A RESOURCE FOR SHARING FAMILY STORIES
Many of us have heard stories in our families that we may not have appreciated while that family member is still living and able to shed more light on the story. This blog is a place where those stories can live on.
If you have relatives' stories or memories that you'd like to share, please post it here, along with any photographs or other media. Please add tags to indicate the location (Poland, Russia, Germany, even Oklahoma) that your family defines as its 'Origin' -- and there can be more than one origin, such as "Poland," "Cuba," "New Jersey") so that, over time, I can create a Directory of origins, and future posters can look for other stories that may pertain to the same time and place as their own family's history.
For years, I've heard about my Jewish maternal great grandfather, Lesender (or Sender) Hadad. He was one of the founders of the city of Petach Tikvah (also Petah Tikvah) in Israel, which was, at that time, Palestine. I know he was originally from Russia, and his name wasn't Hadad, but was adopted, to be accepted by the Arabs. Apparently, he he irrigated his land and started an orange orchard. There is a museum in Petach Tikvah, with a statue of him and some items that belonged to him. Many of his descendants still live there. While his son, my grandfather, left behind some disjointed journals which speak of Sender, it's impossible to find any written information of him, except in Hebrew, which I don't read.
ReplyDeleteWhat year did he immigrate to Palestine, and where did he come from? (Is Sender a Hungarian name?) My father's family left Germany just before the war. While my father went to the U.S., some of his cousins went to Israel, and they founded Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi in the North. One became a cabinet minister (transportation), and his son was Speaker for the Knesset. Another cousin was a coach of the Israeli Olympic volleyball team. I only learned a few years ago when a cousin did a family tree that my father had grown up with loads of cousins in Kiel, Germany (I never heard him talk about them), but they never left Germany, and perished.
ReplyDeleteSender, which is a shortened form of Lesender, was a derivative of Alexander, but they were originally from Russia. I don't know exactly when he arrived in Palestine.
ReplyDeleteIs the kibbutz founded by your father's cousins still in operation? Wow... Speaker for the Knesset and Minister of Transportation - pretty high level posts!
Very sad about the cousins who perished in Germany.
Yes, Tirat Tzvi is very active. They're big exporters of olives and salami.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago, I started having vivid dreams about picking cotton (and I'm not from the south). Of course, my family thought I was crazy. Then I met a woman at my swim workout who had grown up on a kibbutz that was on the same long stretch as the ones my cousins founded, on which I had spent a year between high school and college. I said, "Let me ask you a crazy question: Did Tirat Tzvi have cotton fields?" Yup, they did. I only remembered picking olives and working in the kindergarten, but I guess I also worked picking cotton, which is how I remembered that the leaves that hold the cotton had little spines and were sticky, and there was a hard seed in the middle of the cotton (which is what, I suppose, the cotton gin was designed to remove). I also remembered what it felt like to work bent over for so many hours a day, which I surely couldn't do any longer. But at least on that count I wasn't crazy!
It's amazing how how ancestors memories live on in us and are often experienced in our dream state and waking deja vous experiences too. They can also give prophetic dreams.
ReplyDeleteI remember dreaming that I was in St Jan's,the major cathedral in 's-Hertenobosch in Brabant, Netherlands. Here, I met up with my Great Grandmother Catharina Elisabeth Van Mulbregt(nee Deckers). She was very glad to see me and gave me a ring and told me that I was the one to reveal the family secrets. The pipe organ began to play and light shone through the stained-glass windows. It was a magical moment. Up until that time, I didn't know much about my ancestors -because there had been so much movement due to persecution, war and poverty- and I guess she was wanting acknowledgement. In my life she triggered a search that has ended in an 85000 family geneology, tracing our ancestors right back to Mesopotamia, Israel and Egypt.
Wow, can you share some of what you learned about your ancestors?
ReplyDelete