Bina

From time to time I wonder why I bother keeping this blog up. Last week I was reminded why.

I had just received an email from yet another brother/sister of Jewish Przemysl looking for any traces of their family that still may exist. One of the items she forwarded was the birth certificate of her Przemysl father.  I looked over it, marveling as I always do at the tight calligraphy of pre-typewriter data collection.  Then I saw something that I had not seen before.

Under Column 10 "akuszera," (midwife) was the name "Bina Silberman." Bina, born Blima Malz, happens to be my great-grandmother. 

Bina was, and still is, the stuff of deep family lore. She was always described as not a midwife, but as the midwife of Przemysl. She delivered everyone's grandparents. Of course, there was no picture, no real sense of who she might have been as a person. When I wrote my novel about pre-WWI Przemysl, The 11th of Av, she became one of my main characters in the form of Gitla, the town's mystical midwife.

Dig deep enough and I'm related to you. Dig deeper and our distant relations were best friends. Your grandfather sold mine their dairy. Mine made your family's armoire. That's why we all search and keep searching, because is some way, we are all connected.

Found Missing matzevot in Przemysl

This is an update to an earlier post on Jeff:. Does anyone know the answer to his three questions, below?

The photo below was taken in the Przemysl cemetery in 1949. It shows the matzevot of my great grandmother, Rachela Nadel (died 1944), and my her nephew, Tzwi Leizer Rosiner (died 1943 and interred in Jewish cemetery in 1949).

Last week I sent someone to the cemetery and he located the matzevah of Tzwi Leizer Rosiner. It is clear from the photos attached to this email that the matzevah had been toppled off of its original location and when the cemetery was renovated the matzevah was accidentally placed on the foundation of another grave, just off to the left-hand side. In other words, the Rosiner matzevah is now on the grave of another person. Please see the photos attached.

You can see from the 1949 photo the metal enclosure/fence of the other grave which is still present today. Unfortunately, my great grandmother's matzevah is no longer there.

The questions that I have are as follows:

1. Do we need to contact anyone to obtain permission to remove the Rosiner matzevah from its current location and place it back where it should be?

2. Do we need to contact anyone to obtain permission to place a new matzevah up where my great grandmother's matzevah used to be?

3. Can you recommend anyone in Poland who I can hire to create new matzevah with hebrew letters and move the Rosiner matzevah?

Best regards/Kol Tuv,

Jeff

Looking for family Stein

Dear Sir,

I am a daughter of Stefan Stein, a Holocaust survivor born in Przemyśl (Poland). My father’s mother, four brothers and a sister were killed in Holocaust; my father survived the war at Horodenka, in my mother’s family home.

I am trying to get some knowledge about the life of my family killed in Holocaust, because I don’t want that they fall into oblivion. Also, I have a dream to find a trace of a member of the family who survived the Holocaust, and whose children or grandchildren are alive.

I have never known any family from the side of my father; even one photo have not remained. The only traces after those people are the documents, which luckily remained untouched in the Office of Przemyśl and in the Archive of Przemyśl. Thanks to them, I could construct my little family tree, but still I have no trace of any living family member and I didn’t find any photo.

I live in Poland (in Łódź), I am a retired teacher of mathematics. I have no family except my sister Irena. I would like to join some research group to work together; we could exchange sources of information about Przemyśl, perhaps find some photos. I know a little Yiddish and Hebrew.

Ms. Marla Raucher Osborn, whom I met in the Facebook, in the “Polish-Jewish matters” group and in the Polish “Drugie pokolenie” (Second Generation)group, advised me to contact you.

I would be very happy if you could help me to join a group working on Przemyśl. As you don't know me, I am sending, in the attachment, the copy of my father’s (Dawid Stein) birth certificate from Przemyśl.

Yours truly

Krystyna