The readers of the English Yated should be familiar
with the abovementioned book and its heroine, Mrs. Sara
Lederman, as several of the stories contained in the book
were published in Yated. I believe that the story
below sheds a novel light on the book.
It is about 6:20 AM, Tuesday, 5764, the day after the last
Yom Kippur and I am getting ready to go to daven at
6:45 in Ponovezh, when suddenly my telefax-line phone rings.
I pick it up and hear the fax signal. As many in Israel whose
fax number is listed know, there are a number of companies
that try to sell all kinds of products (a vacation in Turkey,
Cyprus, a weekend in Eilat, a set of pots, etc.) by fax,
usually in the middle of the night.
Well, I think to myself, this is a new one -- a fax in the
morning. I put down the receiver as I usually do. However,
this is different. The phone rings again, the fax buzz is
also there, so now I push the "receive" button.
I glance at the sheet of fax paper emerging from the machine
and note that it is coming from the East Coast of the US. I
peruse the fax and see that it refers to a book I wrote,
published by Feldheim over two years ago and titled These
Children are Mine.
From: Sol Rosenberg To: Rabbi Dov Lederman
Date: 10/7/2003 Time 12:48:18 AM
Page 1 of 1
Dear Rabbi Lederman,
Gmar Chasima Tova,
I just got back from shul, and waiting for me was your
recent book, These Children are Mine, that I just got
via UPS from Feldheim. My name is Shlomo ben HaRav Shlomo
A"H, and I was born in Olkhovatka in June of 1945.
I am the son of Shlomo Gelbart A"H, one of the two Jews
who died in the accident in the Sugar Factory (but I believe
not accurately reported in your book, which implied it was
the Neikron brothers). He was a talmid of Rav Aaron Kotler,
zt"l, in Kletsk in the late '30s before the war. My family
members in Olkhovatka were Meshulem Golovinski and his second
wife with six children, my grandmother and grandfather Alte
and Shaya Rosen, and my mother and father Yitka and Shlomo
Gelbart.
He died motzei Shabbos Bereishis 1944, 28th day of
Tishrei, October.
I was in Olkhovatka a year ago, in August 2002, looking
for the grave of my father, with the assistance of a direct
descendant of the Tchertkoff family that built the sugar
factory in 1832, Nicolai Tchertkoff who lives not far from
here in Nyack, NY. My story is filled with Hashgacha Pratis
that will take more than an hour to detail. My family was
originally from Goworow and Wyszkow and followed the same
path as yours to Komi and Olkhovatka and Israel.
During my trip last year, I met Rav Nosson Klugman,
davened at his yeshiva in Moscow (he is now back in Lakewood
after five years in Moscow) and he put me in touch with Rabbi
Nosson Vershubsky, the Chief Rabbi of Voronezh.
I have many pictures of Olkhovatka, the sugar factory, the
Red House where we lived in the town square, the chalk mines,
as well as about five hours of professional video taken of
all our meetings with officials and the supposed site of my
father's grave.
I even brought bulk chalk and sugar from there. I have
photos of documents from the Sugar Factory listing the Jewish
Polish workers, including a letter requesting permission not
to work on Pesach 1944, and my birth certificate.
I also located the two elderly daughters of Chaim
Schechter, the other man who died at the same time. They live
in Israel and are a bit older than you. I have the phone
numbers. I believe they can add much more detail to the
Olkhovatka part of the story, as they are older than
you.
Please tell me how I can reach you by phone as we need to
talk.
*
It turned out that Rabbi Vershubsky, who is mentioned in the
fax, subsequently traveled to London. There he walked into a
Jewish bookstore, chanced upon my book and informed Mr.
Rosenberg that his father's tragic death and the events that
followed it are described there.
This fax set off a flurry a phone calls and emails between
me and Mr. Rosenberg (his family name was changed from
Gelbart when his mother remarried). I put him in touch with
the family of my good friend, Symcha Cynamon in Boro Park who
also was with us in Olkhovatka. It turned out that Symcha's
oldest sister, Mrs. Henna Beylis, was the best friend of his
mother and so was able to relate to him many details of his
family's life in Olkhovatka, most of which were unknown to
him. Not only this, Mrs. Beylis' husband was the mesader
kedushin of the Gelbart couple in Russia. She also
contested the supposed location of the common grave of Mr.
Schechter and Mr. Gelbart that was pointed out by an old
resident of Olkhovatka and suggested another location.
Mr. Rosenberg made a number of corrections to my Olkhovatka
story (these were incorporated into the Hebrew version which
I hope to put out soon and into the new English edition which
may come out at some later date). Not only that, I suddenly
found out that the old couple whose Shas was
confiscated at the USSR-Polish border were none other than
Mr. Rosenberg's maternal grandparents -- a fact that was
unimportant to me there as a young child and hence I was not
aware of it.
Although this was the most important and portentous reaction
to my book, it was not the only one. Among others, the
grandmother of my niece's daughter-in-law called me up in
tears saying that she was crying reading the book, as many of
the events there, like being lost in the vast expanses of
North Russian woodlands, were so similar to her own
experiences. A lady who lives in Monsey found her mother on
one of the group photographs and a Brooklyn resident wrote me
asking for more details about myself.
The mother-in-law and wife of the artist who composed the
cover made the interesting remark that they no longer read
Holocaust stories, but this one is different.
