a sad legacy for… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Teenagers Mark Matsuki and Leon Feldman came to study in the Boston area this summer as strangers and left as friends, unintentionally regrafting family-like branches of a tree that first took root four generations… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) — The photograph shows a lighthearted moment at the end of a war that four decades later still prompts analysis and evokes somber reflections. Snapped just after Israel and Egypt had signed an agreement ending… Read more »

The graduation of the Torah School at the revitalized Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock, May 19, 2013. (Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – When Henry Leventon, his wife and three daughters attended their first Sabbath service at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock in 1976, the gabbai at the Los Angeles synagogue immediately approached.… Read more »

Chana Staiman visiting the building in Prague where her late father, Harry, was raised. (Courtesy Chana Staiman)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – As a girl in Seattle, Anne Bush evinced little interest in the Holocaust, even though her father, Harry, was a survivor whose mother, sister and brother-in-law had been murdered. But as a mother in… Read more »

Left to right, Geulah Elementary School classmates Avraham Siton, Ora Bogomolny and Mashiach Moshe Shem-Tov meet for lunch in Florida months before their 60th reunion in Israel. Siton would die two days before the June 12 reunion.(Courtesy Ora Bogomolny)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Ora Bogomolny sounded subdued, as if the phone call to her Israel apartment had disturbed her sleep. Indeed, she had experienced a nightmare just hours before receiving the call from “Seeking Kin” on June… Read more »

Rose Goteiner believes that her sister, Ruth Konigstein, is shown in the middle of the bottom row of this 1946 photograph taken in Amsterdam. (Courtesy American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Global Archives)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Picking up her mail about a year ago, 88-year-old Rose Goteiner stopped in her tracks upon seeing the photo on a newsletter cover. Posing shortly after the Holocaust ended, 21 people were standing before… Read more »

Phyllis Fields, second from right, during a 1989 family trip to Hawaii. (Courtesy Fields family)

The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Earlier this month, a “Seeking Kin” column concluded with Rozanne Dittersdorf of New York expressing hope that Phyllis Garfunkel, a childhood friend with whom she lost contact in the late 1940s, “found happiness over… Read more »

The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Recalling her childhood friendship with the girl across the street fills Rozanne Dittersdorf with immense sadness but also deep gratitude. More than six decades later, the pain her friend evinced still brings Dittersdorf to… Read more »

Naomi Bloch's great-grandparents, Shlomo and Esther-Temme Rosenberg, pictured here, led the family's exodus eastward after Russia expelled the Jews of Siauliai in 1915. (Courtesy Naomi Bloch)

The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Several “Seeking Kin” columns have presented people’s searches for descendants of relatives who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. Now comes Naomi Bloch of Melbourne, Australia, with a search involving a twist:… Read more »

Jerusalemite Shlomo Achituv hopes to find the sister or some family of Sara Kucikwocz, pictured here, who was his student in their native Luniniec, Poland, but was killed in the Holocaust.. (Courtesy Shlomo Achituv)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. “The Cruel Winter” How awful is winter, how awful is frost To far-off lands the sparrow has fled The animals have hidden, too, in the caves Beneath the hills and in the forest valleys The trees wrap… Read more »

The fate of three of the 15 students in the first graduating class of Grodno's Tarbut Gymnasium in 1930 (pictured with three of their teachers and the principal) remains a mystery. The three students, shown in the inserts, are Velvel Poliak, Yitzhak Levin/Levine and Max Margolis. (Courtesy Ruth Marcus)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) — In 2008, Ruth Marcus began looking ahead to 2010: the centennial of the birth of her late father, Yitzhak Eliasberg, and 80 years since Grodno’s Tarbut Gymnasium graduated its first class, Eliasberg included. Marcus,… Read more »