More Found Family!

Over the last year, I've been reconnected with cousins in Israel and Australia through JewishGen and through my family tree website. Now I've been connected with family through the kindness of strangers and Yad Vashem.

My great-grandfather, Abram Broitman, immigrated from Savran, Ukraine following the pogroms of 1918 and 1919. They fled to Bucharest Romania, then Toronto Canada, and finally to New York via a short stint in Philadelphia. We didn't have much extended family on that side of the family, and the family we knew we didn't quite know how to connect with our branch of the family. When I started my first family tree in 1985 as a fourth grader, I asked my Aunt to “interview” my grandmother's older sister, Anita about the family. Anita provided the names of all of Abram’s brothers and sisters as well as his parents names. I somehow saved that piece of paper and used it when I started researching our family’s history and experience as an adult. Over the years, this slip of paper has helped me piece together the branches we were in contact with. 

About five years ago, the database at Yad Vashem which documents those who perished in the holocaust became publicly available online. It included translations of all of the submitted names from the past decades. Looking for “Broitman” from Savran then, I found the name “Etel Broitman Erlikh” from Savran, the daughter of Shulum Broitman. That was a perfect match with the names that Aunt Anita had given years earlier - my great-grandfather's sister! I thought there was a good chance that she was related, and tried to contact the name of the person who submitted the page – a man living in Mariupol, Ukraine. I sent letters to every person by that name that  I could find in Ukrainian, Israeli, and US phone directories—in English, Hebrew, and Russian. No luck then. I got one phone call back from a kind woman in Brooklyn who explained that Erlikh was the “Smith” of Ukraine.

Last week I posted an question to a Jewish Genealogy mailing list about Savran. Although unrelated to my question, a helpful researcher in Israel suggested that I check Yad Vashem to see if there were any connections to relatives, and I told him about my fruitless search for the Erlikh family. That researcher decided to look again, and found that the submitter’s daughter had submitted additional pages – and that she lived in Israel. He called her up on my behalf, and I received an e-mail from her daughter a few hours later. While the connection isn’t definitive because of the passage of time and the lack of records, I’m pretty confident that we’re cousins because the names, dates, and locations we know all line up.

The family lives in central Israel. I’m in contact with folks who would be my second-cousin once removed and my third cousin. Etel Broitman Erlikh, her husband Abram Erlikh, and three of their four children perished in the holocaust. One child survived, although I do not yet know how. He stayed in Ukraine until he died in the 1990's. They've even sent me a photo from the 1930s (above).

I am incredibly grateful for the kindness of the Israeli researcher, the availability of the Yad Vashem database, and the power of the internet to reconnect families after over 90 years!