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Unidentified girl, Riwka Milstein and Roza Szwarc, 1937.
guilty about having been secure in the United
States while his birthplace was destroyed. "So I
want to do something," he said.
Referring to the six million Jews killed by the
Nazis, he said, "If you can memorialize these
people, show how they lived, it's no longer a statistic."
Michael Berenbaum, director of the United
States Holocaust Research Institute, said Mr.
Ziegelman's project was not unique. Yaffa Eliach,
a professor of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College,
has spent years researching a Lithuanian Jewish
community whose Yiddish name was Eishishok;
those photographs are displayed in a tower at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington.
Such projects as Professor Eliach's and Mr.
Ziegelman's convey a power beyond that of memorial
books, Mr. Berenbaum said. "You see how
much richer the physicality is, when it's recorded
this way," he said.
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Mr. Ziegelman said he got the idea
for the project after seeing the movie
"Schindler's List." He said he felt that
another story needed to be told, about the
prewar lives of European Jews.
"Fortunately, I had a lot of material
at home," he said. "My mother was a
great saver."
To broaden the collection, Mr.
Ziegelman and Mr. Wasserman sought
out relatives of people who emigrated
from Luboml before the war, ran notices
in Jewish magazines and even put an appeal
on the Internet. "We have material
at this point from over 100 families in the
United States, Israel, Brazil, Argentina,
Poland, Ukraine and France," Mr.
Wasserman said.
Last year, the two men traveled to
Luboml, now in Ukraine, to do research
in the museum there and interview residents
about their recollections of the Jewish
community. Luboml's Mayor gave Mr.
Ziegelman the key to the city.
The full collection which Mr. Ziegelman
hopes to display in New York, is a multimedia
assemblage, with personal objects like a silver
tray and kiddush cup, a girl's colorful frock and
immigration documents.
Mr. Ziegelman prizes a short home movie of
Luboml, made by a visiting American in the
1930s.
Lately, he has begun to think that his collection
serves as a point of orientation for American
Jews wondering about their own long-lost
roots In Eastern Europe.
He gave a talk in the synagogue a few days
ago and encountered a woman who had driven
up from Philadelphia to hear him.
"When people see this," Mr. Wasserman
said, "It reminds them of where they're from, the
stories they heard from their grandmother. It's
reclaiming history, and it's passing it on."
Reprinted with permission of the New York
Times.