Visit to Edinet

While visiting Edinet in northern Bessarabia, in May 2010, while guiding the family Serebrenic from São Paulo, I was able to photograph the house of one of the four drunk Jews of the town, now in ruins, as Leon Akkerman, one of the few Jews who remained there, showed me:

And below, the house that in the past was one of the many synagogues of that city which, according to the census of 1930, from a total of almost 6,000 inhabitants, had a population of about 5,300 Jews:

  

Across the street, it stands the house of the family Akkerman, in an architecture typical of the region. In such traditional house, like many others, there lived Jewish families who were almost completely wiped out in July 1941, when the joint German and Romanian forces repelled the Soviets and took the city:

Jewish families in Arad and Hunedoara

Between 1-5 July 2009, I guided Veronica Singer (US) through Transylvania, the land of her grandparents, searching - and finding! - records and graves related to her familiy (Roth, Grün etc.) at the Jewish Community and at the local branches of the Romanian National Archives in the towns of Arad and Deva. Our journey also included a visit to the Hunyad Castle in the city of Hunedoara, the largest gothic construction of this type in Romania, and to the villages of Bârzava, Petris, Pui and Baru, where Veronica - in the photo, holding a chick at a family house in Pui - was warmly received by local people and was able to grasp the atmosphere in which her ancestrals once lived.

Lost shtetl in Bukovina

During the month of May 2009 I was twice in Cârlibaba in order to carry out a research about the families Jacob and Schapira. The small and picturesque town in today's Suceava county, also known as Kirlibaba under Austrian rule (1774-1918), when it stood at the border between Transylvania and Bukovina, was a prosperous shtetl thanks to its activities in the field of manganese and wood extraction. After the end of WWII, most of the surviving Jews emigrated. Not a single Jew lives today in Cârlibaba. The synagogue was demolished, the ritual butchery is in ruins and the old cemetery (picture) can be hardly kept by a Christian neighbor who takes care of it out of pity.

Frankel

On 01 Nov 2008 I guided the couple Gerardo Frankel and Margarida Reik de Frankel (Uruguay), who came from Montevideo to Bucharest in order to take a ship cruise through the Danube, starting on November 2nd at the Romanian harbor of Oltenita and crossing the Bulgarian, Serbian, Hungarian, Austrian and German borders till Nürnberg. They visited Bucharest's old town, the Jewish neighborhood and the royal palace of Mogosoaia (in the picture) besides some shopping in the malls and antique shops of the city.

Hegwer

Between June 5th and June 12th 2008, Hal and Charlotte Hegwer (US) were guided by us from Timisoara to Bucharest, visiting also Craiova. In Craiova they met the head of the local Jewish community and carefully visited the synagogue and cemetery, looking for records of their ancestors. In Bucharest, besides a traditional sightseeing with the main attractions, the Hegwers visited the Jewish museum and had dinner with all of us at the Caru' cu Bere beerhouse (in the picture, from the left to the right: our guide/driver Marinel Sburlea, Mr & Mrs Hegwer, Fernando & Elena Klabin).

Schonfeld

Between 27 and 29 June 2008 we guided Louis Schonfeld (US) to Iasi and Northern Moldavia. He was able to visit old inns on the way and to research the Iasi Jewish cemetery, besides discovering Moldavian hospitality and gastronomy. Although his family roots come mainly from Salaj (Transylvania) and Zakarpattia (Ukraine), he is interested in any link to the Schonfeld family name. In the picture, a tombstone of the I World War Romanian soldier Moise Scheinfeld at Iasi Jewish cemetery.

Wirtzbaum

In the period 6th-13th September 2001, we guided Albert Wirtzbaum (US) through several places in Romania, so that he could find information of his ancestrals, who used to live in different shtetls in the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and were called Wirtzbaum, Solomon, Blau, Friedman and Fried. The main places of his trip were Bucharest, Sighisoara, Cluj-Napoca (synagogue on the picture) and Oradea. In Transylvania he visited the shtetls Borod, Cornicel, Solduba and Saldabagiu de Munte, and was received as well by the Jewish genealogy specialist Peter Winter. Because of the 9/11 events, he got stuck in Bucharest and we've assisted him in his prolongated stay.