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This is a photo of the shul in Klodawa. This is where our ancestors celebrated their holidays, weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, etc.... Sadly, this is where the Germans came in on the holiest of days, Yom Kippur 1939, and removed all the townspeople from the building. They then removed all the Torahs, and prayer books and burned them. According to Paula Kempinski in her interview with Rabbi Brooks Susman in April 2007, after the Germans invaded and occupied the town, they stabled their horses in the building.
In July 2007, Robin Nichinsky visited Klodawa and the building that was once ...<< MORE >>
If my grandfather were alive today, I can’t image what he would have made of my recent breakfast meeting with His Excellency Zhou Wenzhong, Chinese Ambassador to the United States.
Hersz Rotbart was born in Kolo, Poland and spent most of his adult life making hats by hand and selling them in the weekly open-air market of Klodawa, a small village about one-hour’s drive west of Warsaw.
Zaydie, as I suspect I would have called him had I ever had the privilege of knowing Hersz, had no formal education to speak of and no doubt only knew China as a distant world inhabited by a great number of people of very foreign culture.
Indeed, from Klodawa to Beijing was a distance not counted in miles, but in millennia, for that is how long each culture had marched along its own unique path.
Zaydie died in Auschwitz in 1940, long before I was born and five years before Ambassador Zhou’s parents gave birth to him in China’s Jiangsu Province. As Ambassador, Zhou Wenzhong today represents his country’s 1.3 billion citizens in all of China’s political and business affairs with the United States of America.
<< MORE >>Several people have written in looking for any information that can be found about their family members from Klodawa. One simple first step that is accessible to all, and quite easy to use is the Yad Vashem Shoah Database. In this database you can look up by town, or by family name anyone you are looking for. To get to the database, use this link:
http://www.yadvashem.org/lwp/workplace/IY_HON_Entrance
Once there you will see: "To search the Database or submit names Click Here".
Once you click, you will see boxes to enter either family name or location, or both. It ...<< MORE >>
More than two years ago when I first began getting in touch with fellow Klodawa researchers, Karen Kroneheim and I connected and discovered that our families had been friends via the Klodawa Society. The Society was formed of the "Landsmanshaft" of the town who were newly settled in the U.S., mostly in the New York area, but also from Boston, as with my own family, and probably other places. I hope to find out more about the Klodawa Society, itself. In fact one of the cousins I spoke with over the years told me had actually had a program from ...<< MORE >>