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By Jeanette Friedman
 BROOKLYN, N.Y—One of the most remarkable and poignant things about the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families in Jerusalem in 1981 was a wall plastered with notes from survivors and their children looking for lost family members and friends.
Those were the days before the Internet was a twinkle in all but a few eyes, and what was on that wall was a continuation of a hunt that had begun in the waning days of the Holocaust. For years after the Shoah, The Forward and Morning Journal would be packed with search ads, and the International Tracing Service was overwhelmed with requests.
As our parents leave us behind as the guardians of their history, the searches still don’t stop. And while there are those who scoff at what they think is futile fantasy, the searches continue to this day, 70 years after World War II began. Astonishingly, people do find each other and are able to bring the distant past into the present, triggering yet even more memories for us to remember for them.
At the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, I edit Together, the newspaper that contains many search requests received through snail mail and emails. The Searches editor is Serena Woolrich of Allgenerations, who also gets numerous search requests every month. We reach 85,000 people quarterly.
Yet the odds of one person making two connections in as many years are statistically astronomical. And so when my own mother found two childhood friends because of Together, two years apart, I was amazed. One came as a result of a story she wrote about her fruitless search for her mother’s resting place in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, and the other from a casual email I received at work.
In the first case, she hadn’t seen her friend, Harry Langsam, in 73 years. He lived in a town called Strizhev, where my great-grandfather was the chief rabbi, and was in the room when my great-grandmother passed on. Harry lives in Los Angeles. When he read my mom’s story in Together, he called the office in New York to find out how to reach her. On that very day, she was already on a plane headed for LA, where she was going to spend some time with my younger brother. When she and Harry met, my mother told me, “many tears were shed.”
My mother is the youngest child of a major Hassidic dynastic family, and turned 89 this Shabbos Tehsuva. She has always made sure that my siblings and I knew “from whom we stemmed and what we stand for,” and wrote a book in English—which she finished translating just this week for publication in Yiddish— called “Going Forward.”
She wrote it because she promised her mother she would, and to make sure that her descendants would remember those for whom we were named and who came before. I am a twin with a brother, and we were named for my maternal grandparents: Reb Nosson Dovid, z’tl, the Partzever Rov in Sedlice, Poland, and his wife, Yitta, z’tl.
In 1933, three years after my grandfather died of heart disease, his widow and my mother said goodbye to their “royal” existence in Sedlice and moved to Gensia Street in Warsaw, where they opened an equivalent of today’s bed and breakfasts. My mother was sent to Cracow to study at Sarah Schenirer’s Beis Yakkov.
When the war began, my mom came back to her mother in Warsaw. In addition to trying to care for the starving and the sick, they collected all the Torah scrolls in Warsaw and stored them in her dining room.
Most of my mother’s nine siblings were married and scattered around Poland. Some survived and some didn’t. One, her oldest sister Devorah, left Poland for British Mandate Palestine in 1934. Her brother Yaakov escaped from Treblinka, joined the resistance and died in the Ghetto Uprising. Another brother, the Munkacser Rov, Reb Burachel, z’tl, saved thousands in Hungary during the war. He was the one who arranged to smuggle my mother out of the Ghetto and so she eventually went to Budapest via Munkacs to become a passenger on the Kasztner Transport.
My mother never knew what happened to many of her childhood friends. Yet on September 22, Munish Morgenstern—now Mike Morgen—came to visit with a bouquet for the Rebbe’s daughter. And 76 years since she last saw him, Pesla Rabinowicz—now Peska Friedman—was reunited with her neighbor, the grandson of her father’s gabbai, his sexton.
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The second reunion began with a simple email to the American Gathering from a 3G—a member of the third generation after the Holocaust. (Imagine, it is already five generations since the Holocaust!) Her screen name was LaurenBravo and she simply asked if anyone knew any survivors from Sedlice.
I responded, “Yeah, my mom. Are you very Orthodox? If the family isn’t Orthodox, she probably wouldn’t know them. My grandfather was the Partzever Rov and he had a congregation in the town.”
She emailed back and said the family wasn’t Orthodox now, but her grandfather’s name had been Morgenstern, and she was going to call her grandfather and ask if he heard of the rabbi. Could I call my mom and ask.
So I called my mom, and asked, “Do you know a Morgenstern from Sedlice?”
And she said, “Morgenstern lived upstairs in our house. He was the gabbai! Someone is alive?!”
The reunion between the two was arranged by Mike’s daughter, Sylvia Lebowitz, and his granddaughter, Lauren. Since our initial contact, Lauren has kept in touch with my mom by phone, and visited once with her mom.
Then when my Aunt Devorah, the pioneering Zionist and the last sibling, died just three weeks earlier, Lauren used her passing as the impetus behind the reunion. Both my mother and Munish seemed to need to somehow connect to the good days before the war.
After an initial awkwardness and a staring into each other’s faces to see if they could find the children they once were, a flood of memories was unleashed. There were details about the house they lived in and the street it was on, and the pranks they played on each other. Almost every sentence they uttered began with “Do you remember…”
Munish’s grandfather, the gabbai, died at a wedding. During the wedding he kept saying that the Rebbe was calling to him, but he didn’t want to leave until the wedding was over. It turned out to be the wedding of my mother’s sister, Tobah Chavche.
As we sat and ate a light lunch, I asked Munish about his experiences during the war. Lauren leaned over to me and whispered that he never talked about it, and that he was the sole survivor.
It turned out that just before deportations from Sedlice, Munish crossed the Bug River and became property of the Soviets. He was not able to escape until 1946, somehow made his way to the DP Camp in Fehrenwald, and finally arrived in the United States in 1951. His sister was already in the States, living in Newark, so that’s where he settled.
He found a job as a machinist in an airplane parts factory and did very well. His daughter raised her family in Livingston, New Jersey, and Lauren is an actress who is currently performing in a musical about Raoul Wallenberg.
A few days later, Lauren emailed me. “I felt like I was back in the old world, hearing their stories. I've had so many questions about my grandparents' lives before the war and have worked so hard to research their families. I felt such a sense of accomplishment that I had helped bring these who people together who shared lives 76 years ago.
“I was so happy to hear them discuss the old times and their family and friends. My grandfather does not like to talk about his life in Poland, so their meeting gave me a chance to hear him talk. (I think it's because he had no choice!) And besides all that, I love your mom, she reminds me of my grandmother.”
Munish’s visit was a shot in the arm for my mom. A few days later she told me, “Munish brought me back to the time when I was 8 years old and for a few minutes he made me feel very young again. That’s a wonderful feeling for an elderly lady.”
If you want to post a search, keep it short and send your email to amgathtogether@aol.com and allgenerations@aol.com. No guarantees it will work, but if lightning can strike twice in the same place, who knows?
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