Roots?

Gene's mother was born in Paris.  Family legend has it that his grandparents had lived in the rue des Rosiers in the third arrondissement, at that time the center of Eastern European Jewish immigrant life. Apparently they had come separately from Eastern Europe to find work, had been caught in Paris by the outbreak of World War I, met, married, had two children and left for the US in the early 1920s.

A couple of years ago we tried to pin the story down by going to the mairie (the local town hall) of the third arrondissement to get copies of his grandparents' marriage certificate and his mother's birth certificate.  They didn't exist, at least not in that arrondissement.

Somewhere we got a bad photocopy of the page of an official register listing Gene's mother's birth.  Family legend was way off.  Her name was spelled differently, her birthdate was one day off and the family residence was way across town, in Montmartre, on a tiny street climbing the hill behind Sacre Coeur.

The other day three generations of that family went looking for that street:  Gene, his niece and her baby son, with wives along for the ride.  The rue du Chevalier de la Barre is a short, narrow, winding street slipping down the hill behind the huge Basilica of Sacre Coeur, (the official address of which is actually on that street, it turns out).  The street address on the photocopy was unreadable; all we knew was that somewhere on that street a baby had lived who grew up to become Gene's mother and that baby's great-grandson was being carried down the same street nearly 90 years later.

 

It's a pretty little street, vaguely picturesque, steep but not requiring steps to climb it as many others in the neighborhood do.  At the top of the street is a building, le Centre Israelite de Montmartre, with a plaque on it, one of the ubiquitous plaques on Parisian walls commemorating an event or a person.  This one tells of the 79 Jewish children who had been sheltered in that building until the bombardment of April 1944 had forced them out and that they had eventually been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where 71 of them had died.  How they had managed to stay there until 1944 isn't clear.

The building is a refuge for homeless Jewish families and has been since 1920.  We don't know if this is where Gene's family lived or if they had an apartment elsewhere on the street.  There is a Jewish creche next door, an infant day care facility.  We don't know if his mother might have been taken there while her parents worked.  We don't know any more details.  What we do know is that if her parents had not left Paris for the United States in the 1920s the chances of any of those three generations being on that street on Tuesday were slim to none.

Jewish Prague

The perverse desire of the Nazis to establish a museum of the Jews after wiping them out is responsible for the remarkable remnants of the Jewish community still to be found in Prague.  Although more than 100,000 Jews died in the camps and ghettos, Torah scrolls and hundreds of religious and historical articles were preserved in the several synagogues also preserved in Josefov, the old Jewish area, and are now on display as part of the Jewish Museum established by those who returned.

 

Easily the most moving sight is the Old Jewish Cemetery, which holds the remains and tombstones of those buried here between the 12th and 18th centuries.  Given the small size of the cemetery the dead were buried in layers, the newer dead atop the older.  Finally another cemetery was established outside the central city, where Franz Kafka, perhaps Prague's most famous Jew, was laid to rest.

The tomb of Rabbi Loëw, who legend says conjured the monstrous Golem to protect the Jewish community of Prague from their oppressors, is marked by the traditional stones left on graves in remembrance of the dead, along with small bits of folded papers holding prayers left by the faithful.  A French couple near us left their bits of paper before moving on.

The old cemetery is a small forest of tombstones, some fallen, some leaning against each other for support, some entirely effaced, all dripping in the rain and covered with fallen leaves.  A more melancholy sight is hard to imagine, until you remember that the descendants of these buried Jews have no burial places of their own, having been scattered to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz, to smoke.