Tova Levi | Memorializing the Lives of Her Ancestors

Tova Levi | Memorializing the Lives of Her Ancestors

Heather Murphy: Hi, Tova. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

Tova Levi: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Heather Murphy: Could you start by just introducing yourself, who you are and where you're from?

Tova Levi: So my name is Tova Levi and I live in Brooklyn, New York. I was born and raised here. I've always lived here. I am a speech language pathologist. I work with preschool aged students. So, my career has absolutely nothing to do with genealogy.

Heather Murphy: So, how did you become interested in researching about your family?

Tova Levi: So I actually always loved history. It was one of my favorite subjects in school. I'm just fascinated with learning about the past, but my genealogy journey started about two years ago on a date actually. I was on a first date with somebody and he started talking about his genealogy research and how he used Ancestry.com to research his family, that he, you know, he didn't really know anything about his grandparents. So he had started with that and his tree just grew to thousands and thousands and thousands of people. He added a lot of people that were not blood relatives of his family. But yeah so he was talking a lot about it and he was going on and on as genealogists tend to do. And honestly, I started to get a little bit bored, but, I was very intrigued about Ancestry.com. I hadn't really heard about it. So that night when I got home I signed up for an account and I started putting in the information that I knew about my family and I was getting all those little green leaf hints. and I was just adding more and more people. I'm learning so many things that I hadn't known before. And I was just hooked from that point on.

Heather Murphy: Well, that is a great starting story. I can say that as the first person I've ever talked to, who's been on a date when they started becoming interested in it. So what were some of those initial discoveries that were meaningful for you that really hooked you into continuing.

Tova Levi: Some of the first hints that I got on Ancestry were for my paternal grandfather's family. They were from Germany and Ancestry has a lot of documents from that region. So those were most of the initial hints and then it just continued on from there. All four of my grandparents were born in Europe and my paternal grandparents came to the United States in the early years of World War II. And they were able to escape, you know, before the war got really bad. I'm Jewish and all my family is Jewish. So my paternal grandparents were able to escape before things got really tough before the Nazis, started doing really terrible things.

My maternal grandparents were both Holocaust survivors, so much of my genealogical research has been about kind of trying to piece together my family that was really ripped apart by the war, every single branch of my family was affected and so much was lost and so much was not known. So that has been a lot of what I've done, trying to put it back together and, reconnect with our past and with relatives that we lost touch with.

Heather Murphy: Could you share some of the stories of those ancestors that you've researched?

Tova Levi: So, I could start with my maternal grandparents. who I said were both Holocaust survivors. My grandfather, he was born in what is today Belarus, but at the time was Poland and he spent most of the war years in Siberia. He was in prison there f or several years and then he was let out of prison and I'm not sure exactly what happened when, cause I wasn't able to find that out, but he spent the rest of the war years in Southern Russia until the end of the war and then came to the United States and his branch of the family has really been the biggest mystery for us.

He never really spoke about his past, I guess it was too painful for him. We kind of just knew bits and pieces. He was the only survivor of his immediate family, his parents and siblings were all killed. And Belarus is kind of a black hole for records. It's really tough to get the documents from there. Most of it is closed, not online. Uh, you can hire a researcher to go down there, but it's really difficult. So I still have not found much out about his family. We knew some, a few relatives of his that survived, but it seems that most of the family was wiped out. So it's still a big mystery for me. I hope that maybe one day Belarus will open up a little bit more and I'll be able to find something else.

But two things that I did learn about his family that have been meaningful. One of them is I discovered the date that has parents and siblings were killed. The Nazis took all the townspeople outside to the outskirts of the town and made them dig their own grave and shot them all. And I was able to find the lists from that town and neighboring towns that the survivors tried to put together of who was killed.

And I found my grandfather's family on that list. And we had the date also, which we did not know of beforehand. It was kind of like, we didn't know exactly what had happened to them. We knew they died, but not much else. So that was something that was very meaningful for our family to find out.

I also discovered a photo of his brother that we had never seen before. I found it on a website of the town and interestingly enough, like a month or two, after that, I was going through a box in my uncle's house of old photo albums, just from when my uncles and my mother were young. And at the very bottom was an album that I pulled out at the last minute and I opened it and I saw that those were older photos. They were from my grandparents. Most, some of them were from Europe or maybe shortly after the war. Most of them were not labeled and we couldn't identify them. But I did see a photo of that same brother, my grandfather's brother. And they're the one that I had found on a website. So I knew that it was really him and my grandfather actually had it all the years, but just never showed it to anybody. So now we have a photo of one member of his family, at least so we can know what he looked like and put a face to the name. So that was something else that I discovered about his side.

Heather Murphy: What other stories do you have?

Tova Levi: Let me think. There's always a lot

Heather Murphy: so many

Tova Levi: right? It's funny, because I would say that I only really knew one of my grandparents, two died before I was born and this grandfather that I was just speaking about died when I was only two years old so I have no memory of him. In general, they didn't really speak much about their past, like I had said before about their, childhood and definitely not about, you know the hardships that they faced.

But as I was doing the research, there were a little bits and pieces that I did know that were coming back to me or that my parents had mentioned or whatever it might be. And I did I realized that they did talk about it a little bit, you know, here and there, things were just sometimes casually mentioned over the years. So where there was some that I did know. you know, sometimes you, you kind of know that family story and then you find the documents to back that up. And that's a really cool feeling.

So some other things that I like a combination of what I sort of knew and what I added to that with my research is about my maternal grandmother. She was also a Holocaust survivor. She was sent to Auschwitz with her family, where most of them were murdered upon arrival, but she was sent to the work side and two of her sisters, they survived. They were shipped from camp to camp and, they ended up in Germany as forced laborers for the Messerschmitt airplane factory. And she used to screw parts together for airplanes. That's what she used to say. and you know, so she had mentioned that actually not to me, I had never heard that you mentioned that's one of my siblings. And then I actually found the intake records for her and her sisters when they arrived.

And they have the, they had to fill out the form with her signature on the bottom. Um, so that was, you know, my research combined together with what we kind of knew beforehand. So that was something else about her.

One thing that I have not been able to find out is that she told me that she was liberated from a train car by American troops at either the end of April or the first week of may of 1945.

And I've tried so hard to find some sort of documentation of that, but I haven't been able to find anything concrete, just recording that interaction and that liberation. so maybe one day, I don't know.

Heather Murphy: Um, never know. That's the one thing about these records as we research our family, as time goes by we get more and more access to records that we didn't have before, or that just become easier that putting things online and they're not stuck in an archive somewhere.

Tova Levi: Yeah. for sure. I've only been doing this two years and I've even seen more records come online at that time. So I could only hope that, you know, over the next five, 10 years, there'll be much more.

So a few other things are actually coming to mind about what I discovered that was very meaningful for my family. this is to my, my father's side. I so far, I've been speaking about my mother's side of the family and with my father's side, we also found many things that we didn't know. His parents, well, his mother didn't really talk about her, her family much. I found her my great-grandmother's death record from the ghetto in Countess, Lithuania.

She died it was either 1942 or 43. I don't know. The exact date right now without looking at the documents. But, we also didn't really know what. happened to her. We know that she had an elderly grandmother that she left behind, who couldn't travel with her elderly mother, I'm sorry, who, who couldn't travel.

And we knew that she didn't survive, but we never knew what happened exactly or how she died. And when I found this death record, it showed us that she died in the ghetto from old age and she was actually buried. She was brought to a Jewish burial, which is something that's very important to us.

um, my father especially was very moved by that because he just assumed that she was murdered. And the, you know, when a gas chamber, like so many of our other family members and when, you know, we learned this piece of information it was very meaningful to him. He was able to say the kaddish, which is a special Jewish prayer that said on the anniversary of someone's death, he was able to say that for his grandmother, for the first time ever most likely that it was said for her in her memory 80 years after she died. So that was an emotional moment for him.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, I imagine.

Tova Levi: Yeah.

Heather Murphy: That would have been a great discovery for your family.

Tova Levi: Yes, it definitely was.

Heather Murphy: What else can you tell me about your paternal side?

Tova Levi: I can tell a little bit about my grandmother, my paternal grandmother. She was born in Lithuania. And she was born when her, when her parents were already a little bit older. They were both 40 when she was born and her siblings were 15 years older than her and her cousins also were really much older than her aunts and uncles were also older. And my father didn't really know anything about them. And when I started doing my research, I connected with a third cousin of mine who had done a lot of the research for that branch of the family. So that was nice for me. I got all that from her.

She had also pieced together the family and it's funny because she told me the way that she did it is she used the seating chart from her parents' wedding to find the relatives. The family name was Marcus, and she kept noticing relatives at the wedding seated together by the name of Friedman. So she researched those individuals and she was able to connect it to the Marcus family. There were two Marcus brothers that changed their name to Friedman, where they immigrated to the United States.

We don't know why. But without that seating chart, we would have never connected to those branches of the family. Who would think Marcus and Friedman and what's the connection. So we discovered all these new relatives and we, the two of us, and then since that point, I've been helping her continue the research so we had found so many relatives that actually came to the United States in the eight, starting in the 1880s, 1890s. My grandmother had aunts and uncles here that we never knew about. Um, so that was pretty cool to find.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, who would have ever thought that somebody keeping their seating chart from their wedding would help somebody generations later figure put the family together

Tova Levi: know. I know. It's pretty crazy.

Heather Murphy: yeah. So you never know what might come in handy.

Tova Levi: Exactly. Exactly.

Heather Murphy: Wow. So with all of this that you've been learning about your family, what are you doing to help preserve these stories and share them with other family members now, or for future generations?

Tova Levi: So it's a very good question. So like, so many of us I've become the family historian. When someone has a question about the family, they'll phone me, I have many nieces and nephews, so oftentimes they'll have a school project, you know what to do something about the family and they know to call me. but so far, other than that, you know, I have my own research.

It's online. My Ancestry tree is open it's public. Other than that, nothing much yet, you know, just really telling the stories and connecting with long, lost relatives, sharing photos, things like that. That's so far what I've done. I haven't done anything formally. As of yet, but who knows what the future might bring?

Heather Murphy: Yeah. But even in those little ways, I mean, like sharing with your father, the information that you've found. How has it been for you as you've shared these things that your parents didn't know about their parents or grandparents, how has that been for you as that's happened?

Tova Levi: So it's been an emotional roller coaster. I'll say. At the beginning it was very difficult for me when I was, you know, at the beginning you're doing, there's so much to learn. I was learning so many things at once. And so many of them in my family were sad and horrible and difficult things. I was learning every day about someone else's life was cut short during the Holocaust and.

It was hard. It was really, really difficult. And I remember talking to a friend about it and she told me, why don't you stop? Why don't you take a break? And I said, but I feel like I can't. Who is memorializing some of these people for some, some of these families, the whole family was wiped out.

There's nobody to remember them. And for me, it was a way of trying to memorialize these people who suffered. So it was quite an emotional journey for me. It's gotten easier over time. There haven't been as many new pieces of information that I've learned more recently, so that makes it easier.

I also think that in many ways, as hard as it was for me, it was easier in a way than it would have been for my parents because, one generation even further removed from the Holocaust. I feel like maybe it kind of came back around, you know, my grandparents, it was really difficult for them to speak about their experiences, obviously, and for my parents, you know, when they grew up, their parents didn't talk about it.

Um, they didn't ask questions, so they, whatever they knew they knew. And that was it. But for me, all this time has passed and maybe its time to start talking about it, more opening up, finding these lost pieces and putting it back together.

Heather Murphy: For someone else who might have a similar family history as yours, where there's a lot of sadness and hard things happen, what could you kind of advice? Would you give them about how to work through that in spite of those feelings, or maybe not, not in spite of them, but with them?

Tova Levi: So I think it's really important to focus on the lives of these people and not just their deaths, which is something that have been trying to, to do. Yes. It's important, you know, to learn about the horrors is let's say my case it's specifically the Holocaust. That's extremely important. People should know what happened.

We should talk about it. But in many ways, it might even be more important to talk about their lives before, you know, what was it like for people living in Germany in 1920? What was it like in Poland in 1900, you know, and not to overlook that these were people with vibrant lives, careers, family lives, there was culture.

And I think that keeping that in mind and trying to bring to life what things were like before it got bad. That has definitely helped me. And I think that might help, you know, to focus on the life and not so much the death.

Heather Murphy: I think that is a great point because I can totally see how you can give too much weight to the hard things and let it overshadow those things to celebrate.

Tova Levi: Yeah, for sure.

Heather Murphy: Do you have any other stories or ancestors that you want to mention and share a little bit about their life?

Tova Levi: Hmm. Another good question. I think maybe I I'll talk a little bit about my, the German side of my family. I didn't mention them much yet. For some reason, I just feel the most connection to that side of my family. I don't know why I can't really explain it. My paternal grandfather was German. He was born in Germany in 1914, and our family had been living in the same region for generations. It's about an hour outside Frankfurt. It's a rural part of the state of Hessen in Germany, small little towns, a lot of farming villages, many of my ancestors were cattle dealers or butchers. And there's just something about that side of the family job that just drew me in, I don't know.

And Germany has really, really meticulous records going back quite far. So I've been able to expand my family tree a lot on that side of my family. And it's been interesting to see kind of like threads repeating over the centuries. like I said, many of them were cattle dealers, butchers. My great-grandfather was a butcher himself and he also owned a restaurant together with my great-grandmother. I actually found an ad from, it was maybe 1925, I think, that was published at the local newspaper and it was advertising my grandfather's butcher shop and how he would produce these like tin travel meals, which was pretty cool.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Tova Levi: Yeah.

It was like tinned sausages that you can take for travel that maybe they didn't need to be refrigerated right away or whatever it might've been. I don't know. so that was something pretty cool. And when he came to the United States, he continued to work in a butcher store. He didn't own his own anymore, but he was a butcher here as well. That's not something that really comes continued into our family, nobody today is a butcher. But you know, there were, so some of the distant parts of that family were butchers as well. So it was pretty cool. And some members of that part of the family, when they came to the United States, they actually worked with leather. One of my great, great uncles owned a leather factory in Newark, New Jersey. So that was kind of like a similar occupation. So that was, that was interesting to see.

 Many of my German relatives actually served in the German military in World War I were quite proud of that fact. Um, my cousin who is now in Israel actually has my great-grandfather's service metal from World War I. I haven't seen it in person, but she sent me a picture of it.

Uh, but my father said that they had saved his uniform for many years. He brought it with him to the United States. When he came over, my father would talk about it and he would remember how it smelled bad because it was so many years old already. Um, but it seems like that was thrown out at some point. So we don't have that, we have the service metal. But we do have some pictures of him in uniform. Um, he served, his brother served and they were really proud of that. It kind of sounds weird as an American because it was the other side of the war, but listen, you know, they have to serve and they are proud that they did, that they served for their country. it was, it was kind of weird because many of my relatives from dad's side of the family were still living in Germany. You know, the early 19 hundreds, but many had actually immigrated to the United States already. Some had come quite early, some came in the 1850s and 1860s.

And there were actually cousins fighting on opposite sides of the war. There were some cousins that were living in the United States and were in the United States .Army And then there were other relatives that were still over in Germany and were fighting in the German army. So the chances that they actually met on the battlefield are slim to none, but just thought about it it was kind of weird, you know, they're first cousins fighting on opposite sides of the war, you know, both proud to serve for their countries. So, it was just kind of a weird thing to discover.

Heather Murphy: So, what would you say is one of the biggest benefits that you've received over the last couple of years from learning these stories about your ancestors?

Tova Levi: So it's really given me a connection to my past and it's actually been a really deep connection. It feels like these people are a part of me. I mean, they are, you know, they are a part of me and most of them I've never known. I haven't met. We don't have that many pictures from Europe. My grandparents were able to only smuggle out a few with them. so for the most part, I've never even seen what some of these ancestors looked like, but I just, I just feel them feel like they're a part of me. And I hope to continue that one day with my own children.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much for sharing your family's stories with me and my listeners. I appreciate your time.

Tova Levi: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Heather Murphy: What advice would you give to someone who was just starting to think about researching their family history?

Tova Levi: I actually have two pieces of advice. The first one would be to record your parents and grandparents and any older relatives. Yes, of course talk to them, but today you can just whip out your phone and actually record them through video what they're telling you about what life was like when they were kids. It's something that in 20, 30, 40 years will be a treasure for you and your family. So I think that's a super important thing to do.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that Facebook has been tremendously helpful to me when I've been doing my research. I never used Facebook before this. And when I was Googling, just kind of like genealogy tips on getting started, I came across like a list of Facebook groups for genealogy.

And I joined a bunch of them and I started reading and there was just so, so much to learn there. I've made a lot of contacts with other people who are researching my towns, which has been helpful. And I probably learned the most from these Facebook groups actually. A couple of them that I could mention are one is called Genealogical Translations, where you can post a document that a foreign language and they will translate it for you.

So that's been really, really helpful with my family since you know, so much of them have most, all my family has lived in Europe until recently. Another really good one is the New York City Genealogy. There are a few members there that know everything about US immigration laws and the history of US immigration, which can be very confusing, so that was super, super helpful. So just a couple of tips.

Heather Murphy: Those are great tips. No one has ever said Facebook.

Tova Levi: Oh, okay. That's cool.

Heather Murphy: we bought several unique things here in the interview. I'm so excited.

Tova Levi: Okay. Great.