Jewish families

In 2023, we hosted an exceptionally large group of descendants of Brzesko Jews in Brzesko. Among them there were descendants of the Fischman-Hammer family, Mrs. Yona Kohen and her son Uri. Yona Kohen. Brzesko, February 1, 2023. Photo by Anna...

Some time ago, I came across a card on one of the auction sites. It was written by Blume Rosa Kohs from Brzesko on January 16, 1893. This minimal information helped to recreate the history of another Jewish family from...

by Allan Westreich Book excerpt from The Westreich Family Tree: Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together Using Traditional and Genetic Genealogy.  Edited by Allan H. Westreich, Ph.D.  Published by JewishGen Press, 2023. Brzesko branch of the Westreich family tree. Brzesko is...

By Henry Benjamin Winkler The English writer, L.P. Hartley, begins his novel, The Go-Between, with the oft-quoted sentence:           The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. For many Jews of my family and my generation, our...

Some time ago, Mrs Marilyn Fish contacted our Association. Her great-grandparents, Jonas and Chawa Bluma Vogelhut, lived in Brzesko, but several of their children emigrated to the USA in the 1920s avoiding death in the Shoah. Several days of intensive...

There are only several post-war tombstones at the Brzesko Jewish cemetery. Most of them stand on symbolic graves of people murdered during the war – it often happened that surviving Jews wanted to honour the memory of their murdered relatives...

In the beginning of January 2022, Noa Shashar - descendant of Brzesko Schiff family - told me about an article she found in the Yiddish newspaper "Der Moment" from November 21, 1930. Reporter N. Kleinberger from Brzesko wrote about the...

This article is mainly based on the book "Two who survived. Rose and Max Schindler's story" by M.Lee Connolly, which is dedicated to the story of Holocaust survivors Max Schindler and his wife Rose Schwartz. Since Max's parents, Benjamin Schindler...

Mala Zimetbaum was born in Brzesko on January 20, 1918 as the youngest, sixth child in the family of the merchant Pinkas Zimetbaum/Hartman and Chaje Feigel nee Schmalzer. Mala Zimetbaum Mala's paternal grandparents, Berl Hartman from Brzesko and Marjem Jochwet...

Although Brzesko was a very small town before the war, there used to be four stone synagogues and a wooden one, and Brzesko rabbis belonged to famous rabbinical families - Lipschitz, Templer and Teitelbaum. The oldest ancestor of this last...