Family November 7, 2014 by Ariel Goldstein

Like many Jews of the Western Hemisphere, three of my grandparents were Polish.  They didn’t have great memories of the place where they were born.  But twenty years ago I made the choice to visit Poland. I never imagined that I would return five times more.

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At the Warsaw JCC!

One of the more important trips to Poland took place this summer when   I traveled with the JCCSF and Lehrhaus Judaica to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. 

My maternal grandfather, Zeev Lamstein, was born in Warsaw in 1904 and arrived in Uruguay in the early ‘30s; he passed away in Montevideo in 1959. His family lived in Warsaw for more than 200 years and all the relatives are buried at Gensha cemetery in Warsaw, the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe.

Although Warsaw was almost destroyed during the World War II, the Jewish Cemetery remained intact. With the Jewish community decimated, however, more than 200,000 tombstones were abandoned and the cemetery fell into in disrepair.  For many decades following the war, finding a specific tomb was almost impossible.

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Ariel Goldstein and his mother, Frusa Lamstein, at the grave of her great grandparents in Warsaw.

A few years ago a project was created to map the cemetery and locate the tombs. The program successfully identified more than 70,000 stones; among them were those of my great great-grandparents Yehuda Yosef Lamstein (1850-1919) and Leah Hadas Lamstein (1851-1930). This was the third time I visited the cemetery, but it was very special, because I did it with their great granddaughter Frusa Lamstein  -- my mother.

My connection with this cemetery goes even farther.  The same project that located my relatives’ stones also identified the grave of my wife’s great grandfather, Menachem Mendel Lipszyc (1874-1934), which I visited two years ago.

This summer, the JCCSF/Lehrhaus family group said Kaddish for my relatives at both sites, with both my mother and father present.

After the trip to Warsaw I continued on a family “roots” trip. The next stop was Leipzig in Germany. My paternal grandmother Ella Friedmann was born there in 1907 and arrived in Uruguay in 1942, where she died in 1977. Her father (my great-grandfather) Markus Friedmann (1875-1938) is buried in Leipzig and I visited him for the second time.  But just as in Warsaw, the occasion was special because I did it with his grandson Reginald Goldstein, my father.

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Ariel and his father, Reginald Goldstein, visit the grave of Ariel's great grandfather, Markus Friedmann, in Leipzig, Germany.

Feature image is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

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