Finding Our Jewish Ancestors: Central Europe

My family just completed a Central and Eastern European family heritage tour, seeking out our roots in towns and cities of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria. It was a pilgrimage to pay our respects to the ancestors. My son has, over the past five years or more, researched the genealogy of my and my wife’s family, going back generations–in some cases to the 18th century. It was thanks to his extraordinary dedication, we were able to trace scores of relations back two centuries.

We made pilgrimages to cemeteries, synagogues, libraries and museums. We met living Jews and saw the graves of dead ones. Rabbis, Holocaust survivors, klezmer musicians, and even non-Jews in some of these cities and towns, dedicated to preserving Jewish life and memory. In fact, some of our best guides were non-Jews who took on this project as a labor of love. One of our guides was the child of a Holocaust survivor and didn’t even know he was Jewish until adulthood.  With these guides, we went to small shtetlach tucked away in the countryside, where Jewish cemeteries lay hidden on inaccessible hillsides amidst almost impenetrable underbrush.  It was a journey part archaeology, part genealogy,  history and part geography.

Another critical figure in our trip was our guide, Yale Strom. I first met him through his klezmer music, when I bought his first recording, Hot Pastrami. In 1998, while planning our wedding, I asked if he would play at our wedding. He and Elizabeth played Yiddish klezmer and the Beatles as if it was a single soundtrack.

During our trip, he told me this was also common to traditional klezmer musicians who played at Jewish weddings. They featured not just traditional Jewish music, but popular tunes as well.  Like all Jewish culture of the era and region, it wasn’t a monoculture.  It was an agglomeration of influences including Jewish, Roma, Slavic, Balkan and Ottoman.  All of them combined to create the richness and diversity of klezmer.

Jewish life in eastern Europe is not dying as many believe.  In many cases it is thriving. There are new Jewish museums, cultural festivals, university courses all of which attest to a living community.  However, in many circumstances the old culture of Yiddish-speakers and tradition is receding, if not dying.

I found that immersing oneself in this community offers an intense experience for us–who live in such a different world–and for them. They believe in many cases that they are alone, on their own.  They may see Jewish tourists pursuing the same path as we did. A bit of nostalgia for a lost world.  But they don’t see them engaged deeply in their fate.

In Krakow’s Jewish cultural festival I felt a certain disconnect between the Diaspora homeland and Israel.  The festival banner featured an image of the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.  At a klezmer concert, I even noticed a scowling man standing and constantly sweeping his eyes over the crowd.  Since there were many Israelis in the audience I’d be willing to bet he was a Shin Bet agent, since it provides security for Israeli officials abroad.  The organizers appear to have embraced Israel and Zionism, without realizing how diametrically opposed they have become.

I saw some of this in a separate concert Yale organized for us in Košice.  Three young musicians played klezmer and traditional Romani tunes to a local audience. Yale and I thought there might be 15 or 20 attendees and it would be a small gathering.  Instead there were 75 people in a community of 250 Jews.  We funded the costs of the concert including rental of the synagogue and paying the musicians.  The music was wonderful, truly inspiring.  And it was a meeting of our two Jewish communities.

Klezmer concert in Košice synagogue. pic.twitter.com/ib2fTQ012H

— Tikun Olam 🍉🇮🇷 (@richards1052) August 11, 2026

I only realized after I saw the size of the crowd that it would be important to offer some of the thoughts I mentioned above. But I hadn’t  understand how strong these emotions were until midway through the concert. I was torn about interrupting the proceedings near the end of the event. I decided not to. But I immediately regretted my decisions. It would’ve been so important to me and them to express my solidarity with them as fellow Jews.  A missed opportunity. But hopefully, I will have another chance in another place at a later date.

We also visited the Szentes, Hungary, where my paternal great-grandfather was likely born.  We visited the public library, which had been the town’s synagogue before the Nazis rounded up all the Jews and shipped them to Auschwitz.  When we asked how the synagogue became the library, the staff told us the building was abandoned and the mayor decided to turn it into a library.  Yet another relic of Jewish life erased.  The only thing now left of it were a few photographs and a small display.

Romany wedding band, Michalovce pic.twitter.com/0tRCDBdvdI

— Tikun Olam 🍉🇮🇷 (@richards1052) August 11, 2026

In Michalovce, we were walking to the cemetery when we saw a man drive a Mercedes up to a house.  He was wearing a vivid suit, not at all a typical business suit.  Yale loves talking to strangers. He never knows what he might learn, what stories and tunes he might hear. So he began talking to the man and discovered he was Romani and that his granddaughter would be married later that day.  He invited us to return in a half hour when the wedding band showed up.  We did, and were entertained by an extraordinary ensemble of fiddle, clarinet and cimbalom.  They were flamboyant, prodigiously talented, and breathtakingly fast. I’ve never heard any clarinetist play that many notes so quickly.  The fiddle player too was extraordinary.

Yale asked if he could play them a tune. The fiddler lent him his instrument and he began to play a Romani song also played by klezmer musician.  Then we shared some Jameson whiskey with them and became fast friends.

My son and I began to conceive this trip after he began his genealogical research. It started with a University of Washington Hebrew course in which he translated a Yizkor book from the village of Sečovce, where my wife’s father was born..

New York pilgrimage

Next, a few summers ago we made a pilgrimage to New York and the graves of my grandparents and great-grandparents. They were buried in cemeteries throughout the region from New Jersey to Queens.

The most amazing of them was Mt. Zion in Queens, with seemingly hundreds of thousands of graves of Jews crowding in upon one another.  Towering over the entire scene was a hulking municipal sanitation plant.

I never knew my maternal great-grandparents. I didn’t even know their names until Jonah found them.  Later, I visited my cousin, Ronnie, in Peekskill, a town in the Hudson River valley. She gifted us an original copy of a Torah commentary by Rabbi Israel Neumann, Giborey Yisrael. He was my great-grandfather four times removed. It was published a year after his death, in 1889, in Krakow, Poland. The book required restoration, so I began a process of seeking a professional for the project. Finally, I found Caroline Veenstra, who did a fabulous job as you can see from the accompanying photographs.

Curiously, there were several quartos missing from the book. When we checked the only other original copy we could find, on a Chabad website, it too was missing pages. But not the ones we were missing.  So we were able to include all the lost pages using the other version.  But the question is: how could an original copy of a book have multiple pages missing? Were they somehow removed?  Or was there a mistake in the printing?

European pilgrimage

Then we turned our sights to Europe. Thus far, Jonah had done his research from the US.  It seemed a logical choice to go back to the source.  Where it all began.  Where the Silversteins, Goldsands and Kornhausers lived.

I knew Yale led European pilgrimages for Jews like us seeking out family roots.  So I contacted him. At first I hoped we could join one of his scheduled trips. But none lined up with our itinerary. So I asked if he could do a family trip with our own personalized itinerary.  That’s how we came to enjoy nearly three weeks in Krakow, Tarnow, Nowy Sącz, Budapest and Vienna.

We visited 46 Krakowska and 5 Jozefa in Krakow, Rabbi Neumann’s home for most of his life, and where he died in 1888. Another house in the old Jewish quarter was the birthplace of my great aunts and uncles.  It is a tattoo parlor: a dark irony considering the millions of Jews who received their tattoos from their Nazi tormentors.

We also visited the Ghetto Heroes Square, where many of the city’s Jews were driven before being loaded on cattle cars and shipped to Auschwitz.  As I looked at the large open space I imagined it peopled with a multitude carrying knapsacks on their backs and suitcases in hand.  They held hands with small children or guided their elderly or infirm.  They had no idea what was happening to them, though they had to believe it would not be good.  They were frightened. They were fearful. Worst of all, no one seemed to care. They were entirely at the mercy of the Nazis.

Ambivalence of American Jews to their European past

American Jews naturally have an ambivalent view of their European heritage and ancestors. Most know next to nothing about them, beyond reading books like Elie Wiesel’s Night or hearing a few meyses from a grandparent–if they were willing to speak of the Old Country at all.

Ancestors recede into a hazy past.  Even if we wanted to, how would we find them?  That’s where a genealogical researcher like my son comes in.  He’s scoured heritage sites, civil records, historical archives, and cemetery burial records.

In the past few years, Jonah has taken us to cemeteries in the US and Europe I never knew existed, to view the graves of relatives I never knew existed.  Thanks to the depth of his research, these people are no longer abstractions. They are not part of a faded distant past. They may be ghosts of a sort, but they are my ghosts, my past and now part of me.

There are various ways in which Jews can confront this avalanche of family history and data.  The first is regret or even anger at the extermination not only of specific individual ancestors, but of an entire people, whose lives were snuffed out by a race of pure evil.  The tragedy can be overwhelming. The grief, paralyzing.  It can deprive us of hope and envelop us in utter despair.  Some of us are trapped in the amber of historical loss.

Of course, anyone looking at 20th century European Jewish history must confront all of these emotions, no matter how painful.  But I found an alternate emotional approach.  I didn’t treat our tour as a funeral march, but rather as a treasure hunt.  The treasure was the history and the ancestors.  Finding them was like digging up buried treasure.  When you found a grave, it was as if you met whoever this person was. Not in the flesh of course.  But you got as close as you could get to them.  And traveling thousands of miles and finding them was a small miracle.

In one town, we found a worn and weathered building which looked like an ancient stable.  It looked slapped together with worn wooden planks.  Yet it was nearly 300 years old.  This was the home where my ? was born. These were my roots–in the soil of this small rural town in the foothills of the Tatra mountains.  You can’t get any more humbling than that.

So no, there was no way to undo the evil of the Nazis.  No way to save those 3-million precious Polish Jewish souls whose lives they snuffed out.  But we can offer them honor by finding them where they are, even buried in the ground.  They may be ghosts, but they are nevertheless a real presence.

The Wall of Death where prisoners were shot by firing squad

Our return to the ancestors required more than just logistical planning and a list of shtetls and names of relatives. It required confronting the meaning of it all. What was our relationship to our mishpoche? Were they poor obscure folk, victims of a faraway tragedy (those murdered in the Holocaust). Or were they real people with whom we had a living bond?

Auschwitz: enormity of evil

We went to Auschwitz and it was just as one would expect. Auschwitz in all its vast impenetrable evil. A vast flat open space. An enormous Factory of Death, with a lengthy single row of carefully arranged barracks built on an axis.    They stretched as far as the eye could see.  It seemed endless, though perhaps there were only scores of  buildings.  Looking out on this landscape one senses its emptiness.  It’s not just a physical void in terms of this open barren landscape. But also a dim realization that it is empty of the 1.5-million human beings who lived briefly in these barracks, performing forced labor. While today the space is barren, then it was crammed full of these millions of bodies destined for death.  How do you comprehend such a contradiction?

Auschwitz had one main purpose, one main product: death.  It was designed to process human bodies and dispose of them.  It used the latest modern industrial techniques of the day: zyklon B, the showers, the rail network providing fresh bodies to feed the monster, the crematoria to dispose of them.  The Nazis were masters of mass death.

Contrast this with our ride by bus through the Polish countryside to Auschwitz.  We passed farm fields, suburban homes, family cars, children’s bicycles just outside the gates.  The accouterments of normal life.  But once you passed through that satanic gate, you might as well be in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell.  You had passed from human existence into a netherworld.

All the while you think, how is this possible? How could people on one side of a fence be facing industrial extermination on a scale never before conceived in human history, while on the other side normal bourgeois existence continued as if nothing was happening?  The contradiction is not just unnerving, it is maddening. How do you take this all in? How do you make any sense of it?

The fault or guilt is not only with those Polish neighbors–or all the Poles who stood by, did nothing or even participated in the slaughter–but with humanity writ large.  We can see today how the world can stand by while a latter-day genocide unfolds.  Unlike in WWII, when media had built-in technological limitations (though there were eyewitness accounts provided to the Allies), there is no such excuse today. We have images of the dead and dying broadcast every day–even every hour of the day.  Yet somehow we are powerless to stop it.  We are helpless. We despair.  But no one else does.  We don’t know what it will take.  How do you get an entire world to place its body between the victims and perpetrators and say no, no more?

Finally, we saw the Holocaust. We got about as close to it as you can without living (and dying) it.  Auschwitz is the poison fruit of anti-Semitism.   Today’s ersatz version of anti-Semitism has nothing to do with that.  The performative outrage. The complaints about feeling “discomfort” or “threat” or “unsafe” are invented emotions disconnected from any historical reality.  You want to know what anti-Semitism really is? You want to know what unsafe is? Go to any of the town squares we visited where tens of thousands were rousted from their homes, torn from their loved ones, shipped to Auschwitz in cattle cars and gassed.

The notion that some Jews deserve some special consideration due to their Zionist sensitivities, makes a mockery of real Jewish suffering.  Tell me how “from the river to the sea” is as threatening to Jews as a canister of Zyklon B.  Tell me how use of the term “genocide” regarding Gaza is as threatening as the suffering of Holocaust victims who actually suffered one.  You’ll have to pardon me for my own sense of outrage at this outright desecration of the real victims and their suffering.