The missing have been found.
In a “Seeking Kin” column last month, Rozanne Dittersdorf of New York expressed hope that Phyllis Garfunkel, a childhood friend with whom she lost contact in the late 1940s, “found happiness over these years and created a family of her own.”
In a February column, Sofia Greenberg, 61, of Jerusalem wondered what became of her grandfather’s brother, Mordechai “Morris” Greenberg, who’d left Ukraine for America more than a century ago, and hoped to find her cousins in the United States.
In Greenberg’s case, Oren Kaplan provided the key. Kaplan, a librarian at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, read the column and found an online obituary for Max Greenberg, who died in 2011 at age 89. It mentioned his parents, Morris and Ida; that he had run M. Greenberg Auto Parts and had lived in Ellwood City, Pa. From the 1930 U.S. Census, Kaplan learned that Morris reached the United States in 1905, was born in about 1884 and that Max was the sixth of eight siblings.
The facts coincided nearly precisely with those known by Sofia Greenberg.
Helen Greenberg, Max’s widow, said recently that according to family lore, her father-in-law, Morris, abandoned the Russian army and fled for America. The business he started was a junkyard and later included an auto parts dealership, which eventually was closed by Max’s nephew.
Morris was very observant and boycotted her wedding because it wasn’t Orthodox, she said.
From Jerusalem, Sofia Greenberg expressed delight at her kin having been located. She plans to alert a cousin in Australia to the news and then contact her “new” American relatives.
With so much of her family wiped out in the Holocaust, “this is a world I lost, and now I can at least recover some of it,” she said.
Kaplan seemed satisfied, too. “Most of the time, when people are searching in this manner, they’ve lived through lots of tragedy.” Finding a long-lost friend or relative could be “life-changing,” he said.
That was the case with Phyllis Garfunkel, who survived the Holocaust as a child and joined an uncle an aunt living in Highland Park, N.J. That was where she met Dittersdorf, who left a deep imprint on her.
From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Dittersdorf learned that Phyllis and her sister Cyla boarded the S.S. Ernie Pyle in Germany in August 1947 and were met in New York by their aunt and uncle, Louis and Anna Leiner — not Louis and Esther Glassman, as Dittersdorf remembered.
Dittersdorf called Jack Leiner, whose stepfather is the couple’s son, after finding him online. He said he remains in contact with Cyla, who now lives in Israel, and Cyla’s son, Howard Tarre, in New Jersey.
But Phyllis died long ago of cancer, he informed Dittersdorf. Crushed, Dittersdorf hung up the phone and cried. She remained depressed for a day, but was also relieved that the mystery was solved — and determined to uncover more information. She learned that Phyllis’ surname also was Leiner; Phyllis apparently went by Garfunkel briefly because it was Cyla’s married name.
Dittersdorf contacted Phyllis’ family in Los Angeles and spoke by conference call with Phyllis’ husband, Ellis Fields, and their sons, Scott and David. They told Dittersdorf that Phyllis had worked as a teacher and real estate agent, and died of cancer in 1994. They spoke of Phyllis’ determination to put the Holocaust behind her and live a full life.
The conversation corrected several inaccuracies in Dittersdorf’s recollections. Phyllis, raised in Lvov (present-day Ukraine), had not seen her mother, Golda, shot by a German soldier. Rather, Phyllis’ brother, Chaim, 13, was shot; Golda had hidden him in a closet when the Nazis led her and two other sons, Yitzhak, 3, and Shimon, 1, away to their ultimate deaths at Belzec. Apparently afraid of being left alone, Chaim ran after his family and was murdered.
Cyla survived the war after joining the underground. Phyllis, then known as Feige, passed as non-Jewish and was able to work on several farms nearby, tending animals and caring for the residents’ children. Golda had first placed her with one farm family whom she paid.
As a mother, Phyllis always avoided discussing the Holocaust, Scott Fields said.
Dittersdorf said speaking with the Fields family was “amazing … an experience like I’ve never had in my life. It was bittersweet because she wasn’t there. However, I feel so good because she had a wonderful life.”
Scott Fields, a marketing professional, said of Dittersdorf: “It’s startling that anyone would go to the lengths she did for someone she hasn’t seen in [more than] 60 years, who had a powerful influence, really, for just a moment.
“My mother had a good life after a horrible past,” he added. “It felt good for me to tell [Dittersdorf] that, so she’d feel that her quest was for something.”
There was something else, too.
“Here was this woman who was attributing all of her observance of Judaism to my mother,” Fields said. “Talking to Rozanne, I started wondering how my observance of Judaism was linked to my mother’s experience.
“See, my mother survived on faith,” he continued. ”If she didn’t have faith that God would save her, she wouldn’t have survived — no way.
“Somehow, that faith rubbed off on Rozanne.”
Contact Hillel Kuttler at [email protected] if you would like “Seeking Kin” to write about your search for long-lost relatives and friends. Please include principal facts and your contact information in a brief message.