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14 Tishrei 5765 - September 29, 2004 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
The Power of a True Story
by Dov B. Lederman, author of These Children are Mine

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.

 

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