Israel 2023: first blog missive

(Note: This post follows up on several Facebook posts about my trip to Israel, the first post was Jan 16th 2023. . Some of this might not make sense if you haven't read all those posts. You may not care, and I support that too.)

As I write this on Saturday evening Jan 21, my cousins are at the Jerusalem arm of a nationwide protest. I wanted to join them but I got back from today's adventures a little too late, the crowds are evidently huge (I spoke with my cousin Ofer a little while ago. Today is Shabbat, so of course one must wait until sundown to protest in a country that's founded on an ethnicity that's also a religion. Here's the current news about these protests:

It feels a little understated to say that there are problems in Israel right now. There are always huge problems in Israel of many kinds. But this is my third visit to spend time with my cousins here, and I have never seen them so freaked out about the government here. Never. Including Yehuda who was born in Tel Aviv in 1935 (not '37 as I'd said on Facebook) and thus has lived through every stage of the development and life of the State of Israel. Usually Yehuda has a pretty long view of things and is less freaked out and more philosophical, but he is quite upset about the gov't here right now. Yesterday he and I were talking about it and I asked him does it feel it's getting harder and harder to be a non-religious, center-left Jew here and he said yes. (Note: here, people call themselves and others either "religious" or not. Both of those -- being "religious" or "not religious"-- mean something different here than in the USA. Here being not-religious means you probably celebrate Shabbat with your family every Friday and even sing a prayer or two, and your sons will be bar mitzvahs (really hardly any bat mitzvahs here amongst Israelis), and you have Passover seders and dress your children up for Purim. But you don't go to synagogue and you are not Orthodox. Here being religious could mean you are Orthodox and keep kosher and do all the things and pray every day and it could also mean you are "Haredi" or Chasidic. To me, being a not-religious Jew here is the same as being on the more traditional end of being Jewish in the USA.

Ok that was all written Saturday night Jan 21.

Now it's Sunday Jan 22 here in Israel. According to the news over 110,000 people demonstrated last night in Tel Aviv, with thousands more here in Jerusalem and other larger cities all over the country. Evidently this is the third straight week of protests.

By request, I will write out the whole story of my family in regards to my USA family and my Israeli family. I wrote a short version of the story on my Facebook on Jan 16th. The longer version is:

I never met either of my grandfathers, they both died before I was born. My maternal grandfather, who as far as I always knew was named George Weiser, I was told came to the U.S. sometime in the early 30's or late 20's from Galicia, a region of Poland/Austria-Hungary where a lot of Jews lived in the 1800s and 1900s until all of them were murdered or driven out during and after the Holocaust. I knew he had brothers who also left their town in Poland, but instead of coming to the U.S. they went to Palestine. My grandfather died in 1955 and when he died my grandmother wrote to his brothers in Israel and told them about his death, and they wrote some letters back and forth for a while. I also knew my mother and aunt Judy has written some letters back and forth with their first cousin Yehuda, who was the son of one of my grandfather's brothers. But after a while they all lost touch. That is all I knew. By the time I was old enough to think about these things, I had no idea why the communication ended or why no one in my family had tried to find our Israeli family. I didn't know how many of them there were or where they were or anything.

As I mentioned in my Facebook post, for years I couldn't abide the idea of going to Israel because of all the reasons you might imagine. Then I had a wonderful rabbi whose wife was from Israel, and he and she have really complex and nuanced views of Israel and are not knee-jerk Zionists. They announced a synagogue trip to Israel and I knew they were the only people I could go to Israel with. So I started doing research to find my family.

I asked mother's sister Judy everything she knew about my grandfather's life and his family. She knew his home town was named Gologory. She knew my grandfather's brother's names: Issac, Anczel, and Dov. She also told me that my grandfather's given name was really Gedalie Benjamin. I never knew this. Turns out that Jews have kept and archived really good records because of the Holocaust. Also Israel has really good digitized archives. So I found these things, amazingly:

I found a record of the marriage of my great grandparents, whose names were Juda Weiser and Machle Meth. I found the birth records of my grandfather, Gedalie Benjamin, and his brothers Anczel and Moses Issak -- I knew Yehuda's father's name was Isaac so I assumed this was him. I also found the immigration papers of Yehuda's father Issac (my grandfather's brother) and also my grandfather's other brother Anzcel -- I have never found records yet for anything about Dov Weiser, my grandfather;'s other brother who came to Palestine.

But as amazing as this documentation was, it didn't bring me closer to finding my family now. I got onto the JewishGen discussion list and posted about my search. Amazingly, an Israeli man who helps people find their relatives helped me out, and I don't know how he did this but he emailed me two telephone numbers of Yehuda Weisers, and told me that the number of someone living in Jerusalem was the most likely -- why he thought so, I don't know.

Ok so actually I am tired of typing this now, I am going to post this and I'll tell the rest of the story later. Thank you all for caring and reading.