Learning about your family through genealogy research is a lot of work but also a fabulous puzzle. And, who knows, maybe you will find a neighbor cousin who is the publisher & editor in chief of Inside Press magazines – like I did!
While I am interested in learning about where my family came from, like so many Jewish Americans, I grew up with the idea that any family remaining in Europe during the Second World War perished. I am very interested in learning about family branches that survived so I can learn more about who is still here and thriving today.
The Inside Press’s publisher Grace Bennett and I are both named after paternal grandmothers – both named Gitel – who were born just a year apart in the late 1880s. They both spent much of their adult lives in the outskirts of Lodz, Poland. However, by the time Grace’s father was born in 1923, my grandparents had immigrated to the United States, and would soon have a general store in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
My father was born in New York four years after Grace’s father was born in Poland. While both families ended up in New York, and Grace and I both ended up in Westchester, the paths to getting here were very different. Grace’s father was a Holocaust survivor, eventually arriving in the United States from Israel after the Second World War, while my father grew up in the security of the U.S., and had the opportunity to go to college, eventually getting a PhD in chemistry. Grace’s dad, who never finished high school after surviving numerous labor camps and Auschwitz in his teen years, worked as a maintenance supervisor for most of his career at Yeshiva University.
My path to learning that Grace Bennett is my fourth cousin started with tugging on a loose thread in my Dunkel family tree. An online testimonial and some other documents mentioned a Gitel Dunkel – or maybe Gucca Dunkel – who was married to a Mr. Brajtbard. Or maybe a Mr. Bretsztejn? But Gitel lived in the right place and was possibly related, so it was time to dig deeper.
I found a wonderful interview from a Holocaust survivor, Jacob Breitstein, where he mentioned his mother’s name: Gitel Dunkel. And then after a few confusing twists since Dunkel was transcribed as Dunnel, I found a marriage certificate. Of course it was in Russian, but, after translation, I confirmed Gitel’s link to my family, and to her son Jacob Breitstein, and eventually to a meeting over coffee with my cousin, Gitel’s granddaughter, editor Grace Bennett – who lives just a town away! Imagine that.
