Ancestral Homes

 

    All Jews would list Israel as their ancestral home. However, when the Hebrews were expelled from their native country they settled all over the world. Most of them settled in eastern Europe and or Russia (Ashkenazie) while others made their homes in the Iberian Peninsula and north Africa (Sfardic). There also groups in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Centuries of being displaced makes it impossible to trace roots back to those original ancestors in the Holy Land and we now consider ourselves as descendants from these varied regions. 

    My family traces its roots back to Lithuania and Belarus on my father’s side and to Poland on my mother’s side. My wife’s family hailed from Eastern Europe/Russia on her mother’s side and her father’s family came from Germany and Eastern Europe. 

    I don’t have the names of the home cities for all of my ancestors but I do have some and will give some insight of each of these towns. 

    Traby is a small town in western Belarus close to the Lithuanian border. My Levine family came from Traby and also the Weiners, Mucklers, and Davisons. I couldn’t find much information about Traby. It has a large Catholic church as its most notable landmark. A google search listed several Jewish history sites as well as a Trip Advisor review and about 8 sites for consulting about the weather. The current population of Traby is 837 people and that seems to be the most people that have ever lived there. It is hard to believe that so many Jewish people can trace their roots to this small town. If I do a search of my DNA matches on Ancestry that have people from Traby in their tree I come up with 17 4th to 6th cousin matches. I speculate that it was a farming community because of stories my grandfather told me. There are other Levine families from Traby and I am pretty sure there is a connection with ours but I have not yet found the documentation to confirm it. 

 Traby

    The town of Ivye is about 20 miles to the south of Traby. My uncle and cousin interviewed my grandfather (Louis Levine) and he was living in Ivye when he was a young boy. Louis’s father died when Louis was only 4 years old. His mother was poor and a widow with a newborn baby and sent Louis and his sister, Mary to live with relatives in other towns. They both spent time in Vilna but Louis also lived with some uncles in Ivye. In the interview he recounts the story of he and a friend and their journey from Ivye to Traby to visit Louis’s mother. 

    My great grandfather, Samuel Boxinbaum was born in Kunow, Poland. Kunow is located south of Warsaw and is a small village of about 3200 people. His son, my great uncle, Max Boxinbaum was born in Winbrizk, Poland. I could not find that town anywhere on the internet so the spelling must be wrong. The Pasternak side of my family were all from Poland. Dolishits, Vierzbin, and Lodz were three of the cities that we have documentation on. I can’t find much about the first two but Lodz is the third largest city in Poland with a population of well over a half a million people. An Ancestry search of DNA matches with ties to Lodz gives me two 2nd to 3rd cousin matches and over fifty 4th to 6th cousin matches. 

Current day Lodz
 

     Arlene’s (my wife) paternal grandmother was born in New York but her parents were born in Germany. I have no idea what city they came from nor do I know what towns or shtetls any of her other grandparents or great grandparents were born in.

     I have a story about my father’s mother, Tillie Levine. She was the prototypical Jewish grandmother. She treated all of her grandchildren with nothing but love and she had the unique ability to make each of us feel that we were the most special of all of her grandkids. We used to pick up my grandparents on a Sunday afternoon for a drive in the country. We asked “where do you want to go” and she would always answer “to Eishoshok.” This became a family legend. We knew that Eishoshok was the name of her home town but we never found it on the map because the Lithuanian name and spelling of the town is Eisiskes. We finally made the connection and discovered much about the town’s history and the people who lived there. It is a small town in the southwest portion of Lithuania near the Polish and Belarussian borders. It has a population of about 3500 people and up until the mid 1930’s it was predominately Jewish. In 1895 a fire consumed most of the town. I wondered if my grandmother had written to her relatives there to see if they were ok. I then realized that she was still there and only about 10 years old when the fire broke out. In September of 1941 the Nazi soldiers and Lithuanian Auxilliary troops unceremoniously murdered over 4000 Jewish people that lived in Eishoshok and the surrounding towns. The Holocaust museum in Washington DC has a two floor display of pictures of the people of that town. Many of my relatives adorn those walls. Yaffe Eliach chronicled the history of Eishoshok in her book There Once Was a World. There is documented evidence of Jewish tombstones in an old cemetery that date back to the year 1097. This would establish Eishoshok as one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the diaspora. A search for DNA matches on Ancestry matches me with 10 4th to 6th cousins with ties to this once proud town. 

Synagogue in Eishoshok
 

     One hundred years from now descendants of my immediate family will be calling New York City, Philadelphia, Erie, Pittsburgh, and Toronto as their ancestral towns. As we spread out around the country and the world we would add cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, Albuquerque, Corvallis, and Vancouver. We could also add Tel Aviv, Hamilton, Wilmington, and Portland. The list goes on and on. I hope that some of my family’s descendants will continue to research and record our history for their future generations.