Meeting the Weissmans, Israel 2022
Looking for the Weismans
My family’s history was wound up in a tight ball of twine, previous generations’ silence holding the strands together. There are many ways to search for family members these days, there is DNA sampling, family trees, online databases and of course, conversations with family members. Conversations with family had left me in a vacuum. I knew of Benedictina’s story, yet her great-grandchildren were not able to talk with me. While I had some names from Yosi’s research, I could never confirm Benedictina’s story, and I still couldn’t find the Weismans.
My great-aunt Henrietta had noted names on many of the photographs. Using the information that Yosi had gathered and Henrietta’s notes on the photographs, I created a family tree on Ancestry.com’s website.
The unraveling of the Weisman family history was sudden. In April of 2021 a family tree in Hebrew popped up on my computer screen. Since I can read Hebrew, I noticed the name “Tikva” which means hope. It was a match to my great-grandmother’s sister “Speranza”. I emailed the creator of the Hebrew language family tree, and confirmed that indeed, our families were the same. The creator of the website was my newly found cousin, Yael Goffman (see Exhibit 5), the great grand daughter of Speranza. In a rapidly planned zoom meeting I met Yael, who was equally enthusiastic about reconnecting the different strands of our family. Yael took a break from work to meet with me on zoom. Yael is of my generation, both of us are great-granddaughters of two sisters, Paulina and Speranza. I learned that Paulina’s sister Speranza had moved to Israel after the war. Paulina’s brother Bernard had passed away in 1948 but his son, Chaim Dov (See Exhibit 3, had left Romania for Israel in the 1950s with his wife Tsiril and their daughter Rachel. Yael then introduced me to her cousin Danny Zohar (see Exhibit 5) a grandson of Speranza, and to Bernard’s granddaughter, Rachel (see Exhibit 3).