April 10, 2015

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Genealogy, Hungary, Holocaust Series Part One ‘Wrenching Journey: Where No Tourist Goes’ April 10, 2015

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Where no tourist goes

PAGE 13

Wrenching Journey: Seeking the site of my great-grandmother’’s death

INSIDE

SHANA R. GOLDBERG •• PAGE 8

Business .......................................13 Classifieds ....................................19 Columnists ...............................4, 23 Editorials ......................................24 Leisure..........................................12 Obituaries.....................................20 Readers Speak................................5 Shmoos.........................................22 Super Shabbat ..............................15 Synagogues & Calendar ..............21 Today’’s Life...........................10, 11

Framework for Iran nuclear deal

Best possible or worst possible?

Weekly Calendar 14

LOCAL EVENTS Survivors Memorial ‘‘70 Years: Remembering the Past and Celebrating the Future,’’ the annual Holocaust survivors’’ memorial featuring first-, second-, and thirdgeneration speakers and keynoter Rabbi Avraham Mintz, is Sunday, April 12, 4 p.m., at the JCC.

Governor’’s Holocaust program The Governor’’s 34th annual Holocaust remembrance program hosted by the ADL and highlighting Mengele twin Eva Mozes Kor, who will speak on ‘‘Survival and Forgiveness,’’ is Thursday, April 16, 6 p.m., at Temple Emanuel.

JNF annual breakfast Ron Dermer, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, is the guest speaker at the JNF breakfast on Friday, April 17, 8 a.m., at the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum.

President Barack Obama speaks April 2 in the Rose Garden about the framework agreement with Iran.

Obama rejects Iranian recognition of Israel

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ASHINGTON (JTA) — President Barack Obama dismissed a demand by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that a nuclear deal with Iran include its recognition of Israel. Please see NO RECOGNITION on Page 17

Hate mail in Boulder Powder at JCC, Har HaShem —— not toxic By CHRIS LEPPEK IJN Assistant Editor

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nvelopes containing white powder — one of them accompanied by a note saying “your (sic) have enemies” — forced the closure of two Boulder Jewish institutions this week. The Boulder JCC and Congregation Har Hashem received the envelopes on Monday, April 6, and both institutions immediately evacuated and closed their buildings and contacted emergency responders. When a JCC staffer opened a “susPlease see ENVELOPES on Page 16

Iran, six world powers, agree to an Iranian nuclear ‘‘framework’’

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ASHINGTON (JTA) — A framework for a nuclear deal with Iran has been reached, but significant hurdles remain. At a White House news conference on April 2, President Barack Obama said that the US and the five other world powers negotiating in Switzerland had reached a “historic understanding with Iran on a deal that, if fully implemented, would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” The deadline for a comprehensive agreement is June 30. “It is a good deal” that would “cut off every pathway” to an Iran nuclear weapon, Obama said of the deal reached in Lausanne two days after the negotiators’ selfimposed deadline. “If this framework leads to a final comprehensive deal, it will make our country, our allies and our world safer.” Cautioning, “Nothing is agreed till everything is agreed,” Obama provided the basic outlines of the accord: • Iran will not develop weapons-grade plutonium, and the nuclear facility at Arak will be dismantled and its fuel shipped out of the country. • Iran’s installed centrifuges will be reduced by two-thirds, and Iran won’t enrich uranium using advanced centrifuges for at least 10 years. • International inspectors will

have unprecedented access to Iranian nuclear facilities and their entire supply chain. In exchange, Iran will get relief from certain US and UN sanctions, and the relief will be phased in as Iran takes steps to meet its end of the bargain. If Iran violates the deal, the sanctions will “snap back,” Obama said. The president did not specify what sanctions would be lifted, which would remain, who would determine whether Iran violated the deal, and by what criteria would violatons be measured. Obama said the deal ensures that Iran’s “breakout time” for acquiring a nuclear weapon is at least a year and imposes strict limitations on Iran’s nuclear program for at least 15 years.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Schumer backs Congressional review of Iran deal

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ASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Chuck Schumer is backing a proposal that would allow Congress to approve or reject any deal signed with Iran on curbing its nuclear program. Please see SCHUMER on Page 17

Israeli Arab blasts ISIS Blames Arab countries for Palestinians’’ deaths

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nticipating criticism from overseas and in Washington, Obama spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on April 2

ERUSALEM (JTA) — ArabIsraeli lawmaker Ahmed Tibi called the Islamic State takeover of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria “a crime against humanity.” Tibi, a member of the Arab Joint List party, said on Monday, April 6, that the international community, and Arab countries specifically, bear responsibility for allowing the violence in Yarmouk to occur. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Islamic State took over about 90% of the camp in the last week.

Please see NUCLEAR DEAL on Page 17

Please see YARMOUK on Page 16

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8 • INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS • April 10, 2015

NEWS: The Holocaust in Europe

Where no tourist goes

Wrenching Journey: Seeking the site of my great-grandmother’s death

THE TRACKS I feel sick. These are the tracks that carried Jews in that building to that place — Auschwitz. By SHANA R. GOLDBERG IJN Assistant Publisher I. Desolation

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n 2012 I travelled to a region of Hungary where no tourist goes. It is nigh impossible to convey the desolation of this region, just north of Hungary’s second largest city, Miskolc, and stretching toward the Slovakian border. Despite what news we’re fed about the successes of the EU, Europe is not equally prosperous. Far from it. I travelled to this depressed region to track down the final resting place of my great-grandmother, known to me as Shaindel “Jenny” Marcus. (What could the Jenny be short for, I wondered? Jennifer is certainly not a traditional Hungarian

or Bubbie as we called her, who fled to the United States as a teenager just before the outbreak of war, never visited her mother’s resting place. Bubbie returned to Hungary twice after the war ended and prayed at her father’s gravestone; my greatgrandfather was, in retrospect, lucky enough to die of natural causes, although of course at the time of his death it was devastating for the family. But Bubbie never prayed at her mother’s burial site. You see, during the war, in 1943 or 1944, Bubbie’s mother left their family home in a village near the Romanian border to stay with her other daughter, Esther, who lived in the town of Edelény, close to the Slovakian border.

Edelény neighbors and all of her remaining family in Hungary. After the war, my grandmother was informed of her mother’s passing by Auschwitz survivors who had been together with Shaindel in the Edelény ghetto. But where she was laid to rest my grandmother never knew. Bubbie felt an immense relief that her mother died “naturally,” but not knowing where her mother was buried – that left a gaping hole in her heart. No family member had ever said kaddish at Shaindel’s grave. In 2012 Bubbie was in her early nineties. Though she desperately wanted to make another trip to Hungary, it was too late for her. Like any

nonagenarian, her stamina and mobility had decreased, though she remained present and engaged, and never lost that twinkle in her blue eyes. So I decided to make the trip, to do this mitzvah for my grandmother; for her to have, in her lifetime, the peace of knowing that someone had visited her mother’s resting place, that someone had prayed at her mother’s grave. II. The Ledger

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y 2012 the region I travelled to was quintessential Jobbik territory, Jobbik is Hungary’s extreme right-wing political party known for its anti-

Semitic and anti-Gypsy rhetoric, its popularity fuelled in this region by high unemployment rates and tensions with a large ethnic minority (primarily Gypsy Roma) population. Later during that trip, when I met my genealogy contact in Budapest, he told me that the region was plagued by third-generation unemployment — a term utterly foreign to me. Apparently there are families where grandfather, father and son have never held jobs. The entire concept of gainful employment is as foreign to them as their inherited idleness was to me. In Edelény, only a quarter of the population was employed, and the

The hope — if one can use such a word on such a dispiriting journey . . . name. After a fair amount of online research I got no further; it was only when I saw her death certificate that I learned her Hungarian name, the beautifully regal Eugenia.) The hope — if one can use such a word on such a dispiriting journey — was that I would find a gravesite for my great-grandmother, a Holocaust victim who perished in 1944, shortly before the mass transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where the vast majority were gassed upon arrival – my great aunt Esther and her family included. My grandmother Lila Silberstein,

During that extended visit, Edelény’s Jews – like all other Hungarian Jews — were rounded up and placed in ghettos, although I’m using the word ghetto only in the sense of confining people to a circumscribed area from which they were not permitted to leave. In Edelény, the “ghetto” was not a neighborhood, nor even a network of streets; it was the storehouse for a sugar factory, a factory that recalled the town’s once prosperous status. My great-grandmother Shaindel, for whom I am named, died in this ghetto and thus evaded the horrific destination that awaited her

THE CEMETERY, NEGLECTED Headstones defying gravity, whose inscriptions have faded with the passing of time.

April 10, 2015 • INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS • 9

NEWS: The Holocaust in Europe

Where no tourist goes

Wrenching Journey: Seeking the site of my great-grandmother’s death majority of those were government employees.The rest, I presume, were the proprietors of the few shops I saw. In this corner of Hungary, English is not spoken. Neither is Ger-

ably remain unresolved forever — of what their lives were like in that ghetto. I wandered around the cemetery, like so many others in Eastern Europe, overgrown and strewn

V. The Living

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here’s a certain dissonance unique to the countries of the former Communist bloc. The freshness of EU-funded pro-

once was, a community so large it demanded a synagogue with three levels of seating. And yet, despite the mass murder of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews, despite the growth of

longer characters from a lost time. They were her sisters, her brotherin-law, her nieces and nephews, her mother – and I had seen where they had suffered, on the way to their unspeakable demise.

With no minyan, with no other humans to be seen, in this bleak place devoid of any life, I recite kaddish. man, French, Italian nor, most surprising, Russian. Another myth blown away: Europe is multilingual. I arrived in Edelény after consulting with András, the genealogist in Budapest who assisted me immensely in all aspects of the trip, not least in navigating the bewlidering Hungarian language. He spoke with the municipal office and arranged for them to have the death certificate ready for me to view. He also put me in touch with the caretaker of Edelény’s Jewish cemetery. I did not, however, have the foresight to hire a guide. What ensued could almost be described as a comedy of errors, were the reason I was there not so serious. Despite András having called ahead, it appeared that the municipal staff had no idea why I was there. After trying several different languages, I finally had to get András on the phone, and he was able to facilitate our seeing the ledger in which Shaindel’s death was recorded. The cause of death given was a stroke, and the person who informed the authorities was Chaim Glattstein, a relative of my great aunt Esther’s husband and a member of the family who after the war had informed Bubbie of her mother’s death. III. Shaindel

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eeting with István, the Jewish cemetery caretaker, led to another communication breakdown. I had his cellphone, and after trying out a few languages we landed on Russian, of which I speak a smattering and he claimed to know. Well, if his Russian is considered proficient, I must be fluent! It’s the only time I’ve ever hung the phone up on someone, but we were literally speaking two different languages. Fortunately András, who’d given me István’s number, also told him why we had come to Edelény, so when we got to the cemetery István was waiting for us. By then, though, the writing was on the wall. I had no expectations of finding a proper burial site for Shaindel. András had explained to me the course of events for the doomed Edelény Jews, a timeline

with headstones defying gravity. Headstones from another era, whose inscriptions have all but disappeared with the passing of the centuries. There were Glattsteins, but I saw no marker for Shaindel Marcus, nor for anyone else who died in that war period. Were they buried elsewhere? Another mystery. I said a quiet prayer just in case Shaindel was laid to rest there in an unmarked grave. But I knew that if I wanted to pray at her burial site, I would have to search elsewhere. IV. Those Tracks

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here are tracks like these all over Europe. Train tracks that carried millions of Jews, millions of civilians, to their certain death.Tracks that once were used to transport goods, or passengers, usurped for the most horrific of purposes. The old beet sugar factory, now a lumberyard, remains standing, just yards from those tracks. Its lively turquoise green paint is discordant, such a clash with the desolate landscape, and with the tragedies the building’s walls once witnessed. When I see those empty tracks running parallel to the building that housed Edelény’s Jewish community, I begin to feel an intensely uncomfortable sensation overtaking me, body and mind. I feel sick. Those are the tracks. The tracks that carried Jews in that building to that place — Auschwitz. My mind floods with traumatizing sensation: my great aunt Esther, her husband, Ferenc, their four children, Edith, Kati, Zsofi and Tibi (just a one-year-old). I cannot picture the scene, but what I’m feeling is beyond imagery, it’s visceral. I cross the track to the sugar factory, which doesn’t look like it’s changed much since Shaindel died there. I peer in through a window and see a large, empty, oblong space. So this is the “ghetto”! It is not even worthy of the name. Just one room for all of Edelény’s Jews. My grandmother always believed that Shaindel died in the “ghetto” because of poor hygiene. It sound-

jects, such as newly-paved highways, clash with the pothole riddled country roads. The well invested cities belie the dire poverty of the smaller, less visited towns, such as Edelény. I recall an earlier trip to Vilnius, Lithuania. My husband and I visited a sculpture park outside of the city center that was poorly connected by public transport. We hitched a lift back into town, and despite not speaking a word of English, the Lithuanian driver managed to communicate to us where the funding stopped and began in Lithuania: on the city border. He chuckled as, shifting from a bumpy dirt road to a slick new one, he pointed to the sign denoting the official city boundary. So it was in Hungary, where the motorways were the best I’ve ever driven on. And Budapest, compared to Edelény, was immeasurably more vibrant, full of color and life. After the lifelessness of the journey to Edelény, Budapest was a breath of fresh air. Two cities in one, situated on either side of the Danube; Buda being the older side, dramatically built abutting a mountain face, and Pest, where modern Hungary was born. A bifurcated city for what would be a bifurcated trip. We spent a wonderful Shabbat and Sunday in this city that recalls a far grander time, when Budapest was one of the seats of the AustroHungarian Empire. The city is laid out in a way remarkably similar to Vienna, with wide boulevards, a ring road and a large public garden, which in Budapest houses the medicinal waters of the Szechenyi pools, built in a neo-Baroque style. (No visit to Hungary would be complete without partaking of the healing waters for which the county is famous.) Architecturally, Budapest’s highlight is the plethora of Art Nouveau, from large structures like the Museum of Applied Arts whose roof is a riot of green and gold mosaic to the smaller design elements and figurines found on the facades of buildings across the city. Budapest’s many synagogues are integral to the city’s beauty; the most famous, of course, is the

Jobbik — despite everything — Jewish life thrives in Hungary. There are many active synagogues, denominations, kosher bakeries and restaurants, Jewish education, university programs in Judaic studies. Hungarians even have their own brand of Judaism: Neolog, founded in the late nineteenth century and still practiced at the Dohány. It’s an unusual combination of Orthodox and German Reform ritual. There is no mechitzah, yet the seating is separate. There is a full choir and organ, yet the liturgy is Orthodox and services are conducted solely in Hebrew. As far as I know, it’s unique to Hungary. VI. Time is running out

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ut there in the Hungarian countryside, there was no clarifying moment for me. There was no epiphany, no big discovery, no mystery solved. Instead, there was an experience, and a far deeper understanding of my grandmother’s trajectory. Out there in the barren countryside it hit me just how difficult it must have been for my grandmother to leave her native land as a young 19 year old. She went from that quiet countryside to the boisterous, foreign melting pot of New York City. In Hungary I began to grasp what it was my grandmother had lost. Her family were no longer just names, distant figures for children to be named for, people who lived only in her memory, but real people who lived, worked and breathed where I had stood. An abstract link was now tangible. I never found my great-grandmother’s grave, but I was able to give my grandmother a sense of peace, a small amount of comfort, that someone returned to her beloved mother’s and beloved sister’s last home. I think that for my grandmother my being there was a testament to their existence. Those people she had always spoken of, had mourned for decades, were no

And I felt connected to my namesake, the great-grandmother that had never seemed real, the woman in the black and white photograph with the gentle smile. As I got older, I knew that time was running out. I determined that visiting Hungary was something I could, and should, do for Bubbie. I didn’t necessarily follow the path my grandmother envisioned, but her love never wavered and I, in turn, always had a deep love for her and her story, her history. As a child her old photograph album filled with black and white photos kept me rapt for hours. My grandmother had high standards — specific ones, too — and she had no qualms about letting people know when those standards were not being met. But toward the end of her life she developed a humor about it. On my last visit to her, she told me I looked wonderful but also made a comment about something I was wearing. As soon as she said the words, her mouth turned into a selfdeprecating smile, with that ever present twinkle glinting in her eye. It felt to me that she realized, in that moment, how unimportant that small criticism was, and decided instead just to enjoy the visit. I learned one word of Hungarian on my travels there: Köszönöm. Thank you. (Actually, I was saying this word incorrectly throughout the trip, but my mother put me right when I returned!) It’s the word that encapsulates how I felt at the conclusion of my trip. Grateful that I could make this journey, no matter how emotionally harrowing it was. Grateful for my grandmother, for her courage to flee the only home she’d known, grateful for her love and devotion to those brutally taken from her. Grateful that I could do this for her before she left this world on August 19, 2014. Köszönöm. Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].

So this is the ‘ghetto’! It is not even worthy of the name. that paralleled that of Hungary’s other myriad small communities: The Jews were rounded up, placed into a makeshift ghetto for three weeks before being shipped off to the larger, regional ghetto, in their case in Miskolc. From there, the trains to Auschwitz departed. By the time Shaindel died, it was unlikely that any Jews, whether there was a chevra kadisha or not, had access to things like the town cemetery, which was far from the ghetto. The fact that her death was recorded at all is surprising, but leaves open the mystery — which will prob-

ed far-fetched, the naïve wishes of a daughter unable to face the truth; but now, seeing the place, and imagining the cramped living conditions there, my grandmother’s instinct may have been correct. I slowly tread the earth surrounding the sugar factory. I’m walking on hallowed ground, for I have no doubt that it is here, under this earth, across from those vile tracks, that my great-grandmother lays. And so, with no minyan, with no other humans to be seen, in this bleak place devoid of any life, together with my husband, I recite the kaddish for her.

Dohány Synagogue, built in the Moorish style that many late-19th century European synagogues adopted. The synagogue, Europe’s largest, comes upon you unawares, and its size takes your breath away. Its grandiosity serves as a tragic reminder of the community that

THE LEDGER The cause of death recorded was a stroke.

Genealogy, Hungary, Holocaust Series Part Two ‘Searching for Life’ December 4, 2015

INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS

DECEMBER 4, 2015

Literary Supplement Searching for Life Genealogy is more than a tree BY SHANA R. GOLDBERG

History is a glimpse into bygone lives. Genealogy tries to bring them back. I.

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here’s no place like home, as Dorothy famously proclaimed in “The Wizard of Oz,” and yet, conversely, like the title of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. Dorothy’s violent uprooting from her farm, chased by an evil nemesis, her surreal travels through a cyclone that ultimately landed her in a Goldene Medinah, could be a metaphor for European Holocaust survivors who, following their cataclysm, made a new home in the United States and other corners around the globe. Their journey to Oz was not an illusion, or a nightmare, from which one could awake. Unlike Dorothy they could tap their heels ad infinitum but would never be transported back to their pre-catastrophe lives. No matter how deeply they felt, like Dorothy, that there was no place like home, Holocaust survivors were forced to inhabit Wolfe’s world, where no one can return home again — since home, as they knew it, had ceased to exist. The people of Edelény, Hungary, it seems, tried their hardest to create a space somewhere in between. II.

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n April 10, 2015, in the IJN issue preceding Yom HaShoah, I wrote an essay about my travels to Hungary a few years earlier in search of my great-grandmother Shaindel Marcus’ burial site. As I set off on my trip, I considered genealogy primarily an avocation of dates and lists. By the time the implications of my trip unfolded, I learned that genealogy is so much more. Shaindel’s daughter, my grandmother Lila Silberstein, was a Holocaust refugee who left her family behind in eastern Hungary, never to see them again. After the war, someone wrote to tell her of her mother’s

EDELÉNY What are the chances of a Jewish community of a mere 50 families — destroyed in the Holocaust — finding two local touchstones? demise in the ghetto of Edelény, where she was on an extended visit with her married daughter, Esther. While my journey did not end in a fairy tale full circle, I felt a sense of accomplishment, especially after I spoke to my grandmother about the trip and presented her with her mother’s death certificate, nearly 70 years after the fact. The mystery of my greatgrandmother’s final days remained, yet, for me, the story was over — or at least on hold. Despite not fulfilling its initial goal, my journey to Hungary was far from fruitless. Writing about my trip connected me in a new way to people I had known nearly my whole life and ultimately led me to contact the one woman still alive who knew the family whose story I was seeking. On the Saturday evening after the article came out, I got

Esther Marcus Klein

a call from my mother: “Did you see Dov Mogyoros in synagogue? He was looking for you; you’ll never believe it — his family is from Edelény!” The Mogyoros family, whom we have known since settling on Denver’s East Side in 1983, is from Edelény? Of course, I knew they were Hungarian; the whole family, including all four sons, is fluent in that mystifying Magyar tongue. They also have that genteel Hungarian je ne sais quoi. But from Edelény — the same tiny town of around 50 Jewish families where my Great Aunt Esther had lived? A remarkable coincidence, indeed. III.

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n the meantime, other extraordinary developments were underway. In the mid-2000s, my mother had asked me to search the Yad Vashem database for information about my grandmother’s beloved sister, Esther Marcus Klein, and her children. I am a lover of history and of genealogy and this was the moment that my journey into my grandmother’s family took off. As a child, I had been mesmerized by my grandmother’s black-andwhite photo album stored in the bottom drawer of a cupboard, a relic of another time, filled with unknown stories about unknown people. Tragically, through Yad Vashem, I found testimonies of Esther’s death, along with the deaths of her four children.1 Date of death: 1944. Place of death: Camp, Auschwitz. Signed: Miriam Glattstein. Address: A neighborhood in Jerusalem . . . around the corner from where I lived as a young child. I told myself I would try to find this Miriam Glattstein. But then I told myself there’s no way she’s living there anymore; in fact, what is the likelihood that she is even still alive? (Turns out I was wrong on both counts.) Then, on my trip to Hungary, I discovered that one Chaim Glattstein had reported

Esther Marcus Klein and Ferenc Klein, subjects of search. my great-grandmother’s death to the municipality. Back home after my trip, my grandmother confirmed that Miriam Glattstein was the person who informed her about the tragic demise of the Edelény branch of her family. Somehow, I was led to believe or assumed that Miriam Glattstein was the sister of my grandmother’s brother-in-law, Ferenc Klein. This mistaken notion cemented my assumption that Miriam Glattstein was no longer living, as my greatuncle would have been well

past 100. Publishing the article rekindled my interest in finding Miriam Glattstein or, at the very least, her family. With the help of online tools I began to reconstruct the family tree. I made an important discovery: Miriam Glattstein was not the sister of Ferenc, but his niece. My stomach dropped. Suddenly, there was a chance she was living. I posted a few notes on genealogy message boards, See GENEALOGY on Page 3

December 4, 2015 • INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS — Chanukah Edition • Section C • 3

Searching for Life GENEALOGY from Page 1

and an email came back: “Miriam Glattstein is still living. She has two daughters. I will pass on your information to them.” Tears came to my eyes; was this really happening? The one person who knew what hap-

Kati and Zsofi. In fact, Miriam’s mother performed the bris! There is the image she will never forget: riding in a train with Esther and her four children, en route to Auschwitz. “None of them returned,” says Miriam now, somberly, more than 70 years later, just a few

Overlapping lives: Memories of two families intersect 70 years later pened to my grandmother’s beloved sister — she’s alive. Just recalling that moment now, I am struck by the same gratitude to G-d, to fate, to whatever it might be, that my story did not become an “if only . . . ” When I think that I could have missed this opportunity . . . I emailed Miriam’s daughter, Irit, immediately; we settled on her writing in Hebrew, me in English. Her mother was keen to speak with me and share her memories. We set up a time to talk. I spoke to Miriam Glattstein, both of us to some degree in broken Hebrew. She remembered my family well. She remembered my greatgrandmother, Shaindel, for whom I’m named, from her visits to Edelény before and during the war. Miriam’s recollections matched perfectly with my grandmother’s description of her mother: quiet, composed, a loving mother and grandmother, always dressed in black (her husband had died years earlier). She recalled the joy that the Klein family (my Great Aunt Esther and her husband Ferenc) felt when they had a boy, Tibor, after three girls, Edith,

months short of celebrating her 90th birthday.

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o find someone still living who knew my great-grandmother reinforced my passion for family history. From my childhood I loved hearing stories about Grandpa Harry (Harry M. Harris), who grew up in the Cleveland Orphan Home and came to Colorado to strike gold. Or Grandpa Yechiel Goldberg, a Lithuanian immigrant who died of the Spanish influenza just after WW I, here in Denver. But I’ve come to a conclusion about family history: Truly to feel a connection to someone whom I’ve never met, I need to meet someone who actually knew this person. And now, here is a person, Miriam Glattstein, who knew — and most fondly recollects — Esther and all her four children. They were real. With Holocaust victims, it can be especially hard to make them come alive. So many died young, before their personalities were fully formed. Others perished along with their entire families, rendering it impossible to know who they really were. The first time my great aunt’s

A signpost marking the boundary of the small town of Edelény, Hungary. children became real to me was when I read their names on the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony. They were no longer an amorphous group of victims, but individuals, each with his or her own name. And the nicknames! Kati (Katherine), Zsofi (Zsofia) and Tibi (Tibor). It was clear that whoever filled out these forms knew these children well, and that these children were beloved by their parents, their names diminutive tokens of affection. Their tragic fate in the Holocaust cruelly robbed them of the opportunity to live their lives, and robbed their future extended family, myself included, of ever knowing them — or, even worse, of even knowing what we were missing. The Holocaust transformed them for future generations into statistics, numbers. For me, this genealogy journey brought them back to life and gave them identity. My grandmother, Lila, who passed away on August 19, 2014, had been the last known living link to her sister Esther and to Esther’s eldest child Edith. It’s

The building that housed the synagogue of Edelény, pictured left, survived the war, but was torn down in the 1980s. Courtesy, the Edelény Kehila Links website, maintained by descendents of Edelény families.

unclear whether Lila met Esther’s second child, but she certainly never met the youngest two, who were born after my grandmother fled Europe. When Miriam Glattstein recollected babysitting these four children, the affection discernable in her voice, I, for the first time, recognized these children, my first cousins once removed, as real, living people. They are no longer forgotten. IV.

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y the time I sat down with Aniko and Dr. Miguel Mogyoros to hear their story of Edelény, this remote northern Hungarian town had become a familiar place, and not just because I had visited it. The Mogyoroses knew the Glattsteins, the family to whom I am related by marriage; in fact, the Mogyoroses knew just about every Jewish family that lived in Edelény. It turns out that Edelény was incredibly closeknit and the families who managed to survive kept in very close contact following the war, across the continents. “Listening to all the people from Edelény, you would have thought it was the middle of the universe,” recalls Aniko with a chuckle. “I mean they talked about Edelény as the most wonderful place.” One only has to visit Edelény today to see the humor in the statement — Edelény has slipped far, far from its former glory days — but Aniko’s perception is testament to the larger-than-life role a place can play in family lore. Miguel Mogyoros’ father, Alejandro (Sandor in the original Hungarian), was from Edelény.

Shana R. Goldberg

So is Aniko’s mother, Aranka Jonap née Szoffer, who now lives in Denver. Miguel and Aniko are Edelény originals. Growing up, Aniko in Miskolc, Hungary, Miguel in Mexico City, they each heard endless tales of this fabled town: summer swims in the Bodva River, the coal mine that Aniko’s father owned, one-room schoolhouses, streets inhabited by large families with children of the same age — and the corresponding friendships. The idyll they described

With Holocaust victims, it can be especially hard to make them come alive reminded me of my grandmother’s tales of her hometown, Nyírmeggyes: her father’s successful farm; cherry orchards surrounding their home; close childhood friends down the dirt road. It seems almost a bucolic existence, in my grandmother’s case marred by her father’s untimely passing. Indeed, it was a pastoral life, because many Hungarian (and other European) Jews, unlike most Jews today, did not live urban lives. Their lives were of small villages and the countryside, for some about local industry, for others agrarian. Twists of fate wind through the Mogyoros’ story: Miguel’s mother, originally from Slovakia, ended up in Edelény because war broke out and the borders were sealed. Unrequited love See GENEALOGY on Page 4

4 • Section C • INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS — Chanukah Edition • December 4, 2015

Searching for Life GENEALOGY from Page 3

some time before the war motivated Miguel’s oldest uncle, José, to seek his fortunes in the new world, a fortuitous decision that later served to rescue five of Miguel’s aunts and uncles from the Holocaust. (After the war, José brought two more sib-

Wherever you went, the first thing you did was find people from Edelény lings to Mexico, one of them Miguel’s father.) “My oldest uncle, in ’38, went back to Edelény to visit,” recounts Miguel. The writing was literally on the wall. In Germany, this uncle had seen “signs about no Jews and no dogs allowed on the train, so he started bringing out all the siblings from the oldest to the youngest,” one of the sisters even emigrating as a mail order bride. Others from Edelény wound up in Mexico: Weisser, the teacher in the one-room Jewish schoolhouse; the Weinsteins, greengrocers in Hungary, who then ran a supermarket chain in their adopted homeland. In total, four Edelény families settled in Mexico; others emigrated to Israel, the United States and even Australia. The names of these Edelény families trip off the tongues of both Aniko and Miguel. They were, and are, household names. “Every time they got together, your mother and my father,” says Miguel, “they would talk about this one, what happened to that one . . . ” “There was a bond between these Edelény people,” says Aniko. “Wherever you went, the first thing you did was to find people from Edelény and look them up. “I guess [Miguel’s] father hadn’t heard from my mother since before the war; when he heard that we were in New York [Aniko’s family escaped Hungary during the 1956 uprising], he looked us up.” Families in Edelény were close, but not related. “The closest thing,” says Aniko, “was that [Miguel] and I got married.” Before the war, she says, it was not accepted that people within the same town would marry

The Mogyoros family, 1928. Seated at the front left is Shani, or Sandor, Miguel Mogyoros’ father. Courtesy, the Edelény Kehila Links website, maintained by descendents of Edelény families.

each other. By the time Aniko and Miguel met, years after the war and the destruction it wrought, “[Miguel’s] uncle was so happy when we got engaged.” For Miguel, visiting Edelényites was part and parcel of his young adulthood. On family trips from Mexico City to New York, he and his father would make the rounds, from the Upper West Side to Williamsburg, tracking down former neighbors, from a chasidic family to a single man. When Miguel attended yeshiva in Israel, his father visited. Once again, they set off: a chasidic family in Jerusalem, a Glattstein in Haifa, and, intersecting with my story, another Glattstein in Jerusalem who ran a parfumerie on Jaffa Road, which I was able to later inform Miguel was run by Miriam and her husband. Miriam, in turn, remembers the Mogyoroses visiting the shop.

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Miriam Glattstein, in her Jerusalem home.

he Mogyoroses have made several trips back to Edelény: Aniko once as a child together with her parents, to visit her grandfather’s grave before the family fled Hungary; the two of them during the communist era; and later as a family with their four sons. The swimming hole where their parents once frolicked during summer days is now a trickle; the majestic castle was transformed during communist times into a military barracks,

then later used to rehouse displaced populations; family homes have been torn down. I witnessed that economic deprivation on my visit to Edelény in 2012. It’s a town now stripped of all industry and sustenance, with third-generation unemployment and empty streets.2 But the Edelény of yore lives in the memories of the Mogy-

several years back for a muchneeded cemetery repair. This first generation, in turn, transmitted the devotion to Edelény to their progeny — witness the interest from Aniko and Miguel’s son Dov in the Edelény connection. “There was something about that town that people loved . . . the people who were from there, or maybe it was just the

To feel a true connection to someone I’ve never met, I need to meet someone who actually knew this person oros family. This small Hungarian town, with only 50 families, had a surprisingly strong Jewish infrastructure: a cheder [boys’ school], a girls’ school, a yeshiva. Most of the families were religious, some were not, one or two were chasidic. Notwithstanding small town gossip, everyone, according to the stories the Mogyoroses heard as children, got along. Most families were in business — chiefly textiles, coal or lumber. People looked out for each other, says Aniko. Miriam Glattstein’s recollections mirrored this sentiment. She told me that her Uncle Ferenc came to Edelény after his brother-inlaw, Miriam’s father (probably the manager at the coal mine Aniko’s father owned), offered to help him find work. According to Miriam, her father was true to his word, and Ferenc ran a good trade in Edelény. This sense of community was passed on to the children. The descendants of the surviving Edelény families raised funds

memories,” says Aniko. “They had wonderful memories. I have never, ever heard of anyone speaking badly about this town. When they got together, they had nothing but accolades.” V. ebster’s dictionary defines genealogy as “the history of a particular family showing how the different members of the family are related to each other.” Yet it is so much more than pedigree. Genealogy is an exploration into people: who they were, how they lived, their surroundings, their relationships. It is a glimpse into bygone days and lives. Genealogy, I have learned, leads to discovery, to seeing old friends in new ways, to connecting with people long thought passed, to forming new relationships with distant relatives. Contrary to how I felt following my trip to Hungary, I know

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now that this journey is not over, and probably never will be. So much remains to be uncovered, not only from my grandmother’s story, but, now that my interest is kindled, from my other family lines. Constructing the family tree is only the beginning; the real journey lies in traversing its branches. Much like the eponymous Velveteen Rabbit, the people and places of the past only become real when we treat them as such.

This essay is dedicated to the memories of Esther and Ferenc Klein, and their children Edith, Kati, Zsofi and Tibi, all of whom have no descendants. May they all rest in peace and may their names be remembered. NOTES 1. Esther’s husband Ferenc Klein died of typhus in Buchenwald soon after the war ended. Like thousands of others, liberation for him did not mean survival. He had two brothers; neither of them survived the Holocaust. No one remained from that branch of the Klein family. 2. On their first trip to Edelény, the Mogyoroses had difficulty locating the cemetery. Someone suggested they stop someone older and ask. The person they stopped, who directed them to the overgrown cemetery, had worked in Aniko’s grandfather’s mine before the war. When he left them at the cemetery, he said, “Ever since they took the Jews, this place has gone downhill.”

Shana R. Goldberg is assistant publisher of the INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS. Copyright © 2015 by Shana R. Goldberg. She may be reached at [email protected].