Two people whose personal histories embody the history of the Eastern-European Jews during the last one and half century, Corinne Evens (AEMJP founder) and Cedric Olivestone (a great friend of AEMJP), travelled this year to mysterious places. Below, a few excerpts from the press about their travels.
Corinne Evens took part in the commemoration of the first Polish “stones of memory” in Bialystok, laid down for the family of the Friend of POLIN Museum and founding member of the AEMJP, Samuel Pisar.
80th anniversary of the Bialystok ghetto uprising.
They will honour the family of Samuel Pisar, stepfather of the US Secretary of State
August 2023, source: TVN
16 August 2023 marks the 80th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising. The main ceremonies took place at Mordechai Tenenbaum Square, where the city has restored the fence of the ghetto cemetery and the monument standing nearby. Plaques commemorating the family of Samuel Pisar, stepfather of Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, will be installed in the pavement next to the building at 20 Dąbrowskiego Street.
Samuel Pisar (a Polish-American lawyer and human rights activist who died in 2015 and was the stepfather of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken) was the only member of his family to be miraculously saved from extermination.
On the day the Germans forced the Jewish survivors of the uprising to march out of the Bialystok ghetto, his mother made him wear long trousers. So the Germans, although Samuel was only 14, treated him as a man, not a child, and put him to work. His mum and 10-year-old sister were sent on a transport to Treblinka.
Before the war, the family lived in a tenement house at 20 Dąbrowskiego Street, erected in the second half of the 19th century. It is next to this building that the so-called Stolpersteins will be laid on Wednesday (16 August) at 2 pm, as part of the celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Białystok ghetto uprising.
A Talmudic scholar’s posthumous journey to Jerusalem
The journey to bring a beloved relative home for burial from lonely Czestochowa.
By David Olivestone, sept. 9, 2023, in Jerusalem Post
At some point, Cedric made contact with a distant cousin, a successful European businesswoman and philanthropist, previously unknown to us, whose own deep interest in the family had led her to hire a professional genealogist to investigate and chart the Oliwenstein lineage. We combined and integrated our information with hers, and Cedric committed himself fully to the project.
Cedric traveled to Poland several times to locate and copy birth, marriage, and death certificates that were still on file and open to inspection in various town halls and archives in and around Warsaw, where our father was born and where most of our Polish family lived. Through these and other records, we were able to trace successive generations of our family in Poland back to the 1700s in some detail.
This process culminated in over 70 family members from all around the world, many of whom did not previously know each other, gathering in Warsaw in 2012 for an extraordinary three-day family reunion. We were a diverse group of professionals, physicians, scientists, businesspeople, and people from many other walks of life, some religiously observant, others with less of a connection to their Jewish heritage.
AEMJP Polin 