Day 45 of Nat'l Emergency: Family Mystery Half Solved

The mystery began for me in the middle of the night. Early Friday morning.

I couldn’t fall back asleep after a nocturnal awakening. I opened Facebook on my iPhone. Laura, a cousin in France, had posted an appeal. She asked for help in translating a short note in Yiddish she had found on the first page of her deceased maternal grandfather’s prayer book, his siddur. She included a picture of the note.

I don’t speak or read Yiddish but the letters resemble Hebrew. Perhaps I could make out some words. I was thwarted in my attempt to read the note. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it until I turned the picture upside down. I remained stymied for a while until I figured out the one word third line was the family name of her grandfather.

I also deciphered the year of the note. It was written according to the Jewish calendar using letters with specific numerical values. To calibrate it I got out of bed and searched for my 1962 8th grade graduation yearbook from Yeshiva Rambam, hoping it would contain a Hebrew calendar date I could use as a reference. It did. The year of the note was 1959.

Unable to translate more text I sent the note to friends and relatives seeking help. On her side of the Atlantic Laura was similarly engaged.

About the same time, with outside help, we independently configured the puzzle. Here’s the text:

“As a testament to my appreciation to the Borensztejn family,

From Golda Meir

11 Iyar 5719” (May 19, 1959)

Laura believes he received the siddur during a trip to Israel. “He never mentioned that he had met her (Golda Meir) during this trip … If it IS her writing and signature, why ? What did my grandfather do? Or another member of the family?,” Laura wonders. “I am EXCITED but I don’t get it!”

We solved the mystery of what the note said but a larger mystery remained. What did Laura’s grandfather do to merit this personalized, handwritten note from the then Israeli foreign minister and future prime minister?

We may never know.

Foreign Affairs: This is not the first bit of international intrigue involving Laura’s maternal grandfather. Along with his wife and some extended members of their family he emigrated from Poland to Lens in northeastern France, in the 1930s. Before Nazi Germany invaded, Laura’s grandfather urged his relatives to move south. Only his immediate family went with him to Lyons. But they weren’t safe there, either. 

Warned they might be picked up in a roundup of Jews, her grandparents fled with their two daughters to the border with Switzerland. Because Bonnie, Laura’s mother, was a baby, the Swiss allowed the family to enter, but placed them in three separate refugee camps, one for the father, one for seven-year-old Miriam, and the third for Bonnie and her mother. 

For three years they remained in internment. Miriam was able to see her mother and sister from time to time but her father could not see any of his family. After the war ended the family re-united. They returned to Lyons. 

Their family in Lens was killed. The Nazis rounded up the Jews from Lens on September 11th, 1942. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Among them were Laura’s grandmother’s elder sister, Rosalie, and her daughter Betty. They were sent to Belgium, to a place called Kazerne Dossin (now a memorial, museum and documentation center on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Flanders). They waited there two days before being shipped out on Transport X, arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 17. 

There is no archival record of how or when Rosalie died, but official papers show Betty was selected as a forced laborer. She died of unknown circumstances on October 20, 1942. Portraits of Rosalie Fursetzer and her daughter Betty Mohr are part of the memorial and the Memorial Wall at the barracks of Kazerne Dossin.

According to Kazerne Dossin, “X Transport included 1,048 deportees, including 229 children less than 15 years … The youngest was Josef Jozefowicz, aged one month and a half.”  Only 17 survived the war. 

A Woman's Place (Is Up to a Man)

Ann Romney Blinked: Post-conventions, there was lots of talk about which candidate’s wife conjured up a more touching, if not so truthful, remembrance of the tough financial times she and her husband had starting out their lives together. 

Ann Romney pictured their struggle in a basement Boston apartment, eating tuna casseroles and pasta off an ironing board doing its best impression of a dining room table, while Mitt studied for his Harvard law and business degrees at a desk made from an old door propped up on two sawhorses. 

Not to be outdone, Michelle Obama related how she could see the pavement whizzing by from the holes in the floorboards of Barack’s car; his best pair of shoes were a size too small. 

Oh, how far the seemingly destitute have come!

I’m not sure if the First Lady has retracted any of her depiction, but Ann Romney fessed up to David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “We have not had a financial struggle in our lives, but I want people to believe in their hearts that we know what it is to struggle.” 

For sure they did, as Ann began suffering from multiple sclerosis in 1998. Good thing her husband can afford quality health insurance, or to pay for her treatment out of pocket in case a new insurance company would deny her coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Unless, of course, she’d choose to be covered under provisions of Obamacare that requires insurance companies to extend coverage even for pre-conditions. 

For the record, I was less than impressed by David Gregory’s big moment with Mitt. I watched Meet the Press after returning home from my weekly softball game. Gregory’s questions were softer than the pitches I hurled. What a wasted opportunity to pin Romney down to specifics. He tried once or twice, but for the most part he failed to ask probing questions. 

It also was interesting to hear Romney talk about the country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, considering many Christian sects don’t consider Mormons to be part of their faith. 

A Woman’s Place: Recent articles and events struck me as indicators the world is far from accepting women as equals with men. First there was the controversy in Missouri generated by Rep. Todd Akin on the issue of “legitimate rape” and the ability of a woman’s body to fend off uninvited sperm. That an elected congressman in this day and age could harbor such nonsense is beyond the pale. He’s a deeply religious man. I wonder how much his ignorance is engendered by his religious teachings.

Which brings us to the first article, (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/world/middleeast/05iht-letter05.html?_r=1&bl), a depiction of a woman’s place according to the new rulers of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood. In case you haven’t yet clicked on the link, here’s how the writer, Mona El-Naggar, started her article, “Women are erratic and emotional, and they make good wives and mothers — but never leaders or rulers. That, at least, is what Osama Abou Salama, a professor of botany at Cairo University and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, told young men and women during a recent premarital counseling class.”

The Muslim Brotherhood apparently does not believe such women as Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Benazir Bhutto, or Golda Meir were good leaders or rulers. It doesn’t look promising for the women of Egypt, many of whom protested last year in Tahir Square in the hope they would achieve equal status from a post-Mubarak government.

It doesn’t look too rosy to the northeast of Egypt, either. Israel made the desert bloom, but it cannot cultivate tolerance among its religious zealots. Even with their lives at stake, Haredim, the ultra Orthodox, adhere to dictates that endanger the Jewish state. A long-time deferment from compulsory military service has been lifted, so Haredim are now being drafted. The Israeli military has long been an assimilator and equalizer, but the Haredim are offering stiff resistance to modernity, as can be seen in last Sunday’s Review submission in the NY Times by Shani Boianjiu, “What Happens When the Two Israel’s Meet” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/what-happens-when-the-two-israels-meet.html?partner=rss&emc=rss). 

No, the world does not look very egalitarian these days.