Ancestors and Descendants by Leopold Hoenig Chapter One

Tuesday morning, August 22, 1967. It was a mild, overcast day, and the three of us --- Dr. Heinz Kahn, his mother-in-law, the late Mrs. Sophie Hein (born Faber) and I --- were at the gate of the Jewish cemetery in Mertloch in western Germany. We had just left Heinz's car and had walked to the gate and padlocked chain which he was now unlocking. Once inside, I was to experience an event which was to have an impact on me for the next fourteen-and-a-half years.

Quickly, Sophie took me to my grandfather's tall black gravestone with a Star of David atop his Hebrew name, Tzvi bar Shlomo:

HERMANN HIRSCH

aus Polch

geb. am 1. 10. 1864,

gest. am 14. 2. 1929.

A million thoughts ran through my mind as I stood there meditating. Ever since I was a little boy --- and I was now 30 --- my mother had told me about him, the others in the family, and the villages of Polch and Mertloch.

I took a quick glance to the right and I saw a small, which stone with a Star of David on top:

HIER RUHT

HILDE HERZ

AUS POLCH

1928-1929

R.I.F.

"Who was this?" I asked Sophie Hein in German. "Why that's your little cousin, your Aunt Hannah and Uncle Siegmund's daughter," she replied. I was flabbergasted. I had not known about this first cousin and I made a mental note to talk to my mother and my aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh upon my return home from this six-week trip to Israel and Europe . . . my first venture overseas.

A few moments later, Sophie Hein summoned me to another tall black gravestone, my grandmother's, Yetsche bat Chaim:

HENRIETTE HIRSCH

geb. Friesem, aus Polch

geb. am 7. 11. 1866,

gest. am 11. 8. 1905.

"Let's look at the rest of the stones," I said to Heinz and Sophie. There were more than one hundred of them and many of them had epitaphs which survived Hitler's Holocaust: Anschel, Hirsch, Herz, Marx, Faber, Levy, Gärtner, Wolff, Minkel, Kaufmann. I could not believe what I was seeing. With the exception of the names Dewald, Krechel, Vohs and Platz, I knew every

family name in the cemetery and I knew members of many of these families! Here I was, 3,000 miles from home, in a cemetery and town from which my mother's family had fled thirty or more years earlier because of Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews, and with two distant relatives (I didn't know we were related then.) who welcomed me to their home the previous afternoon and made me feel as if I had known them all my life, and everything I had been told about Polch and Mertloch by my mother suddenly fit into place. The names, the milestones in our family's history, the values I learned no longer seemed to be abstractions in my mind.

Later that day, my mother's good friend, the late Mr. Johann Eisenberger (who with his wife, Maria Eisenberger, I had met for the first time the previous evening) took me around the town of Polch to show me the house where my mother was born. He showed me the former home of my mother's aunt and uncle, Paula and Gustav Hirsch, the Herz houses, those of the Anschels, my mother's aunts Adelheid and Klara Hirsch, and, two doors away, the Synagogue, which was being used as a garage and storage building by the town.

A few hours afterwards, I took the same tour by myself to let the impressions sink in. As I took pictures of the Polch Synagogue on Ostergasse, an old lady stopped me and questioned me. When she found out I was Jewish she began to cry and came out with pictures of my two deceased great aunts and letters they had sent to her from New York. She also produced a photograph of my late Uncle Sali [Salomon Hirsch] from World War I.

Being a sentimentalist and having majored in history at Queens College, I realized that I was in the midst of a gold mine of history --- gems that should be put into writing before those of us who lived scattered throughout the world would lose contact with each other and would never be able to recall these things.

Procrastination and deep involvement in more things than I can handle at once are also two of my other traits. They make this story drag on. Twice more --- in 1969 and 1971 --- I visited Polch and the Mertloch Jewish cemetery and again I spoke about writing a family history. Each time the project was again pout on a list of things to do, as it was`after each of the two Roots series shown on television.

"Stop talking about it and do it already," my mother often admonished me.

Monday afternoon, May 7, 1979. My father and I wished bon voyage at Kennedy Airport in New York City to my Uncle Henry Hirsch, his wife, Bertel, and my two cousins, Henrietta Block and Wilma Hahn (daughters of my Aunt Hannah Herz) as they flew to Israel to attend the wedding of Tali Friesem, my cousin Joseph's oldest daughter.

Less than two days later, at 6:15 a.m., as I was preparing to get ready for school, the telephone rang. "It's Harold in Texas," the voice at the other end said. "My father [my Uncle Henry Hirsch] just died." I was in total disbelief. "I just saw` him at the airport Monday afternoon," I responded. "What happened?" "He had a heart attack and died in his sleep this morning, a few hours after arriving and meeting our relatives in Israel," my cousin answered.

With my uncle's unexpected death I realized that a major source of information for the projected family tree was gone forever. So, within a matter of days, work on this book was begun. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would become involved in a project that would take nearly three years and that I would find the names (or places for them) of some 2,600 people whom I could call my relatives or near relatives.

My mother provided me with the basic information which was then elaborated upon by my Aunt Hannah, my mother's first cousin, Caroline Hirsch Levy, and by my mother's distant cousin, Herbert Fraser (original name, Friesem) over the past 33 months. Herbert's brother, Arieh Eytan, and my cousin, Josef Friesem, both living in Israel, began to come up with names and ran all of my "errands" there. Lionel Hillburn (formerly Leopold Heilberg), a distant relative, invited me to his law office in New York after we made contact and he introduced me to the book, Dokumentation zur Geschichte der Juden am linken Niederrhein seit dem 17. Jahrhundert, published in 1972 by my good friend, the late Klaus H. S. Schulte then of Neuss and later residing in Wegberg and Enkirch, Germany. He encouraged me and provided me with hundreds of names, documents and ideas until his sudden death in September, 2001..

As the months passed, I seemed to be doing very well --- with several hundred names --- but there were so many links I could not piece together. I made a few trips to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York in my precious little spare time, but there never seemed to be enough time to devote to my task.

On Monday, April 21, 1980 my Principal at school, Mr. Nat Blaivas, who in private life is also an Orthodox Rabbi, invited Mr. Avishai Amir of the Israeli Consulate to speak to my social studies classes. It was to turn into an unbelievably fantastic afternoon, for on the way home, as my carpool partner, Sidney Travers, drove past LaGuardia Airport on the Grand Central Parkway, I asked Mr. Amir, "You are a journalist. In which countries have you worked?" He`rattled off a list of nations and I stopped him after he mentioned New Zealand. "I am looking for some long lost relatives for my family tree who live in New Zealand," I said. "Perhaps I can help me. What is the person's name?" he asked me. "That's the problem," I responded. "There is a brother with his family and his sister and her husband, but I don't know their names," I said, for Harry Simon, who had given me a copy of a letter Paul Hirsch of Dublin, Ireland had sent to Adele Hirsch Simon (Harry's late mother), did not know any first names nor did the letter contain any. Furthermore, my attempts to track down Paul Hirsch in Dublin led to a dead end. "That's very difficult," Avishai Amir said, "as there are thousands of Jews in New Zealand." "The brother's last name is Hirsch," I said in a tone that must have indicated failure on my part.

"I know who you are looking for," Avishai Amir said. "He's about 60, comes from the Rhineland and speaks with a German accent. He is the leader of the Jewish community in Dunedin and I know him very well."

That night I wrote a letter to "Mr. Hirsch" and three weeks later, on Monday, May 12, 1980, there arrived an aerogramme from his widow, Margot Hirsh [they dropped the letter c], which began:

"Dear Mr. Hoenig,

"Your letter of the 21 April reached me to-day and I am glad to say that you have reached the right Hirsh family at last . . . "

Paul Hirsch's new address, in a London suburb, and detailed information about this "lost" branch of the family was included in her long letter and which has been followed by many others.

In July, 1980 I met for the first time with more than a dozen relatives and family friends at Else Haiman's home in Southfield, Michigan.

From August, 1981 to July, 1982 I was on a sabbatical leave for research to complete this project and to develop a teaching course in genealogy from it. My wife's late uncle, Dr. Joseph Mersand, a renowned educator, encouraged me to do so.

With time now available, I went to work full-time to complete this work. I took a trip to Richmond, Virginia to try to trace the family of Isaac Hirsch and, although I received an education in genealogy at the Virginia State Library, I could trace him no closer than September, 1879. I was able to do research at the 42nd Street Library, the Schomburg Archives, the Leo Baeck Institute (in New York City) and the National Archives branch at Bayonne, New Jersey. I went on a two-week research trip to Germany and London during which I met with Mr. Schulte, Mr. Dieter Arntz of Euskirchen-Rheder (who has`written books on the Jews of Euskirchen), and Standesamts (record keepers) in Polch, Niederzissen, Euskirchen and Sinzig. The Mayor of Maifeld in Polch, Mr. Hans Baulig, invited me to his office twice during my stay in Polch. I stayed with my relatives, Dr. Heinz and Inge Kahn in Polch and with Paul Hirsch in London.

In the ensuing months, I produced not only the original edition of this book, but also a genealogy of my late father's family and a genealogy teaching guide in order to fulfill the requirements of my sabbatical leave.

Barely five months after my father, Joseph Hoenig's death on January 22, 1991, I retired from teaching social studies at Parsons JHS 168 Queens in New York City on July 5, 1991. Since then I have devoted myself to completing a revision of the Hoenig family history (1998), a book about my late father-in-law's family and my mother-in-laws ancestors - entitled Four Families (1999), a large genealogy of my mother-in-law's family, The Himmelstein Family (2002), and, finally, this revised book.

So, that brings us to the present and we now begin our family study in the ancient world . . . a study that for me is a major accomplishment of a long-standing dream.