The chance discovery of hidden documents detailing the life of an ordinary Jewish family in the Warsaw Ghetto has provided an Israeli woman with information about her murdered family for the first time in more than 50 years.
It has also given today’s young Jews in Warsaw a sense of connetion with the Jewish past of the city and their community.
The collection of letters, notebooks, photographs, and other material was discovered during renovation work on a building that now houses the Warsaw offices of the Ronald Lauder Foundation, which runs a number of Jewish educational programs throughout Poland.
Prior to World War II and the forced ghettoization of Warsaw’s Jews, the building served as a Jewish medical clinic.
The retrieved documents were personal papers and memorabilia of the residents of two apartments that were in the building, the four-member Melchior family and a 20-year-old bachelor, Moses Dov Bursztyn.
After the discovery of the documents was made public in April, an Israeli woman, Sara Urbach, believing she was related to the Melchiors, contacted the Lauder Foundation.
And indeed she was.
“On June 14 I was in Israel and I brought to her copies of the photographs we had found — and yes, they were pictures of her family,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland director of the Lauder Foundation, said in an interview.
Elja Melchior, the father of the family, was Urbach’s brother, Schudrich said.
Melchior had been an administrator at the Jewish clinic, while his wife Ruchla ran a little vegetable shop.
They had two teen-age children.
Urbach, who had managed to flee Poland in November 1939 at the age of 17, had lost all trace of her brother and other members of her family by 1941.
“It was very moving, but she contained her emotions as she looked at picture after picture,” Schudrich said. “They were pictures from the 1920s, the 1930s.
“She recognized them all — her mother, her brother, her niece. She even thought that she might be in one of the pictures.
“All these memories started coming back” to Urbach, he said.
“She had been looking and looking for traces of her family since the war. These are the only physical traces of her relatives, ” Schudrich said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
